Protection Dogs And The Holidays
Halloween, Houseguests And The Table

The dog is put away before the situation starts, not once it has. That is the one rule under everything here. A crate in a back room before the first trick-or-treater, a closed door before the relatives’ car pulls in, a plan for the dog before the holiday trip rather than at the host’s front step. Putting an aroused dog away in the middle of the event is the version that goes wrong.

Three situations are where it goes wrong for working-dog households: Halloween night, adult guests who stay for several days, and the visit to someone else’s house. The holiday table and the decorations are the fourth thing, and they hurt dogs that behave perfectly. New Year’s Eve is a different problem, noise rather than people, and our fireworks guide covers it. We are trainers, not veterinarians. The toxicology below is from veterinary and government sources linked at each point and listed at the foot of the page. The handling advice is ours, from living and working with these dogs, and each such passage says so.

Crate it in a room at the back of the house, with the door closed, before trick-or-treating starts, and leave it there until the porch light is off. The ASPCA’s Halloween advice for every pet is to keep it in a separate, comfortable room away from the front door during the peak hours. For a dog bred to notice who comes to the door, that advice stops being a courtesy.

Why the dog does not “help”. Our view as handlers, not something a study measured. Halloween is the front door as a stress test: the bell goes again and again, the visitors arrive in groups, they are small, they are in masks, and they bend down toward the door and shout. A dog that recognises your neighbours’ children by sight may not recognise them under a mask, and a dog that is allowed to “announce” the first ring has been rewarded for the behaviour you will need it not to show on the fortieth. Why the front door is the legal hot spot as well is set out in our Texas dog bite law guide.

The dog who has to go out at seven. Walk it before dusk and again after the last child has gone, and make both of them boring. If it cannot wait, take it out the back on a leash held by the handler, with the front of the house kept out of the route. The ASPCA adds that a pet taken out after dark should be on a leash and wear a reflective collar and identification.

The candy. The same ASPCA page warns that chocolate in all forms, especially dark or baking chocolate, can be very dangerous, and that sugar-free candy containing xylitol can cause serious problems. The bowl goes on a high shelf, and the children’s bags go where the dog cannot get to them. How much of which chocolate matters, and what xylitol does, is covered in the section on the holiday table below.

Adult guests who stay over need one handler, one set of rules and a closed door at night, and the hard part is that the adults are the ones who will want to bend them. The handler and the house rules come from our guide to the first ninety days and apply to a week of guests unchanged. This section is about what a guest changes.

A stranger now sleeps in the house. The night-time rule is the sleepover rule in our guide to children, and in the morning the crate stays closed until the handler opens it. The difference with an adult guest is that nobody explains the dog to them, because it feels rude. Tell them anyway, on arrival, in plain words: where the dog sleeps, which door stays shut, and that they never open it. Put the dog away for the arrival itself.

The relative who “knows dogs”. Our experience, not a study. The people who cause the problem are not the nervous guests, who keep their distance. They are the confident ones who have owned dogs all their lives. They hand the dog a piece of turkey, they give it a command it half-obeys, they crouch to its face, or they take the leash to “help”. A command the dog does not obey from a stranger teaches it that the words are optional, and a scrap from the table is the start of the problem described under the holiday table below. Write it down before they arrive: no food, no commands, no opening the crate, nobody walks the dog but the handler. Say it kindly, and say it first to the guest who has owned dogs for forty years.

Which adult holds the leash all week. The same one. A guest who walks the dog because you are cooking has, for that walk, become the person the law looks at, for the reason given under “Whoever Holds The Leash Is The Owner” in our Texas dog bite law guide. The practical reason is simpler: a dog handed from person to person all week has no one deciding anything.

The playdate, party and sleepover rules are in our guide to protection dogs and children: put the dog away before the doorbell, and crate it with the door closed for the night. In December they all apply, and they apply in bulk.

What changes when the children are cousins staying for a week is our reasoning, not something we can source. The sleepover rule is written for one night. Over a week a rule can wear down, and a child who left the crate alone on the first night may open it to say hello on the fourth. So the crate stays in a closed room, with a latch a child cannot work, and the adult who runs the rules says out loud each morning where the dog is.

Five things on a Texas holiday table can hurt a dog, and all five look harmless: chocolate in the baking, xylitol in anything sugar-free, raisins and grapes, the onion and garlic in the stuffing, and the fat and bones from the roast. Each is below with the mechanism and the source, because “keep chocolate away” is advice everybody has heard and nobody uses.

If the dog gets into any of it, do not wait for signs. The FDA’s advice for xylitol is to call your vet, an emergency clinic or an animal poison control center right away, and in our view that is the right instinct for all five, since the onion and xylitol damage can show days or hours late. The ASPCA Animal Poison Control Center takes calls on (888) 426-4435, 24 hours a day, 365 days a year, and says a consultation fee may apply. Put the number on the refrigerator before the guests arrive. Tell them what the dog ate, roughly how much, and what the dog weighs; the chocolate figures above are why the type and the amount both matter.

Ribbon and tinsel are worse for a dog than most of what is under the tree, because a string-like object behaves differently inside the gut. Cornell’s Riney Canine Health Center says foreign bodies like string or ribbon, called linear foreign bodies, can cause more severe damage, and that obstructions are emergencies often needing surgery. The mechanism is in a 2011 review by Dr. Geraldine Hunt of UC Davis: one end lodges, the rest is carried along by the muscular waves of the intestine, and because the anchored string cannot pass, the intestine bunches up along it and the taut string can cut through the wall. The review tells surgeons not to pull it back out if there is any sign of that bunching. Her list names string, cords, fabric and tape. The FDA’s holiday page supplies the holiday examples: tinsel, ribbon and string can cause serious stomach and intestinal damage, so keep tinsel off the tree and collect all ribbons and string once the gifts are opened.

The signs Cornell lists are vomiting, loss of appetite, abdominal pain, diarrhoea, dehydration and lethargy. A dog that is off its food on December 26th with a pile of wrapping in the house is a call to the vet, and not one to sleep on. If you can see ribbon hanging from either end of the dog, leave it alone and go: that is our reading of the mechanism above, since a tug at home is the same traction the review warns surgeons against.

Ornaments and light cords. Our own advice, not a sourced figure: keep the lower part of the tree bare and the cords out of reach, because a bored dog in a crowded house chews what is at nose height.

Which holiday plants matter? Fewer than the lists suggest. The ASPCA lists all four below as toxic, and most of the signs it gives are stomach upset, though the mistletoe and amaryllis entries list more. The ASPCA calls poinsettia over-rated and the FDA says severe mistletoe poisoning is uncommon.

Often the honest answer is no, and if you do go, treat the dog as the stranger, because in their house it is. This section is our reasoning as handlers, not a study. At home the dog knows the layout, the routine and the people. At theirs it knows none of that, and three things about their house matter: their dog, their children and their front door.

Their dog. A resident dog is on its own ground. Do not let the first meeting between the two dogs be the holiday itself, in a crowded room.

Their children. The playdate and party rules in the children guide assume your house and your rules. At their house the children do not know the dog, the parents are not the ones who agreed to those rules, and you cannot lock a gate you do not own.

Their door. It opens on their schedule, not yours, and the dog has no room of its own in a house where it has never been. Before you accept the invitation, ask for a closed room with a door that you can crate the dog in, away from the front and the kitchen, and expect to use it for the length of the visit.

Their policy, and yours. Whether your homeowners policy follows the dog into someone else’s house, and what theirs does about your dog, are questions for the two insurers. Our insurance guide explains the exclusions that can apply to a protection dog and what the three kinds of insurance do. It does not say what a host’s policy would do, and neither will we. Ask both agents before the trip. If the trip crosses a state line, that guide also makes the point that the law applying is the law where the bite happens, and our state-by-state guide is the place to start. If the trip is by air, see flying with a protection dog.

When the dog stays home. If the host has a toddler, a dog of its own, no room that closes, or a house full of people you do not know, the dog stays home with a sitter or in a kennel. That is a decision about the house, not about the dog.

Book boarding or a sitter in October, not December, so the trial stay happens before the week that matters. The questions to put to a kennel, the trial stay, the vaccines to ask about and the written brief for a sitter are in our guide to boarding, sitters and travel, and they apply unchanged at Christmas. The holiday-specific case is the relative who offers to “just watch him”: in our view they get the same written brief as a paid sitter, and the same conversation about whether they want the job.

Because December is when the daily work is easiest to drop, and the dog does not take the month off. The ten minutes of obedience folded into the day, set out in the maintenance section of our first-ninety-days guide, are the first thing to go when the house is full. That guide describes the same thing happening over a summer. A holiday does it in a month.

Our observation, not a study: the dog comes out of the season rusty at exactly the things the season undid. Commands were given by the wrong people. It was fed from the table. The doorbell stopped meaning crate and started meaning a party. In the first week of January go back to the routine you set up in the first place, the place command at the door, the sit before the bowl, one handler, and put the next maintenance session in the calendar with a date. If the dog has drifted further than that, tell the person who trained it before February.