What to expect when you’re not expecting

We got a husky puppy on a whim. We had to re-do our home, our schedules, and our budgets. Here’s how it all worked out -

Mishka at the Soest Dunes

How much does a husky puppy cost?

A lot of people choose to adopt grown huskies as it happens to be a breed that often finds itself in shelters. I have a lot of respect for this path but as 2 inexperienced dog owners, we were not equipped to train and comfort a shelter dog, especially a breed as intelligent as a husky.

In The Netherlands - where we live - husky puppies are commonly listed for €800 - €1,300. The price depends on their breeding as well as their colour. Huskies carry the gene for heterochromia (mixed eye colours) and puppies with heterochromia do tend to cost more.

For Mishka, we paid €1,100. For Juno, we paid €900. No, we didn’t get a bulk discount. In fact, had we gotten Juno at the age of 8 weeks, he’d have cost us more than Mishka because of his eye colour. But since he was already over 16 weeks and hadn’t found a home, the breeder had decided to offer him for a lower price.

Vaccination Costs for a Husky Puppy

Puppies usually come with their first vaccination but require 2 additional vaccinations at 9 and 12 weeks before they can go to puppy school or be safe on the streets. The vaccinations cost approximately €75 each round. The cost of de-worming at 9 weeks was another €30. In Juno’s case, we saved this additional cost of €180 and also paid €300 less meaning we effectively saved €480.

Mishka also contracted a UTI at 14 weeks. The cost of the test and antibiotics was an additional €100 approximately.

private puppy school costs

Puppy school in The Netherlands is pretty good and doesn’t cost much. But given that we had a difficult (intelligent) dog and wished to train her in English at a time most convenient to our schedules, we opted for a private trainer. 6 private lessons over the course of a year cost us €450.

The benefit is that we get 1:1 time with our trainer. She also comes home to train with us. Within 2 sessions we already saw a big difference in Mishka. She generally has a high food motivation and is easy to train. But we had issues with her eating trash on the streets and recall once she gained the confidence to be outside.

Why our husky uses puzzle toys and yours should too

Until 2 weeks after the final vaccination, it is generally not advised to bring your puppy outside. If you now think about it, that’s 6 weeks (between 8 and 14 weeks of age) that you need to keep your puppy indoors. That’s a crazy amount of stimulation that you need to provide an excited pup. Mishka also posed an additional problem. She was always so hungry that she’d inhale her food like a vacuum cleaner and then choke on it. To slow her down and also tire her out mentally, we introduced feeding toys.

At 12 weeks she had mastered an assortment of 9 different toys. We observed that she was able to optimise each toy in 3 to 5 meals. The snuffle mats survived less than 4 meals and she was able to halve her time on a frozen lick mat within 2 days. Splitting her food into 4 meals helped regulate her blood sugar as well as split her food portions. At the age of 16 weeks, she was down to 3 meals and 5 puzzle toys per meal. I started creating a little treasure hunt with a mix of toys and scatter feeding to train her nose.

why we regret using puppy pads & other potty training woes

Huskies are really smart and once Mishka understood that outside = potty, things improved. But it definitely took us a while to get there. We used a puppy training pad for ONE day. We were too afraid to let her out into the backyard without a collar (yes, we were that unprepared). But that one day cost us. Despite giving her access to the backyard, she continued to pee in her crate or puppy pen.

We knew about rewarding successful potty outdoors and throwing her a big potty party, but do it every 2 hours throughout the night for a week and tell me how you survive that. Once she was vaccinated and spring was around the corner, I wanted her to stop using the backyard for her business. But the switch from back to frontyard was frustrating. She’d go on a walk and hold her pee in until we got home and she reached the back door. I’d be jumping over the baby gate and carrying her out the front door only for her to run back inside and to the back door. This went on for days until she one day peed in the front yard. Now we had to start restricting backyard access and only bring her out front. One tree at a time, we made progress. She had chosen a specific poop spot a few hundred metres from home and we had to bring her there 4x a day or she’d poop inside the house. We eventually created a potty map for Mishka. My husband and I would pin her new favourite spot so the other could troubleshoot if she was refusing to pee or poop on our walks.

Mishka is now 5 months old and still rarely signals (by sitting next to the door) when she needs to go outside. We rarely have accidents now, but still watch her like a hawk or proactively take her out after naps or before meals. Yes, she he has peed and pooped in the middle of a meal because she got too excited by food.

It takes a village to train a puppy

Everyone talks about a dog’s (especially a husky’s) need for exercise and you might think that’s going to be the biggest chunk of commitment for you. But it’s not. It’s training. At least for the first couple years. I cannot emphasise this enough. Huskies are so incredibly smart. They observe every thing you do from the way you stand to the way you position your hands. I have inadvertently trained her to do things at the snap of my fingers instead of the command-word. In the first weeks, Mishka figured out that potty = treat. So she stopped peeing for free. I had to show her a treat to make her squat. It’s not so amusing when you roll out of bed at 3 am to stand outside in the cold winter waiting for your puppy to empty its bladder.

Mishka also learned very quickly that I keep her favourite home made treats - frozen yoghurt, banana cookies, apple slices, etc. - in the freezer. Now we cannot open the freezer without bracing ourselves for a dog that comes running across the house at the sound of the freezer tray being pulled out. This also means that can’t treat ourselves to ice cream when the dogs are sleeping. I mean, we can but we choose not to shorten the few hours of quiet we get when they nap.

We were also unprepared for the attention we’d get everywhere we went with a puppy. Call me biased, but I stand by my opinion. Our dogs are the prettiest dogs I’ve ever seen. This means that people will snap their fingers at them, make whistling sounds, and even run after them (yes, people are crazy) on the streets. Huskies look mean but they are friendly derps. Ours will leave with perfect strangers. They have no protective behaviour at all. This also means that they jump on people for pets. Not everyone likes this and it’s of course not ok when kids are involved. But every person who encourages them by then rewarding the behaviour (with pets) is teaching them that it’s ok. So, walks are indeed very difficult and sometimes unpleasant with an added language barrier.

Peanut butter farts, sleep talking, and all the other things I love about our huskies

Huskies are talkative. We knew that. But ours also talk in their sleep. With access to the whole house, they have chosen their favourite spots. Mishka likes to sleep in the open with her legs up in the air. Juno likes to sleep under the couch. Both talk in their dreams. Every time we introduce them to new foods, we prepare ourselves for some minor indigestion. Mishka liked to assert dominance by laying in my lap during meetings and farting peanut butter farts straight up my nose. It definitely made for some interesting Zoom meeting looks!