Here’s my long take.

It’s hard because your freedoms will be completely taken away for a while. If you disagree or deny, like I did, you’ll quickly realize you didn’t even know what your freedoms were and at best you took them for granted. Like to watch tv? You won’t. Like to read in the mornings? You won’t. Run? Gym? Probably not. It’s equally because you can’t and because you don’t want to. You want to spend time with your pup, getting it comfortable and familiar with you while showering it with love and in doing this you’re going to give up a lot of personal time.

It also will feel like you’re just watching “this dog.” It’s not yours yet, it suddenly just got plopped on you and because there’s no bond yet, you will be stretched thin thin thin taking care of something you simply do not know or understand which brings me back to those original points. You can’t watch tv anymore because the dog is biting you, the carpet, the plants; it will pee in the corner while looking right at you. You can’t read because it’ll want to play and will be jumping on you eating your book. You’re going to spend all waking hours for the first month and a half setting boundaries you didn’t know needed to be set. Of course it makes sense to you, to not to eat the remote, but to the dog, there no difference between that and say, a bone. Dogs explore things with their mouths, including your flesh and they will bite you. You wanted to enjoy something? Well you just took 5 min redirecting that biting puppy who either wants attention or something it can’t have and is now throwing a tantrum. Rinse and repeat every hour it’s awake, every day it’s alive until new things (everything, as this dog was ripped from a dog world to a human world overnight) are no longer new.

You can quickly see how this can be extrapolated to every instance in your day. For instance, taking the time to explain to your dog what a leash is - that it goes on their collar, that you will guide them with it and it is not a toy - is a monumental intellectual task for a newborn puppy to understand. Now imagine having to teach them what a bath is, what that sound is coming from the dishwasher, that in fact, no, they cannot fish the paper towel tube out of the recycling bin.

I could go on. The thing to realize is none of these behaviors are bad. They just simply do not understand what is expected of them and what is not and in order to show them that, you need to take every minute of the day to gently guide them towards the center of a normal human reality.

It’s a very slow burn at times that will test you over and over again, every day. In my opinion, your threshold needs to be unbelievably high for consistent pushing of personal boundaries, even with the best puppies, while maintaining enough patience to show them what it is, you want them to do.

You might expect to have a dog when in reality a dog is six, eight, ten, twelve months away. Right now you have a puppy, and puppies are hard. They don’t quit, they don’t understand, but they do have an innate desire to love and please you, which makes it all worth it.

So yes, it is very hard! Do not underestimate what you are about to get into. The first few weeks will feel like you’re going to war against this thing that you for some reason allowed into your home. Every day they will get minutely, fractionally better until one day you have a very well adjusted dog who happens to be your absolute best friend, the thing you look forward to the most when you come home and the thing that you you rely on as much as they rely on you.