1 Being Prepared

​Planning and thinking about how a puppy will fit in to your family life makes the transition easier from the breeder to your home for your new pup and helps you relax and enjoy your new arrival.

After all the waiting, bringing a new puppy home is exciting and even more so if you have young children.  It is a big step for any puppy to leave the only home they have known, go in a car for the first time, leave their mother and perhaps littermates, all at the same time. So, thinking about some of the preparations before your puppy arrives helps you to work out what he needs in these first few weeks without his mother.
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It is an excellent idea to ask the breeder for a piece of bedding that your puppy has been using for the first few nights with you. Agreeing as a family where your new puppy will sleep, how you will manage puppy in the first few days, what happens when you go back to work and planning on how to prevent your precious puppy escaping when lots of visitors come to see him. Stairgates are invaluable for providing safety and peace of mind.

Building a trusting, loving and stable relationship is a key part to robust, friendly and confident puppies that grow up to be brilliant pet dogs.

There are lots of ways to develop these relationships with your puppies through play, cuddles, feeding, exercise, spending quality time together and of course reward based training!

Working through training challenges and learning together is a great way to build, improve and strengthen those all-important relationships, with the added benefit of improving communication and teaching some manners.

For me, I start by teaching a hand touch. This is where, when presented with a hand at puppy’s level and asked to ‘TOUCH’ the puppy will run up and touch the hand with their nose. This might seem like a strange choice but is has a few huge benefits.

​Dogs of any age love to search for things – and especially puppies – as searching uses their young brain too and is great mental exercise for them.

Searching for food or toys not only teaches them to use their nose as well as their eyes, but begins the training process of them learning to wait ‘for good things to happen’.  You can practice your ‘wait or stay’ while you go about hiding food or toys and your lovely puppy is being taught some self-control too. A very useful skill for puppies!
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So, to get him started, he can be in the same room as you and you can hide some smelly treats in an empty toilet roll holder or a furry pencil case. Show him what you are doing so he realises that the treats are hidden inside. However, he must not move whilst you hide the item, as that is ‘cheating’, so if your puppy needs support to remain in one position ask a friend or family member to help while he is learning. Puppies learn fun tasks like this one especially quickly!  I like to use a release cue to begin the search such as ‘search’ or ‘find’ or a simple ‘free’ will do too but you might need to give him lots of encouragement as he learns what to do. Try as hard as you can to let him find it on his own and when he does, open it and give him the scrummy contents. When you think he gets the game, you can begin to hide it in another room or outside. A great addition to the game is pretending to hide it in one place but put it in another, and he will learn to really use his nose! This mind game works super well on a rainy day or in the garden where there are lots of hiding places and competing smells!

Did you know the average dog’s vocabulary can reach upward of 150 distinct words? So, why do we hear so many dog owners using the same words repeatedly with little or no effect on their dogs?
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The most likely reason is that the dog doesn’t understand the verbal request (cue) in the current context, if at all. We find that very often when a dog responds to a cue it probably isn’t responding to the exact word at all – often, it’s responding to the tone of voice and the body language that accompanies that word.

In order of priority for our dogs:

    1 The physical communication (body language & gestures)
    2 The tone of voice we are using
    3 The actual word itself

So often we fall into the trap of expecting dogs to understand human language, without having ever having taught them what the words mean.

“Ah! Ah!”, “Don’t”, “Leave It”, “No”, “Stop” (and worse)... are all words we hear everyday from clients desperately trying to stop their canine thief pinching food off the table, or in an attempt to stop Fido running off with their latest bounty (typically tea towels, shoes, socks or underpants!). Yet despite your best effort this doesn’t seem to deter the dog at all.
To solve this problem we would teach the dog a number of concepts, one of which would be a “leave it” cue; so when the dog approaches an item they shouldn’t have, the owner can simply say “leave it” in a nice gentle voice and the dog responds accordingly.