Last time on McCann Dogs. You guys are gonna spend the day with.
Us on this little.
Guy's very first day home. Yes.
Then feed.
Dinner time for your puppy is actually the, of your nighttime schedule.
Nighttime schedule nighttime schedule.
When you get a new puppy,
one of the first things that people often ask is how is the first night with
your puppy? Assuming that it was gonna be a disaster. Well,
tonight is gonna be our first night with our puppy. And today in this episode,
we're gonna share with you what a nighttime schedule looks like.
That is actually gonna set up your very first night home with your puppy to be
not so much of a nightmare, but hopefully a really big success.
This is our second episode, but if this is your first time here,
let me bring you up to speed. This is our new puppy vlog. Now as a dog trainer,
for more than 20 years, I have raised and trained a lot of dogs already.
In this series,
I'm gonna share with you some tips and tricks of I've learned along the way.
And I bet many of them you've never heard of I'm Kayl McCann.
This is eight-week-old mixed breed puppy Five Alive welcome back
to McCann Dogs.
Good boy. We are about five hours away from bedtime.
And in the last episode I talked about the importance of dinner time,
any mealtime, in fact with your puppy. So it is now dinnertime,
and I'm gonna take advantage to the fact that I have a very hungry puppy and I'm
gonna do some training. Now in the last episode I talked about, you know,
some of the reasons why we use food, but I,
I wanted to dive into it a little bit deeper because this is such an I
opportunity that we wanna take advantage yes. Of with our puppies. Now,
number one is if you have a busy schedule and you have lots going on in
your life teaching, or you have to stop to feed your puppy anyways,
they still need breakfast, lunch, and dinner. At this point,
that's just a great way to structure in some training automatically.
I know every day, right now he's getting three meals a day.
I'm likely going to have three minimum short training sessions.
Oh my goodness. Training sessions a day, because it's already built in now,
I gave you a lot of examples in the last episode of things that you can do with
your puppy during mealtime. But remember,
it's not really so much about what you do, it's when you do it.
And the fact that you're taking advantage of a puppy,
that's really either you're gonna go, that's maybe not chew on my sweatshirt.
That's not a good idea. Now, when you're doing these training exercises,
you could work on brand new things.
Each time you set out to do your training session,
or you could repeat some of the things that you did earlier in the day,
both are really good things to do puppies, learn through root dogs. In fact,
at any age, learn through repetition.
So if I've already started to sort of plant a seed about a certain behavior in
his brain earlier in the day,
it actually would be a great idea for me to revisit it so that he gets little
short periods of training all throughout the day.
You're gonna notice that puppies have a very short attention span.
They can't work on the same thing over and over and over again,
they get disengaged or they get frustrated or they get distracted.
So it's much better just to work for a few minutes at a time when they're eager
with some of their meals or whatever you're working on.
So you get the absolute most out of that training session,
keeping things very short and sweet and fun. Now,
how does dinner time relate to your nighttime schedule? Well,
a lot of it has to do with when you're gonna feed your puppy in over the next
two hours,
I'm going to stop feeding him so that he has a few hours to digest his food
and have a chance to go to the bathroom.
And I'm gonna give you a little sneak peek later on,
on how we're gonna make that happen a little bit more easily. But for now,
I'm not necessarily gonna give him his whole meal and then put him in the crate
and that's it for the night. I'm gonna actually give him some of this now,
do a little bit of training. I might use some of it in the crate.
I'm gonna make dinner time last, longer than the 15 seconds.
It would take for me. You have to put him,
put this down and let him eat that way.
I can use the food for him making good choices a little bit later.
So I'm gonna take half of his meal here. You're bud.
And I'm gonna just play around with some of the exercises that I like to do.
When he first gets.
Home,
yes.
I'm getting down to the end of my food.
And we are getting to the point where we need to eat dinner ourselves.
So when it comes time to dinner time with your puppy,
there's a couple of ops that you can do for your schedule.
Option number one could be take the rest of your puppy's food and have 'em go in
their crate, finish their food in their crate,
and then just let 'em hang out there. Oh yes. Good boy.
While you cook dinner and do your thing and you know,
this could be a good option.
If you have a busy household or if you're on your own,
you can't really to watch the puppy and cook dinner, do everything at,
at the same time,
because it's a great time for puppies to make mistakes if you're not watching
them. Option number two could be divide and conquer. Yes. Good boy.
You could have one person, you know,
make dinner and the other person could be on puppy duty and making sure that
they're not getting into mischief. They could continue training with them.
And option number three, which is,
I think what we might do tonight is a blend of.
Both.
Yes, very nice.
We are about to sit down for dinner and puppy's been out,
Ken had a little play with him, did some training.
Both of us would like to eat in peace right now. That's true.
So puppy's in his crate. So now that dinner's done,
the puppy is in his crate and he is still sleeping.
So we're gonna let him sleep a little bit longer.
And then the next step is to get him up and take him outside.
So he can go to the bathroom room. Now, as they we have about three hours,
I would say until bedtime. So in terms of what happens next with the puppy,
well, you have a few options. So option number one could be,
if they're sleeping, let them sleep, let them sleep a little bit longer.
Or if they're stirring,
take them outside and you could actually put them back in their crate.
If you wanted to you know, with his first day home,
we've been excited and we have done so much with him today. So for,
to have him just kind of chill out in the crate would be completely fine.
At this point, you could just sit down and relax if you wanted. Now,
option two starts with taking the puppy outside because right.
Yes. Hurry up, hurry up.
Because after you've fed your puppy and they've had a bit of an activity,
that's a really common time for them to have to go to the bathroom.
And if you don't let them out right away, it's really, you know,
a big possibility that they'll have an accident,
especially he's not house trained yet.
So my goal today is to set him up for success. So we don't have any accidents.
Now I'm at the point in the night where I don't really wanna give him any more
food. And now what I wanna do is to work on things that are a little bit calmer.
I wanna teach him that at nighttime. We're not gonna go crazy,
run around the house. We're just gonna be chill.
So I have a little bone and I'm gonna actually pull over one of these little dog
beds. And if we wanna sit down and have, you know, a little, oh, wow,
a little you know, watch TV together.
I could just grab a seat with him here and start actually teaching him how to
just come and lie on a bed and chew on a bone. Now,
the other reason why I really like to do with this with my puppies is I want him
to be really comfortable with me when he's chewing on bones.
I want him to learn right from the beginning, that bones are to be shared,
not to, to feel like he has to, you know, be possessive over them.
And if he learns just from a puppy to be calm and hang out with me and chew on
the bone, it teaches him from the start. This is something we can do together.
The other thing you might consider when you have a puppy is not necessarily
letting them up on the furniture as of yet. Now,
as your puppy gets a bit older and you have good leadership and have a good
relationship with your puppy,
that's something that you and your family could certainly decide with one
another.
But since he's brand new we're just gonna hang out here on the floor and teach
him that you know, down here is a pretty good place to be as well. Now,
if you watch our channel,
you probably know that Ken and I actually have six other dogs,
and you may have noticed that we haven't shown you them in,
in the videos thus far.
And so what we'd like to do when we have a brand new puppy is we actually like
to keep our puppies separate from our other dogs. You know,
we're trying to build a bond between us and the puppy.
We're also gonna try and make sure that he sort of has an opportunity to get
comfortable in a brand new house that he is not been before.
Also the other dogs are sort of in, for a very rude awakening.
The fact that there's a new little brother in town.
So we just wanna make sure that when we do introduce him for the first time,
we'll do it really gradually.
And for now it's just important that he gets an opportunity to get comfortable
with us. Now,
we were really hoping to be able to lie here calmly and chew on a bone and watch
Ozark together.
But clearly even after are all of the exercises that we showed you in the last
video earlier today,
that he still has this abundance of energy.
So lying here and being calm is not really what we're gonna do.
We're gonna change gears. And I'm just gonna do something active.
I have one of our really fun, fuzzy ball tugs.
It's a bungy fuzz and ball all in one is like the most epic toy.
And it is Five Alive approved. That is for sure.
Now when I'm playing tug with them,
there's a couple little lessons that he can learn with this.
A lot of people are apprehensive to play tug with their puppies.
When they're young, woo, woo. He got a hold on that thing.
But I can actually teach him to be respectful with his mouth and with his body
when he's playing tug,
I actually will take my free hand and I'll sort of put my hands on his body.
I might put my hands near his face. You can see,
he can start to understand that your mouth needs to stay on the toy.
It doesn't come to me,
but I want to get very comfortable with me holding his body.
Now he's got Terrier in him so he likes to tug really crazy. Yeah.
And obviously you're just gonna tailor the play to your specific puppy.
He's pretty crazy. He likes to play pretty rough,
but you might tailor your play to your puppy's needs if they want something a
bit different really say,
yeah, it's fun. If you keep the toy moving, keep it engaged.
So your puppy gets to use that chase drive. That's really natural. Oh, good boy.
And then sometimes in the early stages, you can let him win.
We are moving on to plan B.
I was really hopeful that we could sit at the bed and chew on our nice little
bone and be relaxed,
but five is not liking that plan quite so much.
He's a little bit too energetic for that. So that's okay.
I just need to sort of, you know, move around that. You know, if you,
with your puppy do even half of the exercises that we showed you that we did
today, which is in our other video you know,
I'm not gonna feel guilty about putting him in his crate and sitting down and,
and, you know, watching TV and just kind of relaxing because he has had a very,
very full day. And my guess is he's probably even over tired now.
So putting him away is gonna be great. I can maybe get him out.
Try again a little bit later if he's a little bit more common, if not,
that's okay too. Now don't forget. Every time you have exercise,
you gonna do something active with your pup.
You need to take them outside first, before you put them in the crate.
We've gone out. We've had a little pee. We're a little bit more chill now. Yeah.
So we're gonna pop 'em in the crate and we're gonna go and relax for a little
bit and give 'em a little bit of a, a time.
With Five Alive, sleeping in his crate,
Ken and Kayl are able to put their feet up and relax for a couple of hours.
Maybe they could even watch a movie.
I've heard the Shawshank Redemption is good.
It has been a long day, but we still have two things to do,
which might be the most important that we do before bedtime.
We're closing in about 30 minutes before we actually try to shut things down.
First things first, the puppy's been in his crate for a little bit,
so we need to take him outside to avoid any accidents.
Those other two things that I was talking about,
the two things we still need to accomplish is we need to make sure that he is,
we've got every little drop of gas out of the tank before we put him in his
crate for the night. So we're gonna do some exercises,
an amazing exercise that we do with all of our puppies.
And you're gonna really see the value in this.
You're gonna see how much energy they burn,
how much we can reinforce the name or whatever word we're using.
We're gonna do something called restrained, recalls the other. It is.
And the other added benefit of the restrained recalls is this kind of physical
activity. If the puppy does have to have a poop,
sometimes it can stimulate that.
And it could really help your puppy to go poop before it's bedtime.
Something that's important to remember when you're working on this is the
payoff. When your puppy gets to the tug,
that's the part that has to be really fun. Of course,
they're gonna love running and chasing. And you know,
your timing when you release is also really important,
but you have to figure out how to make this part valuable.
It's also gonna teach you a lot about your dog. How much do they like toys?
What kinds of toys do they like?
But an exercise like this is gonna burn off so much energy and you can do it
nearly anywhere. We can do this in the kitchen, in the living room or wherever,
but it allows you to just get every drop outta the tank. As I mentioned before.
So hopefully we have a puppy who sleeps all night.
See told you a little exercise. It gets you a poop,
which means we get to go to bed less stressed out.
So for the first couple nights, sometimes,
actually even the first couple weeks depending on how comfortable you are with
this, we actually have our brand new puppies sleep in their crate,
but in our room. And in order to make sure that I am, he can be close to me,
he feels a little bit more comfortable.
I can also hear him stirring in the night.
We actually elevate the crate and put it right up where we can see it.
Now I didn't have enough room on my bedside table,
so you could totally put it up there.
So we just have a little that we have to elevate him. So he is the same level,
so we can see him and his crates gonna go up here.
And so this is where he's going to sleep for the next little while.
And eventually we'll transfer it to the floor.
And then eventually as he's older and he's more trustworthy and he knows the
rules of the house, you know, he could sleep, not in a crate.
But we're a long way. We're a long way from that. Now in his crate,
there's a few chew bones. There's a few things.
And you'll notice that we have a little blanket in here. Now,
if you've watched any of our other crate training videos,
you probably would've heard that we do not recommend putting blankets or bedding
or stuffed animals or anything like that in your puppies crate.
Because a lot of the time your puppies may go to the bathroom on it and then
squish it off to the side. And then you have some house training issues,
or a lot of puppies will try to eat it.
Now he is already used to sleeping in a bed with
in his crate with bedding. So, because that's familiar to him,
we're actually gonna start with a bit of bedding in his crate and we'll see if
he is good with it overnight. If he has an accident on it,
or if he tries to eat it or something then obviously we'll remove it because I
don't want him to, you know, get hurt. But we're gonna start with it.
So sometimes it's a puppy dependent thing and you need to make sure that you're
choosing the right thing for your pop.
If they're sort of a habit of chewing thing,
then you may consider taking it out.
Or if they're having accidents in their crate,
take it out because you'll find that that will sometimes just fix it right up.
Okay. What do you think Mr. Bedtime for Bonzo?
Puppy snuggles are just like the absolute best thing in the whole world.
Could you be any cuter? He's actually starting to get tired now.
I'm really liking the looks of this good boy. Okay.
It's bedtime. I love you so much. You're my favorite puppy.
Don't tell BeeLine.
So I'm gonna turn the crate just like this so that it's facing me that way when
I'm sleeping and he starts to fuss a little bit.
I can stick my fingers in the crate, try and settle him a little bit.
If he actually does make enough noise that I think he has to go to the bathroom.
I will for the first couple nights, get up and take him outside. You know,
if he's not used to holding his bladder, all throughout the night.
Then I need to be aware of that. And then as time goes on,
we can work through that a little bit more.
And we have lots of videos on crate training and all that stuff specifically.
But for tonight I can feel comfortable putting him in the crate.
He's had exercise, he's gone to the bathroom. We're good to go.
And now fingers crossed that we do make it through the night.
And I'll have to report to you in the morning.
After a long day of puppy training, Kayl enjoyed some well earned sleep.
Remember there is renewal in rest and tomorrow we
are going to do this all over again.
Guess what. He slept through the whole night?
I think I might be the luckiest puppy owner in the world. Also, look,
I don't know if he can see in there or not, but he is just, hi, good morning.
He is just the cutest thing. He is awake now though.
So that means I actually have to get outta bed and take him outside. But like,
this is just the best thing ever. Yeah.
We are having lots of fun creating this new puppy vlog for you guys.
And if you'd like to keep up with the details, check out the next video,
click that card right here.
And if you want some training advice that's specific to you and your dog.
And you'd like how out from one of our McCann Dogs, team of instructors,
make sure you check out the link in the description below to our Puppy
Essentials program. On that note. I'm Ken I'm Kayl, happy training.