There's very few things as exciting as bringing a brand new puppy home to the
house. And often what happens is we walk in the door,
we set the puppy down and we realized that our puppies don't know anything.
And suddenly things are going to be a lot harder than it seems. Mistake.
Number one,
that dog owners make is not having a realistic idea of what a puppy understands
when we bring them home.
And sometimes that can lead us to set them up for failures because we're
expecting them that they understand the rules of the house,
the second they come home.
Or they understand how to respond to their name or not to pee on the carpet or
not to bark in their crate.
These are all normal puppy things that are going to happen.
And the most important thing is that you have a game plan to make sure that when
these things pop up, you know exactly what to do to work through them.
It's really common when puppies first come home to be a little bit more
cautious, they're still trying to figure out the lay of the land.
They tend to follow us a bit more. They're really snuggly.
And then as the dog starts to get a little bit more comfortable in the home,
you start to see some of those normal puppy behaviors.
And it's important that even though the first week goes brilliantly,
that you don't let down your guard and start giving your brand new puppy,
all this freedom and opportunity to make poor choices.
What's really important is that you realize that the first little bit could be
smooth sailing and that you need to be ready for your dog to start
investigating, you know, how the couch tastes and you know,
different things around the house that they might start to be curious about.
It's important that you predict those things and you're able to work through
them until you really have a problem. That's hard to go back and fix.
We have a lot of great videos on our YouTube channel to help you with your first
day home with your puppy also your first week home with your puppy,
but really what it boils down to is having a great combination between good
management skills.
And then also getting started with your basic training right away now having the
right expectations combined with the next four tips that I'm going to give you
is really going to help you to avoid failure in your puppy training.
I'm Kayl McCann, this is a little Beeline. Welcome back to McCann Dogs.
Having the right expectation goes hand in hand with leadership.
Leadership is really important because it's going to be what helps you get
through some of the unwanted behavior that you're going to get from your puppy
like barking when they're not supposed to,
or maybe nipping and biting at you and your family members.
It's extremely important that when you're starting to establish yourself as a
leader, that you do it in a very calm and concise way,
and that everybody in the family is on the same page.
It's important to have a little family meeting and trying to determine what
things your puppy is going to be allowed to do and what things are going to be
completely off the table. Once you've established the rules,
then we're going to work on controlling our puppy to make sure that those
unwanted behaviors don't repeat themselves over and over again,
the absolute best way to have great leadership over your puppy is to set your
puppy up for success and eliminate the repetition of your puppy.
Making poor choices.
One of the most common things that puppy owners complain to us about is the fact
that their puppies don't listen to them.
One thing you need to keep in mind when you're trying to teach your puppy to
listen reliably to you is make sure you're training always using the three
P's prepare proofing and practice.
Let's break an exercise down so you can learn a little bit more about them.
Let's start with prepare and we'll use something like teaching your puppy to
respond to their name as an example.
So prepare means that you're going to be prepared to ensure that your puppy is
going to turn and respond to their name every time that you call it in the
beginning stages of their training.
And this is a common mistake that people often make is they start to use their
puppies name and all kinds of different scenarios,
and they repeat it over and over without actually expecting or teaching the
puppy to move towards them each and every time.
We recommend that when you're teaching this,
that you set your puppy up to be successful by making sure that anytime you're
going to use their name,
you're always prepared to back it up with some type of lure or reward, food,
toy.
That's going to ensure that they turn towards you and they need several weeks of
practicing name followed automatically by some type of lure to encourage
them to turn towards us. That's going to make their name much more valuable.
And it's also going to start teaching a really reliable response, right?
From the beginning. Once your puppy has a good understanding of that skill,
you're going to need to move into the proofing phase.
And this is where things get really fun,
because we want to make sure that our puppy's learn to respond to their name,
even around distractions, without having that food or treat on their nose.
They need to be able to turn away from other dogs and people,
things in your home. So proofing, that's going to be really important now,
in order to get into that phase, though,
they need hundreds of repetitions of doing it right before we start to make it
harder.
The other thing to keep in mind when you go into the proofing phase is that you
need to be ready to know what to do. If your puppy makes a mistake.
And that circles back to our proactive and a reactive training,
if your puppy doesn't respond to their name, what are you going to do about it?
Are you going to keep calling it over and over again and start to allow that
command to weaken? Or are you going to have a backup plan?
Are you going to have your puppy on a leash or a line,
or are you going to go back to using some food and toys a little longer to
ensure that you have a really reliable response each and every time and next
comes practice.
Now there's a common saying out there that practice makes perfect,
but we like the saying perfect practice makes perfect.
And this is really important in dog training because dogs learn through
repetitions and it's best if they learn through repetitions of success.
So our goal is to practice it as many times as we can.
The other thing that's important to note about practicing is where you practice,
make sure that you're not just practicing in the kitchen or in one room at your
house, make sure that you're changing the scenery a little bit for your puppy,
working all the way up to being able to work at the park. Now,
this formula is going to be applied to anything that you teach your puppy to do.
We talk a lot on this channel about the importance of setting your puppy up to
be successful and not allowing them to rehearse the wrong things over and over
again.
The next tip you need to know to avoid failure in your puppy training is having
a clear understanding between when reactive training is appropriate and when
proactive training is appropriate,
let's use the example of somebody coming to your home to talk about proactive
and reactive training. Now,
when you have a baby puppy and somebody is going to come over to your house,
do you have a plan in place? What are you going to have happen?
Are you just going to let somebody knock on the door and see what happens?
It's much smarter to be more proactive,
which means you're going to anticipate a possible problem or anticipate a
possible win and be ready to either prevent or reward your puppy. So,
for example, if I know somebody is coming to the door,
I'm going to a have them text ahead of time. So I'm ready.
I'm going to have my leash. I'm going to have my treats ready.
So if somebody approaches, I'm ready to be at a distance,
rewarding my puppy for being quiet, being calm,
I might work some sits and work on teaching my puppy, right from the beginning,
not to get over excited and rush and jump all over.
Everybody that come in the door now for reactive training.
That means that if I'm a little slow to get control and you know,
the puppy happens to wiggle on my hands and get to somebody.
I need to make sure that I have a way to work through that exercise quickly
before my puppy gets a long time of self rewarding. Hi babe.
So if my puppy rushes the door and I have Alicia on,
I can easily stop my puppy and I can diffuse the situation very quickly,
rather than letting my puppy rehearse for weeks and weeks on end rushing to the
door barking, jumping on people.
Did you know there's a few exercises that you can do with your puppy?
That's going to teach them to have more self impulse control.
Maybe you have a pretty impulsive puppy already.
Now these aren't obedience exercises,
but they're little games that you can play that will teach your puppy to
independently, make good choices. Again,
we have a lot of great videos on the channel about something that we refer to as
rule-outs. Now, this is really important.
So I want to break down an example for you that you can literally use with your
puppy today. Something like, you know,
jumping up the door in order to go outside.
This is something that little B-line used to do when she was a puppy,
she loves to go outside and play and all that excitement would lead to bouncing
and spinning and going bananas at the door.
So what I would do is I would have her on leash and I would simply wait for the
moment for her to take a break in her jumping in her spinning.
And I would wait for her just to stand calmly. And when she would do that,
I would say yes. And then I would open the door and let her go outside each day,
we would practice this each time she wanted to go out.
She learned very quickly that the faster she calmed down and she settled the
faster we would be able to go outside.
And it got to the point where she would run to the door,
sit and look at me as if to say, look at me, mom, look at me, I'm being calm.
And then I could let her out from there. So I took something that she wanted,
like going outside and playing.
And I made sure I got something that I wanted in return,
like sitting and being calm.
Now that you have a better understanding of how to train your puppy and you have
some ways to avoid failure in your training.
The next thing you need to know is what to teach your puppy.
Check out this video right here. It's our puppy training schedule by age. Now,
if you're looking for some more help in your puppy training,
make sure you check the link in the description below to our puppy essentials
online program, where you can work with one of the McCann Dogs,
instructors to make sure we help you through all of your puppy training
challenges on that note. I'm Kayl. This is Beeline. Happy training.