When it comes to your puppy training goals and expectations for that first
month, there's five different areas that we want you to think about.
The first one could be possibly the most important.
And that is being a really good leader for your puppy.
I'm going to show you a couple of exercises that I do with Euchre every single
day. That just sort of helps implement me as being in charge.
But it's a really non-confrontational way just for her to figure that out. Now,
I know she's going to want to come out and play with this Frisbee.
So we're going to work a little bit on coming out of the crate a little bit more
calmly for me to put her house line on.
So I'm going to go ahead and open the door and I'm only going to open it an inch
or so. And I'm going to just see if she's going to come out or not.
And I don't want her to come out. Oh, good girl. Unless, oops.
Unless I give her permission. So if she decides to barge, Yes, you,
if she decides to barge out of the crate, I'm simply going to shut the door.
There's no discipline. There's no yelling. There's no screaming.
She decides her own fate. Yes. Good girl. And I'm going to reach in,
put her leash on. Good girl. She still needs to wait for permission.
What a good girl.
Okay. So good.
And all of that self control leads to coming out.
And having a little game with a little Frisbee.
I don't always play with her with her Frisbee when she comes out.
Sometimes I just pet her. Sometimes I'll let her come out,
ask her to sit first and then we can move forward.
You can switch it up a little bit,
but that's a great way just to teach them from the get-go that you're in charge,
but it doesn't need to be a big thing can be nice and easy.
And this is super easy to practice multiple times a day because the amount of
times that your puppy is in and out of their crate in one day.
Another leadership exercise that we work on with her are some skills or some
self control around the door.
Now we don't have a lot of people coming to our door right now,
but we do want to condition her. If somebody does come in,
we don't want her just to run through and jump on them.
The second thing we want her to understand is if, if the door's ever open,
we don't want her to run out and be in an unsafe situation.
So I'm going to show you what we've been working on with her.
Hey baby cakes, come here for a second. So I'm going.
To encourage her just to lie down here at the top.
I'm going to reward her and I'm teaching her to remain.
In this position as I put my shoes on.
So she can just show a little bit of self-control good girl. Wait.
As she holds position,
I'm going to return often and reward her initially while she's learning this.
Good. Wait. Yes. Excellent. What a good girl?
Maintaining position here. More valuable than getting up. No,
she just made a mistake. So I'm just going to help her out.
I'm just going to lure her back down for now, but I'm not going to reward her.
I'm going to reward her only if she holds the down. Yes.
Like that wait. And.
I'm going to try the next step, which is a bit more challenging.
I'm going to open the door.
Yes, babe. You so smart. Good girl.
Again, bringing value to maintaining position. And then the last test,
which is the most challenging is getting her to stop in front of.
The door. Okay Euch, sit. Yes. Good girly.
And we're teaching her that.
You're not allowed to go outside until we give you permission.
So I'm going to get the line in my hand first and then out.
We go, okay, let's go. Good girl. Now that you know.
How to be a good leader for your puppy.
We need to talk about the next four points. I'm Kayl McCann. This is Euchre.
Welcome back to McCann Dogs.
Sure. Let's start first with talking about puppy potty training. Now,
at this point, after a month of your puppy being home,
you should be at the point where your puppy is no longer having accidents in
your house.
And they also should be well on their way to asking you when they have to go
outside as well.
Now we've had pretty good success with Euchre in this department.
She has had a few accidents along the way,
but both times that she had her accidents,
it was because I wasn't quick enough to let her outside.
And one of the things that we've been really focusing on with her is
understanding her daily potty schedule so that we can anticipate when she might
have to go out.
There's also been a few times where we have purposely not let her out to kind of
put her in a situation where she had to indicate to go outside.
And her response was to go to the door, get a little bit disconnected.
It gave us an opportunity to say,
do you have to go outside and then go through the process of taking her.
Once we showed her that a few times,
she was able to indicate on her own to us when she needed to go out,
but knowing your puppy schedule and having a better idea of, you know,
when they normally have to go throughout the day. And with that,
also making sure that you're being really good at supervising them is really
gonna allow you to have success with this.
We actually have a video specifically on how to teach your puppy,
how to let you know that they have to go outside.
And you can find that in the description below,
we're having a lot of success so far with her,
even just after one month of having her home.
But that doesn't mean that we trust her completely when we're not able to
supervise her.
We're still going to use all the tools that we have to ensure that she's not
sliding backwards in her progress.
Things like utilizing crate when we can't pay attention,
or we have baby gates that we put out so that she can't sneak into the other
room and have an accident.
She's also always on her house line to ensure that we can get control and get
her outside when me too.
So it's really important that even when things start to go successfully,
that you don't just let your guard down and get to relaxed too quickly,
because it's very easy for puppies to slide backwards in their progress.
So make sure you're maintaining good criteria.
You keep that supervision up and then you're still really working towards
teaching them to ask you to go outside. Now, in terms of the crate,
it's something that she's learned to be comfortable in,
right from the beginning,
because it's something that we use right from the first day that she's come
home. Now, a couple of the things, okay.
A couple of the things that we've done to encourage her to be comfortable in her
crate is keep it in a place that's really central in her home.
So she never feels segregated. She's always sort of sees us walking around.
We've also used it a lot throughout the day. You know,
we try to spend as much time training with her and spending time out of the
crate as we can, but we both live really busy lives.
So she has to get used to spending time in her crate for a long period.
So it's important that from the beginning, we don't make that a big deal.
We just put her in after she's had ample exercise after she's had a lot of
training and then just let her learn to just chill and be calm.
Sometimes she can be a wild woman in there and she'll play with her toys and
entertain herself, which is fine,
but she knows that it's her place to kind of go and chill out.
And it's something that we're going to utilize for months and months and months.
You know,
the first couple of days of having her home in terms of her crate training,
we did let her out when she would make some noise in her crate,
we were still trying to work out her potty schedule and figure out what exactly
she wanted, but as time went on and we got a better sense of her schedule.
We did have to work through a little bit of barking.
She did go through a bit of a defiant stage where she just wanted to be out
playing, or she would see one of us leave the house. She would want to bark.
And we would just work through that individually until she understood that,
you know, when you go in your crate, you just need to learn to chill out.
One of the things that can be helpful though,
is making sure that before we would put her into the crate for an extended
period of time, she was tired. She'd had lots of exercise,
she'd had some training and sometimes she'd go in,
she'd fuss for a couple minutes because she didn't want the fun to end.
And then she would finally realize that she was tired and then she'd be out for
a nap giving us a few more hours to get some work done.
And the second question we get asked a lot is how much time should my puppy be
spending in their crate? And we really want you to think about, you know,
quality time together, over quantity.
She spends far more time in her crate than she does spend out of her crate,
unfortunately.
But one of the reasons why that happens is she doesn't have all of her training
done yet and she can't be trusted. You know, being loose in my house.
She's still wants to chew on things. She still wants to jump up on the counter.
Sometimes she's a puppy and she's going to make poor choices.
So I look at it this way, when she's out of her crate,
I make sure that she has quality attention from me. We're training. You know,
she's playing around in the kitchen, I'm paying attention to her.
I'm making sure she's getting lots of exercise throughout the day so that when
it is time to go in her crate, I don't feel guilty about putting her in there.
And as her training starts to come along and she can learn things like,
go and lie down on your bed or, you know, hi or, you know,
not to jump up or she starts to make better choices around the house.
Her crate time will slowly become less and less and less,
but you don't want to be giving that freedom to your puppy too early,
before their training is done.
So just make sure that the time that they're out of their crate,
you're giving quality attention.
You're really doing as much as you can so that when they're in the crate,
you don't feel so bad.
Now where's your expectations be in terms of training at that one month mark.
Now, when we're doing our training,
especially in the first month and the initial training of all of the,
the exercises that we do, we build on motivation.
We motivate the dog to do things. They learn to do things, you know, fun and,
and properly when they're doing things from the beginning. But,
I will tell you something that we've struggled with this puppy is that she's not
super motivated here, but to work for food.
And this is something that has been a major challenge.
So we've had to be pretty strategic with with our food rewards.
We've had to take and learn certain times of the day that she's been, you know,
a little bit more eager to work for food.
And they haven't always been times that I would have anticipated.
And then we've also had to try a whole bunch of different types of food.
In the past, I've been able to feed you know,
just kibble at home with my puppies to get them to work. But for her,
she's not interested in kibble she's will eat it for her breakfast.
But after that, she's just not interested. Now,
one of the things that we've really learned with this puppy is that she loves to
play with toys. So I've utilized a toy as a reward for a lot of our training.
So I'll show you a couple of things that I've been doing with our toy.
I have Frisbee here. So once I've trained her to sit,
I can actually use it as the reward sipped. Yes. Get it. Good girl.
So if she sits, that means the game is going to start once again. Good girl.
Yes. Okay. Get it. Good girl.
Now what I've had a lot of fun with, with this puppy being a Border Collie,
she's super energetic.
I've also started to use it to teach her little impulse control.
So now sit good. Ooh, that was a good one. Sit, sit.
Good girl. Good sit.
Okay. Good girl.
So I teach her, even though I'm waving that Frisbee around in front of you,
you have to maintain good.
Control. Good girl out.
Yes. Excellent. So you can see the engagement andn the intensity.
I'm getting through listening because I'm using something that oops, that she,
yes, that's a good girl that she truly wants.
So you have to figure out what makes your dog tick now. I can't. Oh,
that's very nice, good girl.
I can't use a toy for every single thing that I want to teach,
but I can at least start working on the process of her learning to listen and
stay focused, especially around distractions. Now,
what should you expect from your puppy within that first month of having them
home? Well, I would recommend that you start on all of the basics. You know,
things like teaching them to sit and down and maybe at the one month point you
could work towards having them hold that position for a longer period of time
until being released like you saw Euchre do.
I would also be working a lot on teaching them how to respond to their name
around distractions.
You don't necessarily need to put them in a distracting environment,
but create distractions around you. You know, sometimes when I'm practicing,
I'll grab some of her toys off of the crate and I'll spread them around the
floor and I'll work with more distractions around,
even though I'm not changing the location,
I making the environment around her a little bit more challenging.
You might work on some calming exercises,
like teaching them a wait or an on your bed exercise so that you can utilize
that when they're out of their crate,
instead of having to put them away all the time things that are going to allow
you to control the puppy a little bit more easily is where your focus should be.
And then don't forget about the fun stuff as well. You know,
something that we work every single day would be, you know,
stationary exercises, like sit down, a wait on your bed.
We work on motion exercises like teaching her,
her recall to come to me to come close so that I can gain control.
We work weekly sometimes daily on our handling exercises so that I can more
easily clip her toenails. And then last but not least the fun stuff is tricks.
You know, we try to work on tricks, you know, a little bit every day, if we can,
it helps keep her both mentally and physically stimulated,
which means more resting for me in between our training sessions.
It also teaches her that listening and learning with me and,
and doing things for me is a lot of fun. It's motivating.
And the more I can teach her about that,
the easier it is going to be to teach her more serious things like how to walk
on a loose leash and you know, when we're out in the public.
So make sure that you're taking little time every day to work on lots of
different aspects of your training,
because it makes a big difference when it all comes together at the end next,
let's talk a little bit about chewing nipping and biting.
Now I will tell you that of a lot of the puppies that I've had in the past.
This puppy loves to chew,
and it's been something that we've really had to have close supervision on.
She's chewing her house line right now.
We've had to make sure that we're really paying close attention to her because
she loves to put things in her mouth.
So it's very important that she has access to toys at all times and toys that
are going to be safe for her to chew.
If she was to have things like stuffed animals or rope toys,
she would have those ripped apart in about two seconds flat,
the squeakies would be out. So when we're giving her toys to play with,
she does have toys, access to toys all the times,
but she'll have things like chew bones or things like Kong with cheese inside,
or anything that if she was to lie down and chew on it,
she wouldn't be able to rip apart or wreck.
And this is really important because that's allowed us to redirect her to those
items.
Instead of the things that she's curious about chewing things like Amazon boxes
or the toilet paper roll, or the tea towel hanging from the from the stove.
These are all things that she's really investigated in just like any other
puppy.
But having a house line on has been instrumental in our ability to redirect her
and teach her that those choices are just not on the table. And then of course,
if we're multitasking and we need a little bit of time to focus on what we're
doing, we would just happily put her in the crate and in the crate,
she has those things to chew as well. So whenever she feels like playing,
she has something to do that with now in terms of nipping and biting.
Thankfully, that's something that we haven't really had to deal a lot with.
And there's a specific reason why from the get go,
we have been very strict about whether she's allowed to put her mouth on our
clothes or on our skin. And that's always been a major no-no.
That was something that we implemented with the rules, right from the beginning.
But, you know, because we've done so much training and control,
we manage her well, she really views us as strong leaders.
And because she understands where the relationship lies,
she's just not that interested in using her mouth now,
has she tried it in the past? Yep. She's tried to choose. Oh, she's like,
that sounds, she's like to chew you know, on my,
on my shirtsleeve or my fuzzy boots and again,
redirection using the line and stopping her from doing that has been really
helpful, but utilizing her training, utilizing a response to name,
leave it sit no really controlling her and teaching her what to do rather than
having to correct her for things that she shouldn't be doing. Now,
if you're one month in with your puppy and you're still dealing with a lot of
nipping and biting,
I have a couple of videos on the channel that I think would really help.
And we'll those in the description below the other thing I'm going to post is a
link to our puppy essentials online program.
And that's going to give you an opportunity to work with our trainers so we can
help you specifically with some of the areas that you're struggling with your
puppy at home. Now that we have the first month covered,
if you're looking for a puppy training schedule specific to your dog's age,
click that card right there on that note, I'm Kayl. This is Euchre,
Happy Training.