Puppy Training: When, what and where?

Bear in mind that each puppy is different to the next. Their genes, their breed, their early history in the litter, their individual character and personality, and the goals you have for your puppy all come into play when deciding what is top priority for training. However, in saying that, there are some critical things to be aware of and I believe every dog should learn no matter the end goals.

Early learning is the strongest, so aside from picking a breeder that makes sure your puppies first 7-8 weeks of life are full of positive experiences, you need to be aware the next couple of months with you are also critical for early learning. The experiences your puppy has in their early stages of life will have a tremendous impact on the development of their mind. While I actively encourage you to soak up all of the glorious, adorable, bundle of joy your puppy is, please bear in mind that each day that passes your puppy has learned more than you think that could possibly affect the rest of their life.

When to train:

I like to think about this split into two:

1. You have the scheduled training time that you specifically have an exercise you want to work on, you have your treat bag and clicker (or verbal marker) at the ready and you both know learning is about to take place. It’s good to set a timer or have a certain amount of treats ready so you don’t accidentally over train. The law of diminishing returns applies to dog training too, you will get the most out of training your puppy within the first few minutes, it will then plateau from there, you don’t want to reach the point your puppy is overtired and no longer enjoying the training or getting anything from it.

2. The rest of your puppies awake time is a fantastic opportunity to reinforce behaviours that you like to see, and to manage your puppy’s environment so that they are not reinforced for the behaviours you don’t want your puppy to learn. This is where the majority of your puppy’s learning takes place. With time and experience you will learn there is more to reinforcing behaviour other than food, however, food is a quick and easy way to reinforce lots of appropriate behaviours with your puppy and to create a history of positive experiences with you. I would recommend you have small treat tubs around the areas that your puppy has access to (even having some ready in your pocket for easy access), so that when you see your puppy do something unprompted that you want to see happen again you can quickly get a reward to them to pair that action with something they like. An example of this which I did with my dogs was placing a reward down each time they chilled out while the humans cooked or ate food. Instead of becoming curious and attempting to jump at counters or nudge us trying to get access to our food, they learned very quickly the best thing was just to lay down and relax and good things would come to them. Now they are well into their adulthood they no longer need constant rewards and are naturally relaxed if we are cooking or eating.

What to train:

This will come down to a few factors: your goals as a family, your dogs genes and breed meaning they might be predisposed to certain behaviours, how much time you can dedicate towards training, and your experience when it comes to training a dog. The reality is you can’t expect your dog to be exceptionally trained if your own experience and knowledge is limited, and you are only dedicating once a week to some training. You will also need to be prepared to learn, practice, and dedicate time to your puppy.

The majority of people will revert to standard obedience ‘commands’ as their go to for what to train their new puppy in the early stages. However, there is plenty of time when your puppy is a bit older and you have passed their critical learning period to teach them these things. Personally, if I could advice puppy guardians of what to train first it would be along these lines:

• Response to name – Puppy responds to name when called (don’t overuse their name especially when getting annoyed at them, this poisons their name and makes training very difficult).

• Food manners – The beginning of self control training and learning to be calm around treat training.

• Drop / Give – Letting go of objects both theirs and things they will find, also good for teaching self control (do not grab things off your puppy, trade for something equally good to prevent loss of trust).

• Hand target – Teaches puppy to follow your hand when you need them to move out the way, prevents unnecessary negative handling.

• Positive handling – Very important for vet visits, and life long incidents where you will need your dog to be still while you deal with something on them (instead of waiting until you NEED to do something to them, be proactive and practice handling parts of the body and pairing this with some tasty food).

• Equipment – Teaching puppy to be comfortable around any equipment used, ie collar, harness, lead (do not expect puppy to tolerate these being forced on for long, this usually becomes an issue without people realising it, all of a sudden puppy is running away when harness comes out).

• Recall – To ensure your dog stays safe and under control on walks, for puppies this begins with some fun games to encourage running towards their guardian and provided with something they enjoy.

• Loose lead walking – This very quickly gets out of hand as puppy gains confidence outside, loose lead walking should start in the house and garden for the weeks that your puppy is at home before fully vaccinated, be proactive instead of waiting till their first walk and overwhelming them at the same time as expecting them to walk nicely on a 1m lead. (ps, get a 2m lead minimum).

• Settling – This includes in the house and outside, but starts by learning how to settle in the house.

There are of course LOTS of other exercises to include later to expand their knowledge and tool kit, however you need to prioritise the things that are most important for early learning.

Where to train:

If you remember back to when you first learnt a new task (let’s say driving). If you had never even been in the driving seat and was expected to know how to use the clutch, acceleration, break, handbrake, signals, mirrors etc. in the busiest area of a city all in the first day…well I would have broken down and probably never trusted another instructor with my learning again. Everything would have been broken down for you, split into appropriate phases until you could piece everything together many lessons later. You may see all of these amazing things that dogs can do on the internet or the tv, but what you don’t see if the months or years of their training to get to that stage.

Firstly, you need a low distraction environment the dog is used to when you teach them anything new; usually a room in your house. When you see your puppy successfully understanding the training exercise in that room, you can generalise that training to different environments by moving to different rooms of the house, then move into the garden, out onto the street, in a quite park, in the supermarket car park when your other half is doing the shopping…you get the idea. You can also start proofing their training by adding a little distraction in: go back to the garden and get your other half to walk around while you practice, or put some toys around the area, start to do some training in the park when there is a person in the distance, move a little close to the supermarket entrance…again you get the idea.

As with everything, this is a simple concept that is not so simple when it comes to real life. Things won’t always go well, but something to remember is that if your dog is failing to respond to training this is not because they are stupid/slow/stubborn. It’s because you have asked for too much too soon in terms of distraction level, your dog is not understanding what is being asked of them as you haven't broken down the training for them, they are stressed or scared, or because they are not motivated by what you are offering them.

Something I haven’t discussed above is the importance of appropriate socialisation and tips to go about this - see puppy socialisation blog for more on this.