Time Sensitive Puppy Training, Top 5 Behaviors - It’s Not What You Think!
A couple months ago I met a woman with a small breed puppy, just 2 months old. Since she was a first time puppy owner and had young kids, I tried to give her some advice on what to do RIGHT AWAY to set her puppy up for success as an adult.
I guaranteed this woman that she would be contacting me for help in a few months if she didn't train these things right away.
And guess what... she contacted me last week saying they are struggling with training and need help.
For me, there are a few things I think should be trained as a priority, particularly for small breeds, that, when done, will make life infinitely easier, but when not done, are very frustrating and take so much longer to train.
Bad habits are easier to not learn in the first place than they are to unlearn.
So, with that in mind, here are my top 5 things to train and work on with a puppy.
Without a doubt, I think this is one of the most important, especially with small breed dogs, as their bladder is obviously much smaller. The ability to hold pee is muscle control, which takes time to build up, as the puppy gets older and more mature. With small dogs, it's much easier to miss a small puddle, vs a large one, and so often people have a harder time potty training small dogs.
It's not that they are harder to train, is just that you have to be more diligent in the beginning stages because they simply can not hold it as long! For potty training, take your puppy out every 1-2 hours during the day (1 for smaller dogs, 2 for larger dogs), after waking up, after playtime (or during playtime if play has been going on for 20-30 minutes), first thing in the morning, right before bed, and 5-10 minutes after eating or drinking.
Do not ever let your puppy out of your site inside, for any reason, until they have proven trustworthy. If you puppy has an accident inside, that is your mistake and negligence, NOT the puppy's fault. Do not punish your puppy for accidents you find after the fact. Praise and reward your dog for going outside and give them ample opportunity to do so.
Many people have success with using potty pads and if they are working for you, great! Through experience I typically don't recommend using them except under circumstances where it's absolutely necessary, because if you use pee pads too long, a. the puppy doesn't build up bladder control (learning to hold it for periods) and b. it promotes peeing on the floor, and the puppy learns that's ok. Some dogs are great about going all the way on the pad, but most go 1/2 on and 1/2 off, or miss it entirely but go close to the pad... this is your puppy learning to actually just pee on the floor, NOT to hold it and go outside!
Potty training is SO much easier with a puppy than with an adolescent or adult dog. Then the habit is already learned and you have to be even more diligent! For that reason, I list house training as the number one most important thing to teach a puppy, because it is time sensitive.
This could be tied with number one, but is an ongoing training and should be done throughout puppyhood. Think of socialization as an umbrella, it goes over your entire puppy, it shades your puppy's viewpoints, experiences, personality, temperament, fear responses, etc.
Socialization is NOT having your puppy meet every person and every dog on the street. It is NOT only going to the dog park or dog beach on the weekend and walks around the block during the day. It is actually teaching your dog to be neutral and calm around new experiences, sights, sounds, people, dogs, situations, etc.
Socialization starts before you ever get your puppy, it starts and just a few weeks old as they start to explore their surroundings. Stop for a moment and think about what we do with human babies. Maybe for the first few months a mother and baby might stay home, until the mother is feeling better, but most of our culture is centered around taking the baby out and giving him/her new experiences. By only a few years of age, most kids have been to the zoo, been hundreds of places (simple things like the grocery store, restaurants and cafes, other houses, been held by other people, seen sights and sounds, noises, construction, cars, and so on).
I don't know of anyone in any culture that keeps a baby inside for the several years of its life, until it is "older" and "healthier," and imagine what that would be like to keep a child indoors only until they were six, ten, or eighteen years old. How weird would the world be? How new and different and hard to comprehend.
Well, a puppy is no different, and they need similar experiences as a baby needs regarding seeing and understanding the world, so as to set them up for success as an adult. Having a puppy is hard work, because it takes a lot of effort and diligence to take them new places and incorporate them into your life.
This is a huge topic I will write more on later, but for now, giving your puppy a wide variety of positive experiences until they are a year old is of the utmost importance. Note that these must be positive experiences. If your puppy is slightly shy, then forcing her to endure petting is not positive and will backfire. But, having her become comfortable standing next to a person would be a good first step.
Lets face it, puppy teeth are like piranha teeth, or what I imagine piranha teeth would feel like. They are small and sharp and bloody hurt when your puppy digs them into your soft arm skin, achilles tendon, calf, finger, nose, or wherever else your puppy bites you.
Well, just like human babies (if you've ever been bitten by a human baby, it ALSO hurts! Or had your hair pulled by a baby, but we all understand it is normal and they don't have the inhibition or self control), puppies need to learn and develop motor control and bite inhibition. Dogs explore with and use their mouths the way we use our hands, and mouthing is an absolutely common puppy behavior.
Bite inhibition is actually not teaching your dog not to bite, it's teaching your dog to inhibit the bite; to learn how much pressure is ok, to learn what is appropriate to mouth and what isn't, to learn when to mouth and when not to.
Dogs with good bite inhibition show great restraint as adults in situations where they snap a warning instead of actually biting. As opposed to dogs I've come across that I can see never learned bite inhibition and are either a 1 yr old exuberant dog that still mouths really hard, or an adult dog that bites people instead of giving a warning snap or applying light pressure on the skin but not actually biting down.
What you are working on with your puppy to teach bite inhibition is gradually getting them to mouth your skin lighter and lighter until they eventually stop. If your dog mouths your hand and you whop him on the nose so hard that he never mouths you again, yes you stopped his puppy mouthing but no, you did not teach bite inhibition and you now have a dangerous dog that does not know how much jaw pressure to apply.
On contrast, if your puppy mouths and you yelp loudly as if it really hurt, and your puppy looks startled, then you do the same action again and your puppy mouths LESS hard, praise him/her because that is the beginning of learning bite inhibition. Puppy mouthed too hard, caused pain, so then puppy mouthed less hard the next time. You keep doing that until your puppy has learned to have a soft mouth.
Keep in mind this takes time (I completely understand mouthing hurts and is not fun!) but it is extremely important for your dog to learn as he/she is also developing mentally, and developing finer motor skills and better self control. Bite inhibition can't be taught overnight.
Jumping is another behavior that I consider to be time sensitive, meaning if you teaching is from the get-go to a puppy, you prevent a hugely annoying bad habit as an adult.
Personally I don't mind when dogs jump on me during classes or at lessons, I am completely used to it. However, I don't want my own dogs doing that at home, and both of my dogs have never ever jumped as a habit. So now, as adults, they greet people on all fours and it's not an issue.
My Rottweiler is now 2 years old and over 100 pounds. At 4 months she was about 45 pounds, and one day I took her into the bank with me. I looked away for a moment and when I turned back, one of the bankers was encouraging her to jump up. Luckily my puppy had already had enough experience greeting people politely that she was actually confused on what to do, and didn't jump up, but I had to quickly tell the banker that wasn't ok and I was training her not to jump. I bet you can guess what she said because it is what everyone says... "Oh, I don't mind."
I said, "I mind." I absolutely mind when she is 100 pounds and jumps on my mom, or my landlord, or one of my clients. I mind when she knocks a child over because someone that we have never seen again "didn't mind jumping."
The point is, if you are diligent about never rewarding your puppy for jumping, then they never learn the bad habit, then problem solved as an adult. If you are soft and allow jumping when they are little because it's benign, and then change your mind at 6 months or a year or two and now you suddenly mind, well, you have that long of a habit to try and retrain.
There are a couple different development stages for a puppy, but to oversimplify them, here is what happens. Your 2-3 month old puppy loves you, follows you around the house, sleeps on your lap, etc. You are the most important thing in their world. Then when they are 6, 7, 8 months old, they become more confident, develop more, and suddenly you are not the most important thing. They want to explore outside the house, etc. And all that freedom (too much freedom) and superficial training and trust you thought you had when they were little, is suddenly gone. You puppy runs out the door or the gate, they run away when you call, they regress in potty training, etc. etc.
So, in preparation for this "rebellious" phase of development that ALL puppies go through, to one degree or another, I train a super great recall, so my dog knows that coming to me is the best, best thing ever! This way, during the rebel stage, I have at least some foundation for recall to fall back on, as opposed to nothing.
If you notice, Sit, Down, Stay, Shake, Roll Over, etc. are NOT on here.
Because those are learned behaviors that can be trained at any time.
None of them are time sensitive.
None of them are easier for a puppy to learn than an adult dog.
Yes they are important and yes you can train them at the same time as the 5 listed above, but do not work on them as a higher priority. You can train a dog to sit at 3 years old. You cannot reverse the lack of socialization as a puppy at 3 years old.
