Keep Training Simple for Your Puppy

I'm Dale Buchanan, and this is Puppy Talk, the podcast that offers free advice and tips for raising a happy, healthy, and obedient puppy. For more information on this podcast, visit us online at puppytalkpodcast.com. Welcome to Puppytalk Podcast episode number 137. I'm your host, Dale Buchanan. Today I'm going to talk about why it's best to keep training simple for your puppy. This is a very important topic because a lot of new puppy owners want to teach their puppy all of this extravagant obedience commands and obedience training too soon, and it creates problems with the puppy down the road. And it also creates problems with the puppy learning the foundational skills effectively. Let's get started. Why it's best to keep it simple is what I just explained. You don't want to overwhelm the puppy too early on. You wouldn't want to get a kid that's 10 years old into college. They are in elementary school and then they need to go through junior high school, high school, and then college. They need to learn the skills to do all of the things to get them ready for life. And that's what we do with puppies. Think of puppy training as elementary school. Keep it that simple because you want to work on arithmetic, reading, history, science, and so forth. You're not going to do anything over the top for a young kid. So why would you do anything over the top for a young puppy? When I work with a new client, I focus on the foundational skills of seven basic obedience commands. They are sit, down, stay, come, leave it, drop it, and bed or place. Believe it or not, every adult dog that I go to for training that has a behavior problem, anywhere from two to eight years old, has never learned these foundational skills, and that's part of the issue. The owners bypassed the dog learning these foundational skills, and they have problems later on in life with chewing or barking or jumping on people, or what I see most often, lack of socialization skills, and they can't cope, even going to Home Depot or Lowe's, something that simple where they should be able to handle that at 12, 14 weeks old. A dog's five, six, seven years old and they can't do it because they never learned anything from the ground up. They were try to force into these situations to be social and they can't do it. There are consequences of making the training too complex too early. And what I've seen mostly with clients is when they try to teach their puppy things like tricks, and I've talked about this before in another episode: shake, roll over, play dead, go to the middle, which means between your legs, to have a perfect heel position while walking or off-leash training at four months old, these types of things. They neglect the foundational stuff of sit down, stay, and come. What we want puppies to do at early age is to go to their bed, lay down, and stay so they don't jump on guests when they come over. We want them to walk nicely on a leash in public so we can take them places. And when you're conversing with somebody or buying something off the shelf, they lay down and stay out of the way. A well-trained and well-behaved dog can do that. Even at four or five months old, they can do that. I've proven it. I have all the videos on my Instagram page and YouTube and Facebook pages of puppies doing this on a regular basis. This is very important because people want to take their dogs places. They want to take their dogs out on field trips. When people hire me to train their dog, there are generally three areas of focus where there are problems. One is house manners, two is leash manners, and three are socialization skills. So we focus on the house manners first. To prevent a dog from going to the front door and jumping on guests as they come in, we work on them staying on their bed. To prevent a dog from having potty accidents in the house, we have them stay on their bed so we can watch them and know where they are. And if they need to go out, we take them out. To prevent a dog from chewing your furniture, they stay on their bed. To prevent a dog from barking at everything out the front windows, we put them in a room in the back of the house and they stay on their bed. You see where this is going. A dog that can stay on its bed in the house is a well-behaved dog. A dog that runs around and does anything at once in the house, has no structure and no manners, is always getting itself into trouble. And there are exceptions to this, of course, but we're talking about puppies under six months old, generally. When it comes to leash training, I always get called to help leash reactivity. These are dogs that have been pulling on a leash for a long time. They react to other dogs, they react to other people, they get overly excited, they get overstimulated. The triggers present challenges for them to cope with everyday life out of the house on a leash. There's a barrier frustration. The barrier is the leash. The leash is holding them back from getting to the other dog or the person or whatever. Dogs can also be leash reactive to cars and bikes and airplanes and birds and other animals. It can be reactive to anything on a leash. We want to prevent that early on by giving the dog the foundational skills through leash training, not necessarily leash walking, not taking long walks and letting the dog misbehave, but teaching them proper obedience skills while on a leash. This is what I do with all the puppies that I train. The final thing is socialization skills. We take puppies on field trips to places where they're going to learn to behave and be civil with a lot of distractions. We go to Home Depot in Lowe's, where there are forklifts and pallet jacks and flatbeds and shopping carts and announcements and music and a lot of people and usually a lot of other dogs. We like to go to Hobby Lobby and outdoor malls, what we have here in Huntsville called Bridge Street, where you can go in and out of stores, a variety of stores. You can be outside, you can be inside. This is really fun and it's exciting for dogs. They get to see a lot of different people in a lot of locations that have different floor textures, different size aisles, different materials there. Some have clothes, some have home goods, some have jewelry. So they get to experience all of these things in one shopping mall that's outdoors and indoors, that's dog friendly. This is very important for dogs to learn socialization skills because the majority of dogs that are older, that have never been socialized, they can't just suddenly do it. If a dog is fearful of going in public or is skittish or has anxiety or stress, they just can't suddenly, at six or eight years old, learn how to be a very social dog. It's virtually impossible for a dog that age to suddenly adapt to social situations. The critical period for socialization is usually between four and 12 weeks old. Some people say between eight and 16 weeks old. Regardless, by four or five months, the puppy needs to have a lot of socialization. He needs to have already gone for a lot of car rides, a lot of different places. And people are saying, well, what about vaccines? You're not going places where there are other contamination from animals. You're not, they're not getting around other dogs' feces, so they're not going to the dog park, they're not going to daycare yet, usually. They're going to places that have a controlled environment where them picking up a disease is highly unlikely. With dogs that aren't fully vaccinated, the diseases that they're going to pick up are going to typically be parvo and distemper and giardia, which is a parasite, and worms, or they could get any variation of those things through contaminated dog's feces. So we're not letting them get near any other dog's feces or any other dogs at all until they are fully vaccinated. And when they are, usually about four months, there's no issues whatsoever. That's what a basic training program looks like with our puppies. If we want to go to the intermediate level, I encourage everybody to look into the AKCK9 Good Citizen, which for us adds more sessions, more training and testing for the AKCK9 Good Citizen that ensures that your dog can be anywhere in public, at the vet, at the groomer, being pet by people, walking good on a leash, walking through a crowd, those types of things, and you don't have to worry about it. This has more items on it that the dog has to train and test for that bring up the level of socialization skills. For example, you sitting at a counter or sitting at a table, filling out a form, and your dog laying underneath you and being out of the way. You walking through the door with a cup of coffee and you hold the door open, the dog goes through, doesn't pull you through, the coffee doesn't spill. Those types of things are very important. And that's some of the items that are on the advanced canine good citizen training and testing. It's very easy for your puppy to get overwhelmed early on. How do you know when this is happening? The number one way that you know it's happening is they check out. They don't like training anymore. It's a chore for them, it's no longer fun. This is when it's too much. You need to back off a little bit, take it easy, take it slower, focus on sit down, stay calm, practice those 25 times a day for months until your puppy's really good at those with a vocal command and a hand signal. And then you can add more things on later. You've got a long time to add on more things to the dog's training program. You don't have to do it all right away. I hope this information helps you. If you have any questions about the content of this episode, you can reach me through my website, puppytalkpodcast.com. Have a great day.