Make coming to you a game and practice it at home, in your backyard, and on every outing.
Play Time and Interaction
Puppies need plenty of physical and mental exercise as well as rest, so you will need to establish a regular routine and schedule for playing and resting. Puppies have a lot of energy, but they tire quickly. Of course, a tired puppy is a good puppy! A tired puppy is less likely to be bored and subsequently chew your shoes or table legs or otherwise misbehave.
Your schedule and work hours will dictate your puppy’s schedule. If you work evenings, for instance, your puppy’s schedule will differ from that of someone who works at home. Either way, the key is having a schedule that is flexible enough to suit your lifestyle yet still meet your puppy’s daily needs.
Ideally, you should play with your puppy multiple times a day, including in the morning—after he has pottied and before he has been fed—and five or six times throughout the day, and then a vigorous play session later in the evening before he goes to bed.
Most puppies tire after fifteen or twenty minutes of play. Much will depend on your puppy’s breed and individual energy level and what and how you play with him. Puppies also have the attention span of gnats, so your playtime should be fun and productive.
Don’t confuse interactive play with stimulating a puppy into hyperactive behavior; this encourages misbehavior. Instead, consider fun chase or wait games where you begin instilling the Come and Wait commands. Teach him to follow you everywhere, and make it fun and rewarding for him to be close to you. This is an important skill because Follow Me morphs into Walk Nicely on Leash and Come to Me. Sure, you can catch him now, while he is a puppy, but you won't stand a chance when he is full grown and super fast.
Part of your daily routine should include handling your puppy at every opportunity. Put your hand in his collar, count his toes, check his ears, inspect his teeth, rub his tummy, and kiss his nose. Handling a puppy teaches him to accept being handled as an adult dog, which makes life easier when he needs to be groomed or visit the veterinarian. Plenty of fun handling games help a puppy learn in a fun, positive, and humane manner to enjoy being picked up and/or held. Some dogs never learn to enjoy it, but they must learn to tolerate it without a lot of squabbling.
Hungry Students
Many puppies are pretty hungry first thing in the morning, and their growling tummies may dictate their feeding times and playtimes. You may find it easier to feed him first and then play. If you choose this route, be sure to wait at least thirty to forty-five minutes after feeding time. You don’t want him running and playing on a full tummy.
Make your puppy follow you! Never chase any puppy, especially one that will soon be able to outrun you.
Teach a Communication System
Developing a good communication system from day one is essential—and logical. Without one, how will your puppy grow into an adult dog who understands what you want? How will he know that “Come” means “run to me as fast as you can right now (without stopping to sniff or pee on every bush along the way)”? Likewise, using “Down” when what you really mean is “get off the couch” is likely to confuse your puppy.
Life is less stressful for puppies and adult dogs if we show them what we want and reward them for it, rather than trying to make them guess what we want. “Down” should mean “lie down,” and it should mean the same thing today as it does next week and next month. Of course, the words you choose are secondary. What’s important is consistency. If you choose to use “Here” instead of “Come,” that’s OK, but be sure to use the same word every time. Using “Here” on Monday, “Come” on Tuesday, and Get over here!” on Wednesday and Friday is likely to have your puppy floundering in confusion for weeks to come.
You begin developing a communication system and building a puppy’s vocabulary by associating a command (i.e., Sit) with the behavior. Remember, puppies do not come preprogrammed. Repeatedly saying, “Sit. Sit. Sit! I said SIT!” does nothing to enhance your puppy’s vocabulary. Until you show him what behavior goes with “Sit,” and you reward him for the behavior over and over and over again, he does not know understand that “Sit” means “put your rear end on the ground.”
Teach your puppy a vocabulary and communication system by showing him what you want. Remember that puppies and adult dogs are not intentionally belligerent or naughty. If you are having a communication problem, you need to go back to square one. You need to look at where your training went awry. What do you need to do to better explain what you want? How can you better show your puppy what you expect from him? Clear, consistent communication helps your puppy grow into a stress-free adult dog.
Communicating with your puppy is hands-on business.
Part II: Training Your Puppy
Chapter 4: House-Training Primer
Despite the horror stories you might have heard, house-training your puppy is a relatively simple and painless process. It is the one area of puppy rearing that causes owners a great deal of angst, but honestly, it is very simple. Of course, few owners get through the house-training phase without an accident or five, but that is to be expected. More often than not, problems arise when owners complicate the matter by expecting too much from their puppy. An eight-week-old puppy is equivalent to a four- to six-month-old human baby. Would you expect a young baby to control his or her bladder? I think not. It is equally unfair to ask your baby puppy to exercise the control of an adult dog.
Good planning and preparation and your unwavering commitment to the process are the keys to success. Dogs are creatures of habit, and the house-training process will be more successful if you invest the time into teaching the appropriate behavior, which is pottying outside—not peeing from one end of your house to the other.
Crate or Paper?
First, you will need to decide which method—crate-training or paper-training—you will teach your puppy. Crate-training is by far the most efficient method of house-training. Years ago, owners did not capitalize on the fact that dogs are den animals that love having a place of their own to sleep and eat. Consider this: if your puppy were born in the wild, he would live in a cave or den, and most den animals have an instinctive desire to keep their dens clean. The fact that your puppy is now domesticated does not change one iota of his natural instinct to keep his sleeping area (i.e., his crate) clean.
Dogs will do just about anything to avoid eliminating where they sleep. A crate mimics a dog’s den. By capitalizing on your puppy’s deep-seated cleanliness instinct, you can teach him to control his bladder and bowels and to eliminate outdoors. Crate-training helps facilitate house-training and minimize accidents.
Paper-training (along with puppy pads and litterboxes), on the other hand, is an older yet still utilized method of house-training. It works well for people with tiny dogs or people who live in high-rise apartments and can’t go down thirty floors every hour or whenever their puppy looks like he needs to do his business.
The concept of paper-training is that you teach your puppy to relieve himself on newspaper or absorbent pads that you have spread out on the floor. You place the paper in a convenient location, where the puppy can see it, but not too close to his crate. (Remember, he won’t want to potty where he sleeps.) Over time, you gradually reduce the area of floor covered by newspaper until your puppy is pottying on just a small section of paper. Simultaneously, you begin moving the paper closer to the door. When you are home and able to supervise your puppy, you take him outdoors to potty—the theory being that by moving the paper closer to the door, and as the puppy develops