As a trainer I’ve done my fair share of work with young puppies – whether it’s raising them for myself and other people or helping clients with their new pups. I just brought home a new puppy and he’s given me the perfect opportunity to really discuss puppy raising in depth to hopefully help more people with their new additions.
A little background information on this puppy. Ambriel is an English Cocker Spaniel born 7/3/24 and came home 9/18 so he’s 12 weeks at the time of writing this.
Puppyhood is exhausting. These are the key takeaways from his first week home and should serve as a guide for the first week with any puppy.
Reinforcement – Looking for the Good
Puppies are always making decisions – whether they’re good or bad! One of the best things you can do with young puppies is look for their good decisions and reinforce it (praise, treats, access to what they want,etc). There are SO many opportunities for reinforcement with puppies as soon as you start to look for them. Puppy comes up to you to say hi and doesn’t jump on you? Highly reinforce keeping their feet on the floor. Puppy chooses the toy instead of the chair? Praise and interact with them. Learning happens in every single interaction with our dogs regardless of if we’re intending them to learn anything!
Remember, reinforcement is whatever the dog decides is reinforcing. For a lot of young puppies, talking to them and telling them how awesome they are or giving a quick snuggle is enough for reinforcing the day to day good choices at home.
Name Recognition
We take the time to choose a name we like that fits our new puppy and we want them to know it! So our habit as humans is to use it a lot and expect them to pick it up. I’m going to recommend you do the exact opposite. The first few days you should only use their name when you have their attention already and can immediately follow it with a reinforcer (either food or cuddles). Try to never use their name when you’re wanting to correct their behavior or if you aren’t confident they’re going to respond. If we say it too often (especially in negative connotations like when they’re chewing on the electric cords and we need them to STOP) then we run the risk of their name just becoming background noise to them. We want dogs to have a strong name response so as they grow we can get their attention whenever we need to. I’ll add a video of me working on this with Ambriel in the hotel after we left his breeder’s house.
Training?
There’s so many articles and videos online pressuring people to train puppies right away – you need to teach X Y and Z in the first week! Do this, do that, juggle a million things and do it all perfectly! It’s overwhelming even for me and I live for training.
Take a breath.
The first week home, don’t worry about doing a bunch of formal training. Your pup’s entire world just changed and they deserve time to adapt and really settle into this being “home”. There will be plenty of time for training later. There are no hard and fast rules, I find myself breaking “rules” all of the time with puppies I’ve raised and they’ve all turned out fine.
In one week with Ambriel, he will come to his name and that’s pretty much it as far as “obedience” training. In addition to that, if he’s on a leash then dragging me places isn’t an option. He has to keep the leash loose to go anywhere. This is important in the long run because the more they reinforce themselves for pulling when they’re young the harder it will be to course correct and get nice leash manners as they mature. (more to come on this in a later blog!)
If you are reading this because you also have a new puppy, congrats!! I would recommend checking out our puppy survival guide for more info on potty training, socialization, and more. We also have a puppy class every Saturday at 10am – the building is fully sanitized before every class to ensure safety for puppies that aren’t yet fully vaccinated. Create an Account and Enroll here or contact us today nwaschoolfordogs@gmail.com or 479-332-4237