A Nighttime Puppy Training Schedule Where EVERYONE Gets To Sleep!
Last time on McCann Dogs. You
guys are gonna spend the day with. Us on this little. Guy's very first day home. Yes. Then feed. Dinner time for your puppy is actually
the, of your nighttime schedule. Nighttime schedule nighttime schedule. When you get a new puppy, one of the first things that people
often ask is how is the first night with your puppy? Assuming that it
was gonna be a disaster.
Well, tonight is gonna be our first night with
our puppy. And today in this episode, we're gonna share with you what
a nighttime schedule looks like. That is actually gonna set up your very
first night home with your puppy to be not so much of a nightmare, but
hopefully a really big success. This is our second episode, but
if this is your first time here, let me bring you up to speed. This is
our new puppy vlog. Now as a dog trainer, for more than 20 years, I have raised
and trained a lot of dogs already. In this series, I'm gonna share with you some tips and
tricks of I've learned along the way. And I bet many of them you've
never heard of I'm Kayl McCann. This is eight-week-old mixed breed
puppy Five Alive welcome back to McCann Dogs. Good boy. We are about five
hours away from bedtime. And in the last episode I talked
about the importance of dinner time, any mealtime, in fact with your
puppy.
So it is now dinnertime, and I'm gonna take advantage to the fact
that I have a very hungry puppy and I'm gonna do some training. Now in the
last episode I talked about, you know, some of the reasons
why we use food, but I, I wanted to dive into it a little
bit deeper because this is such an I opportunity that we wanna take
advantage yes. Of with our puppies. Now, number one is if you have a busy
schedule and you have lots going on in your life teaching, or you have to
stop to feed your puppy anyways, they still need breakfast,
lunch, and dinner.
At this point, that's just a great way to structure
in some training automatically. I know every day, right now
he's getting three meals a day. I'm likely going to have three
minimum short training sessions. Oh my goodness. Training sessions a
day, because it's already built in now, I gave you a lot of examples in the last
episode of things that you can do with your puppy during mealtime.
But remember, it's not really so much about
what you do, it's when you do it. And the fact that you're
taking advantage of a puppy, that's really either you're gonna go,
that's maybe not chew on my sweatshirt. That's not a good idea. Now, when
you're doing these training exercises, you could work on brand new things. Each time you set out to
do your training session, or you could repeat some of the things
that you did earlier in the day, both are really good things to do
puppies, learn through root dogs. In fact, at any age, learn through repetition. So if I've already started to sort of
plant a seed about a certain behavior in his brain earlier in the day, it actually would be a great idea for
me to revisit it so that he gets little short periods of training
all throughout the day.
You're gonna notice that puppies
have a very short attention span. They can't work on the same thing
over and over and over again, they get disengaged or they get
frustrated or they get distracted. So it's much better just to work for a
few minutes at a time when they're eager with some of their meals or
whatever you're working on. So you get the absolute most
out of that training session, keeping things very short
and sweet and fun.
Now, how does dinner time relate to
your nighttime schedule? Well, a lot of it has to do with when you're
gonna feed your puppy in over the next two hours, I'm going to stop feeding him so that
he has a few hours to digest his food and have a chance to go to the bathroom. And I'm gonna give you a
little sneak peek later on, on how we're gonna make that happen a
little bit more easily. But for now, I'm not necessarily gonna give him his
whole meal and then put him in the crate and that's it for the night. I'm gonna
actually give him some of this now, do a little bit of training. I
might use some of it in the crate. I'm gonna make dinner time last,
longer than the 15 seconds. It would take for me.
You have to put him, put this down and let him eat that way. I can use the food for him making
good choices a little bit later. So I'm gonna take half of
his meal here. You're bud. And I'm gonna just play around with
some of the exercises that I like to do. When he first gets. Home, yes. I'm getting down to the end of my food. And we are getting to the point where
we need to eat dinner ourselves. So when it comes time to
dinner time with your puppy, there's a couple of ops that
you can do for your schedule. Option number one could be take the rest
of your puppy's food and have 'em go in their crate, finish their
food in their crate, and then just let 'em hang
out there. Oh yes. Good boy. While you cook dinner and
do your thing and you know, this could be a good option. If you have a busy household
or if you're on your own, you can't really to watch the puppy
and cook dinner, do everything at, at the same time, because it's a great time for puppies
to make mistakes if you're not watching them.
Option number two could be
divide and conquer. Yes. Good boy. You could have one person, you know, make dinner and the other person could
be on puppy duty and making sure that they're not getting into mischief.
They could continue training with them. And option number three, which is, I think what we might do
tonight is a blend of. Both. Yes, very nice. We are about to sit down for
dinner and puppy's been out, Ken had a little play with
him, did some training. Both of us would like to eat in
peace right now. That's true. So puppy's in his crate.
So now that dinner's done, the puppy is in his crate
and he is still sleeping. So we're gonna let him
sleep a little bit longer. And then the next step is to
get him up and take him outside.
So he can go to the bathroom room.
Now, as they we have about three hours, I would say until bedtime. So in terms
of what happens next with the puppy, well, you have a few options.
So option number one could be, if they're sleeping, let them sleep,
let them sleep a little bit longer. Or if they're stirring, take them outside and you could
actually put them back in their crate. If you wanted to you know,
with his first day home, we've been excited and we have done
so much with him today. So for, to have him just kind of chill out in
the crate would be completely fine.
At this point, you could just sit
down and relax if you wanted. Now, option two starts with taking
the puppy outside because right. Yes. Hurry up, hurry up. Because after you've fed your puppy
and they've had a bit of an activity, that's a really common time for
them to have to go to the bathroom. And if you don't let them out
right away, it's really, you know, a big possibility that
they'll have an accident, especially he's not house trained yet.
So my goal today is to set him up for
success. So we don't have any accidents. Now I'm at the point in the night where
I don't really wanna give him any more food. And now what I wanna do is to work
on things that are a little bit calmer. I wanna teach him that at
nighttime. We're not gonna go crazy, run around the house.
We're just gonna be chill. So I have a little bone and I'm gonna
actually pull over one of these little dog beds. And if we wanna sit down and
have, you know, a little, oh, wow, a little you know, watch TV together. I could just grab a seat with him here
and start actually teaching him how to just come and lie on a bed
and chew on a bone.
Now, the other reason why I really like to do
with this with my puppies is I want him to be really comfortable with
me when he's chewing on bones. I want him to learn right from the
beginning, that bones are to be shared, not to, to feel like he has to,
you know, be possessive over them. And if he learns just from a puppy to
be calm and hang out with me and chew on the bone, it teaches him from the start.
This is something we can do together. The other thing you might consider when
you have a puppy is not necessarily letting them up on the
furniture as of yet. Now, as your puppy gets a bit older and you
have good leadership and have a good relationship with your puppy, that's something that you and your
family could certainly decide with one another. But since he's brand new we're just gonna
hang out here on the floor and teach him that you know, down here is a
pretty good place to be as well.
Now, if you watch our channel, you probably know that Ken and
I actually have six other dogs, and you may have noticed that
we haven't shown you them in, in the videos thus far. And so what we'd like to do when we have
a brand new puppy is we actually like to keep our puppies separate
from our other dogs. You know, we're trying to build a bond
between us and the puppy. We're also gonna try and make sure that
he sort of has an opportunity to get comfortable in a brand new house
that he is not been before. Also the other dogs are sort of
in, for a very rude awakening. The fact that there's a
new little brother in town. So we just wanna make sure that when
we do introduce him for the first time, we'll do it really gradually.
And for now it's just important that he
gets an opportunity to get comfortable with us. Now, we were really hoping to be able to lie
here calmly and chew on a bone and watch Ozark together. But clearly even after are all of the
exercises that we showed you in the last video earlier today, that he still has this
abundance of energy. So lying here and being calm is
not really what we're gonna do. We're gonna change gears. And I'm
just gonna do something active. I have one of our really
fun, fuzzy ball tugs. It's a bungy fuzz and ball all
in one is like the most epic toy. And it is Five Alive
approved. That is for sure. Now when I'm playing tug with them, there's a couple little lessons
that he can learn with this. A lot of people are apprehensive
to play tug with their puppies. When they're young, woo, woo.
He got a hold on that thing.
But I can actually teach
him to be respectful with
his mouth and with his body when he's playing tug, I actually will take my free hand and
I'll sort of put my hands on his body. I might put my hands near
his face. You can see, he can start to understand that
your mouth needs to stay on the toy. It doesn't come to me, but I want to get very comfortable
with me holding his body. Now he's got Terrier in him so he
likes to tug really crazy. Yeah. And obviously you're just gonna tailor
the play to your specific puppy. He's pretty crazy.
He
likes to play pretty rough, but you might tailor your play to your
puppy's needs if they want something a bit different really say, yeah, it's fun. If you keep the
toy moving, keep it engaged. So your puppy gets to use
that chase drive. That's
really natural. Oh, good boy. And then sometimes in the early
stages, you can let him win. We are moving on to plan B. I was really hopeful that we could sit
at the bed and chew on our nice little bone and be relaxed, but five is not liking
that plan quite so much.
He's a little bit too energetic
for that. So that's okay. I just need to sort of, you know,
move around that. You know, if you, with your puppy do even half of the
exercises that we showed you that we did today, which is in our
other video you know, I'm not gonna feel guilty about putting
him in his crate and sitting down and, and, you know, watching TV and just kind
of relaxing because he has had a very, very full day. And my guess is
he's probably even over tired now. So putting him away is gonna be
great. I can maybe get him out. Try again a little bit later if he's
a little bit more common, if not, that's okay too. Now don't forget.
Every time you have exercise, you gonna do something
active with your pup. You need to take them outside first,
before you put them in the crate.
We've gone out. We've had a little pee.
We're a little bit more chill now. Yeah. So we're gonna pop 'em in the crate and
we're gonna go and relax for a little bit and give 'em a
little bit of a, a time. With Five Alive, sleeping in his crate, Ken and Kayl are able to put their feet
up and relax for a couple of hours. Maybe they could even watch a movie. I've heard the Shawshank
Redemption is good. It has been a long day, but we
still have two things to do, which might be the most important
that we do before bedtime. We're closing in about 30 minutes before
we actually try to shut things down. First things first, the puppy's
been in his crate for a little bit, so we need to take him outside
to avoid any accidents. Those other two things
that I was talking about, the two things we still need to accomplish
is we need to make sure that he is, we've got every little drop of gas out
of the tank before we put him in his crate for the night.
So we're
gonna do some exercises, an amazing exercise that we
do with all of our puppies. And you're gonna really
see the value in this. You're gonna see how
much energy they burn, how much we can reinforce the
name or whatever word we're using. We're gonna do something called
restrained, recalls the other. It is. And the other added benefit
of the restrained recalls
is this kind of physical activity. If the puppy
does have to have a poop, sometimes it can stimulate that. And it could really help your puppy
to go poop before it's bedtime. Something that's important to remember
when you're working on this is the payoff. When your puppy gets to the tug, that's the part that has to
be really fun. Of course, they're gonna love running
and chasing.
And you know, your timing when you release
is also really important, but you have to figure out how
to make this part valuable. It's also gonna teach you a lot about
your dog. How much do they like toys? What kinds of toys do they like? But an exercise like this is gonna burn
off so much energy and you can do it nearly anywhere. We can do this in the
kitchen, in the living room or wherever, but it allows you to just get every drop
outta the tank. As I mentioned before. So hopefully we have a
puppy who sleeps all night. See told you a little
exercise. It gets you a poop, which means we get to go
to bed less stressed out. So for the first couple nights, sometimes, actually even the first couple weeks
depending on how comfortable you are with this, we actually have our brand
new puppies sleep in their crate, but in our room.
And in order to make
sure that I am, he can be close to me, he feels a little bit more comfortable. I can also hear him stirring in the night. We actually elevate the crate and
put it right up where we can see it. Now I didn't have enough
room on my bedside table, so you could totally put it up there. So we just have a little that we have
to elevate him. So he is the same level, so we can see him and his
crates gonna go up here. And so this is where he's going to
sleep for the next little while. And eventually we'll
transfer it to the floor. And then eventually as he's older and
he's more trustworthy and he knows the rules of the house, you know,
he could sleep, not in a crate. But we're a long way. We're a long
way from that.
Now in his crate, there's a few chew bones.
There's a few things. And you'll notice that we have
a little blanket in here. Now, if you've watched any of our
other crate training videos, you probably would've heard that we do
not recommend putting blankets or bedding or stuffed animals or anything
like that in your puppies crate. Because a lot of the time your puppies
may go to the bathroom on it and then squish it off to the side. And then
you have some house training issues, or a lot of puppies will try to eat it. Now he is already used
to sleeping in a bed with in his crate with bedding. So,
because that's familiar to him, we're actually gonna start with a bit
of bedding in his crate and we'll see if he is good with it overnight.
If he has an accident on it, or if he tries to eat it or something
then obviously we'll remove it because I don't want him to, you know, get
hurt.
But we're gonna start with it. So sometimes it's a puppy dependent thing
and you need to make sure that you're choosing the right thing for your pop. If they're sort of a
habit of chewing thing, then you may consider taking it out. Or if they're having
accidents in their crate, take it out because you'll find that
that will sometimes just fix it right up. Okay. What do you think
Mr. Bedtime for Bonzo? Puppy snuggles are just like the
absolute best thing in the whole world. Could you be any cuter? He's
actually starting to get tired now. I'm really liking the looks
of this good boy. Okay. It's bedtime.
I love you so
much. You're my favorite puppy. Don't tell BeeLine. So I'm gonna turn the crate just like
this so that it's facing me that way when I'm sleeping and he starts
to fuss a little bit. I can stick my fingers in the crate,
try and settle him a little bit. If he actually does make enough noise
that I think he has to go to the bathroom.
I will for the first couple nights,
get up and take him outside. You know, if he's not used to holding his
bladder, all throughout the night. Then I need to be aware of
that. And then as time goes on, we can work through
that a little bit more. And we have lots of videos on crate
training and all that stuff specifically. But for tonight I can feel
comfortable putting him in the crate.
He's had exercise, he's gone to
the bathroom. We're good to go. And now fingers crossed that we
do make it through the night. And I'll have to report
to you in the morning. After a long day of puppy training,
Kayl enjoyed some well earned sleep. Remember there is renewal
in rest and tomorrow we are going to do this all over again. Guess what. He slept
through the whole night? I think I might be the luckiest
puppy owner in the world. Also, look, I don't know if he can see in there or
not, but he is just, hi, good morning. He is just the cutest thing.
He is awake now though. So that means I actually have to get
outta bed and take him outside. But like, this is just the best thing ever. Yeah. We are having lots of fun creating
this new puppy vlog for you guys. And if you'd like to keep up with the
details, check out the next video, click that card right here.
And if you want some training advice
that's specific to you and your dog. And you'd like how out from one of
our McCann Dogs, team of instructors, make sure you check out the link in
the description below to our Puppy Essentials program. On that note.
I'm Ken I'm Kayl, happy training..
