Puppy Training Expectations And Goals For The First Month
When it comes to your puppy training
goals and expectations for that first month, there's five different areas
that we want you to think about. The first one could be
possibly the most important. And that is being a really
good leader for your puppy. I'm going to show you a
couple of exercises that I
do with Euchre every single day. That just sort of helps
implement me as being in charge. But it's a really non-confrontational
way just for her to figure that out. Now, I know she's going to want to come
out and play with this Frisbee. So we're going to work a little bit on
coming out of the crate a little bit more calmly for me to put her house line on.
So I'm going to go ahead and open the
door and I'm only going to open it an inch or so. And I'm going to just see
if she's going to come out or not. And I don't want her to come
out. Oh, good girl. Unless, oops. Unless I give her permission. So
if she decides to barge, Yes, you, if she decides to barge out of the
crate, I'm simply going to shut the door. There's no discipline. There's
no yelling. There's no screaming. She decides her own fate. Yes. Good
girl. And I'm going to reach in, put her leash on.
Good girl. She
still needs to wait for permission. What a good girl. Okay. So good. And all of that self
control leads to coming out. And having a little game
with a little Frisbee. I don't always play with her with
her Frisbee when she comes out. Sometimes I just pet her.
Sometimes I'll let her come out, ask her to sit first and
then we can move forward. You can switch it up a little bit, but that's a great way just to teach them
from the get-go that you're in charge, but it doesn't need to be a
big thing can be nice and easy. And this is super easy to practice
multiple times a day because the amount of times that your puppy is in and
out of their crate in one day. Another leadership exercise that we
work on with her are some skills or some self control around the door. Now we don't have a lot of people
coming to our door right now, but we do want to condition
her.
If somebody does come in, we don't want her just to
run through and jump on them. The second thing we want her to
understand is if, if the door's ever open, we don't want her to run out
and be in an unsafe situation. So I'm going to show you what
we've been working on with her. Hey baby cakes, come here
for a second. So I'm going. To encourage her just to
lie down here at the top. I'm going to reward her and
I'm teaching her to remain.
In this position as I put my shoes on. So she can just show a little bit
of self-control good girl. Wait. As she holds position, I'm going to return often and reward
her initially while she's learning this. Good. Wait. Yes. Excellent.
What a good girl? Maintaining position here. More
valuable than getting up. No, she just made a mistake.
So
I'm just going to help her out. I'm just going to lure her back down for
now, but I'm not going to reward her. I'm going to reward her only
if she holds the down. Yes. Like that wait. And. I'm going to try the next step,
which is a bit more challenging. I'm going to open the door. Yes, babe. You so smart. Good girl. Again, bringing value to maintaining
position. And then the last test, which is the most challenging is
getting her to stop in front of. The door. Okay Euch, sit. Yes. Good girly. And we're teaching her that. You're not allowed to go outside
until we give you permission. So I'm going to get the line
in my hand first and then out. We go, okay, let's go. Good
girl. Now that you know. How to be a good leader for your puppy. We need to talk about the next four
points.
I'm Kayl McCann. This is Euchre. Welcome back to McCann Dogs. Sure. Let's start first with talking
about puppy potty training. Now, at this point, after a month
of your puppy being home, you should be at the point where your
puppy is no longer having accidents in your house. And they also should be well on their
way to asking you when they have to go outside as well.
Now we've had pretty good success
with Euchre in this department. She has had a few accidents along the way, but both times that she had her accidents, it was because I wasn't quick
enough to let her outside. And one of the things that we've
been really focusing on with her is understanding her daily potty schedule
so that we can anticipate when she might have to go out. There's also been a few times where we
have purposely not let her out to kind of put her in a situation where she
had to indicate to go outside. And her response was to go to the
door, get a little bit disconnected. It gave us an opportunity to say, do you have to go outside and then
go through the process of taking her. Once we showed her that a few times, she was able to indicate on her own
to us when she needed to go out, but knowing your puppy schedule and
having a better idea of, you know, when they normally have to go
throughout the day.
And with that, also making sure that you're being
really good at supervising them is really gonna allow you to have success with this. We actually have a video specifically
on how to teach your puppy, how to let you know that
they have to go outside. And you can find that in
the description below, we're having a lot of
success so far with her, even just after one
month of having her home. But that doesn't mean that we trust
her completely when we're not able to supervise her. We're still going to use all the tools
that we have to ensure that she's not sliding backwards in her progress. Things like utilizing crate
when we can't pay attention, or we have baby gates that we put out
so that she can't sneak into the other room and have an accident.
She's also always on her house line to
ensure that we can get control and get her outside when me too. So it's really important that even
when things start to go successfully, that you don't just let your guard
down and get to relaxed too quickly, because it's very easy for puppies
to slide backwards in their progress. So make sure you're
maintaining good criteria. You keep that supervision up and then
you're still really working towards teaching them to ask you to go
outside. Now, in terms of the crate, it's something that she's
learned to be comfortable in, right from the beginning, because it's something that we use
right from the first day that she's come home.
Now, a couple of the things, okay. A couple of the things that we've done
to encourage her to be comfortable in her crate is keep it in a place
that's really central in her home. So she never feels segregated. She's
always sort of sees us walking around. We've also used it a lot
throughout the day. You know, we try to spend as much time training
with her and spending time out of the crate as we can, but we
both live really busy lives. So she has to get used to spending
time in her crate for a long period. So it's important that from the
beginning, we don't make that a big deal. We just put her in after she's had
ample exercise after she's had a lot of training and then just let her
learn to just chill and be calm. Sometimes she can be a wild woman in
there and she'll play with her toys and entertain herself, which is fine, but she knows that it's her place
to kind of go and chill out.
And it's something that we're going to
utilize for months and months and months. You know, the first couple of days of having her
home in terms of her crate training, we did let her out when she would
make some noise in her crate, we were still trying to work out her
potty schedule and figure out what exactly she wanted, but as time went on and
we got a better sense of her schedule. We did have to work through
a little bit of barking. She did go through a bit of a defiant
stage where she just wanted to be out playing, or she would see one of us
leave the house. She would want to bark. And we would just work through that
individually until she understood that, you know, when you go in your crate,
you just need to learn to chill out.
One of the things that
can be helpful though, is making sure that before we would
put her into the crate for an extended period of time, she was tired.
She'd had lots of exercise, she'd had some training
and sometimes she'd go in, she'd fuss for a couple minutes
because she didn't want the fun to end. And then she would finally realize that
she was tired and then she'd be out for a nap giving us a few more
hours to get some work done. And the second question we get asked a
lot is how much time should my puppy be spending in their crate? And we really
want you to think about, you know, quality time together, over quantity. She spends far more time in her crate
than she does spend out of her crate, unfortunately. But one of the reasons why that happens
is she doesn't have all of her training done yet and she can't be trusted.
You know, being loose in my house. She's still wants to chew on things.
She
still wants to jump up on the counter. Sometimes she's a puppy and
she's going to make poor choices. So I look at it this way,
when she's out of her crate, I make sure that she has quality attention
from me. We're training. You know, she's playing around in the kitchen,
I'm paying attention to her. I'm making sure she's getting lots of
exercise throughout the day so that when it is time to go in her crate, I don't
feel guilty about putting her in there. And as her training starts to come
along and she can learn things like, go and lie down on your bed
or, you know, hi or, you know, not to jump up or she starts to make
better choices around the house. Her crate time will slowly
become less and less and less, but you don't want to be giving that
freedom to your puppy too early, before their training is done.
So just make sure that the time
that they're out of their crate, you're giving quality attention. You're really doing as much as you
can so that when they're in the crate, you don't feel so bad. Now where's your expectations be in
terms of training at that one month mark. Now, when we're doing our training, especially in the first month and
the initial training of all of the, the exercises that we do,
we build on motivation. We motivate the dog to do things. They
learn to do things, you know, fun and, and properly when they're doing
things from the beginning. But, I will tell you something
that we've struggled with
this puppy is that she's not super motivated here,
but to work for food. And this is something that
has been a major challenge. So we've had to be pretty strategic
with with our food rewards. We've had to take and learn certain times
of the day that she's been, you know, a little bit more eager to work for food.
And they haven't always been times
that I would have anticipated. And then we've also had to try a whole
bunch of different types of food. In the past, I've been
able to feed you know, just kibble at home with my puppies
to get them to work. But for her, she's not interested in kibble
she's will eat it for her breakfast. But after that, she's
just not interested. Now, one of the things that we've
really learned with this
puppy is that she loves to play with toys. So I've utilized a toy
as a reward for a lot of our training. So I'll show you a couple of things
that I've been doing with our toy. I have Frisbee here. So once
I've trained her to sit, I can actually use it as the reward
sipped. Yes. Get it. Good girl. So if she sits, that means the game is
going to start once again.
Good girl. Yes. Okay. Get it. Good girl. Now what I've had a lot of fun with,
with this puppy being a Border Collie, she's super energetic. I've also started to use it to
teach her little impulse control. So now sit good. Ooh, that
was a good one. Sit, sit. Good girl. Good sit. Okay. Good girl. So I teach her, even though I'm waving
that Frisbee around in front of you, you have to maintain good.
Control. Good girl out. Yes. Excellent. So you can see
the engagement andn the intensity. I'm getting through listening because
I'm using something that oops, that she, yes, that's a good girl
that she truly wants. So you have to figure out what makes
your dog tick now. I can't. Oh, that's very nice, good girl. I can't use a toy for every
single thing that I want to teach, but I can at least start working on the
process of her learning to listen and stay focused, especially
around distractions.
Now, what should you expect from your puppy
within that first month of having them home? Well, I would recommend that you
start on all of the basics. You know, things like teaching them to sit and
down and maybe at the one month point you could work towards having them hold that
position for a longer period of time until being released
like you saw Euchre do.
I would also be working a lot on teaching
them how to respond to their name around distractions. You don't necessarily need to put
them in a distracting environment, but create distractions around you. You
know, sometimes when I'm practicing, I'll grab some of her toys off of the
crate and I'll spread them around the floor and I'll work with
more distractions around, even though I'm not changing the location, I making the environment around
her a little bit more challenging. You might work on some calming exercises, like teaching them a wait or an on your
bed exercise so that you can utilize that when they're out of their crate, instead of having to put them away all
the time things that are going to allow you to control the puppy a little bit
more easily is where your focus should be.
And then don't forget about the
fun stuff as well. You know, something that we work every
single day would be, you know, stationary exercises, like
sit down, a wait on your bed. We work on motion exercises
like teaching her, her recall to come to me to come
close so that I can gain control. We work weekly sometimes daily on our
handling exercises so that I can more easily clip her toenails.
And then last
but not least the fun stuff is tricks. You know, we try to work on tricks, you
know, a little bit every day, if we can, it helps keep her both mentally
and physically stimulated, which means more resting for me
in between our training sessions. It also teaches her that listening
and learning with me and, and doing things for me is a
lot of fun. It's motivating. And the more I can teach her about that, the easier it is going to be to teach
her more serious things like how to walk on a loose leash and you know,
when we're out in the public. So make sure that you're taking little
time every day to work on lots of different aspects of your training, because it makes a big difference when
it all comes together at the end next, let's talk a little bit about
chewing nipping and biting. Now I will tell you that of a lot of
the puppies that I've had in the past. This puppy loves to chew, and it's been something that we've
really had to have close supervision on.
She's chewing her house line right now. We've had to make sure that we're really
paying close attention to her because she loves to put things in her mouth. So it's very important that she has
access to toys at all times and toys that are going to be safe for her to chew. If she was to have things like
stuffed animals or rope toys, she would have those ripped
apart in about two seconds flat, the squeakies would be out. So when
we're giving her toys to play with, she does have toys, access
to toys all the times, but she'll have things like chew bones
or things like Kong with cheese inside, or anything that if she was
to lie down and chew on it, she wouldn't be able
to rip apart or wreck. And this is really important because
that's allowed us to redirect her to those items. Instead of the things that she's curious
about chewing things like Amazon boxes or the toilet paper roll, or the tea
towel hanging from the from the stove. These are all things that she's really
investigated in just like any other puppy.
But having a house line on
has been instrumental in
our ability to redirect her and teach her that those choices are just
not on the table. And then of course, if we're multitasking and we need a
little bit of time to focus on what we're doing, we would just happily put
her in the crate and in the crate, she has those things to chew as well.
So whenever she feels like playing, she has something to do that with
now in terms of nipping and biting. Thankfully, that's something that we
haven't really had to deal a lot with. And there's a specific
reason why from the get go, we have been very strict about whether
she's allowed to put her mouth on our clothes or on our skin. And
that's always been a major no-no. That was something that we implemented
with the rules, right from the beginning. But, you know, because we've done
so much training and control, we manage her well, she really
views us as strong leaders.
And because she understands
where the relationship lies, she's just not that interested
in using her mouth now, has she tried it in the past? Yep.
She's tried to choose. Oh, she's like, that sounds, she's like
to chew you know, on my, on my shirtsleeve or my
fuzzy boots and again, redirection using the line and stopping
her from doing that has been really helpful, but utilizing her training,
utilizing a response to name, leave it sit no really controlling her
and teaching her what to do rather than having to correct her for things
that she shouldn't be doing. Now, if you're one month in with your puppy
and you're still dealing with a lot of nipping and biting, I have a couple of videos on the
channel that I think would really help. And we'll those in the description below
the other thing I'm going to post is a link to our puppy
essentials online program. And that's going to give
you an opportunity to work
with our trainers so we can help you specifically with some of the
areas that you're struggling with your puppy at home.
Now that we
have the first month covered, if you're looking for a puppy training
schedule specific to your dog's age, click that card right there on that
note, I'm Kayl. This is Euchre, Happy Training..
