Starting Out With Your New Puppy

You’ve been planning for months, and at last, your new puppy is here! Your expectations are enormous: this is going to be the perfect dog you’ve always wanted. And maybe that’s right, and your little puppy will become your brilliant family dog.

But for many of us - and for many of our puppies - we have to work hard to achieve that vision in our minds. Just as you have to work on your career, or your relationship with your partner, to make the best of it, so you have to work with your new puppy to build a powerful bond where you understand each other well. It won’t all fall into place without a good bit of effort!

Your puppy's personality

While you can expect a few specific characteristics if you choose a particular breed or type, this is by no means guaranteed! Dogs, like us, are individuals. There are plenty of whippets, for instance, who love nothing better than a rabbit chase, and there are plenty more who will watch the rabbits race past without raising an eyebrow. Some collies will herd anything, down to a blade of grass or a matchstick, while others are not even interested in toy play.

So you can’t necessarily expect the breeding to have done the work for you! You may have to spend quite some time getting your whippet pup interested in chasing, or your collie keen to herd.

But if the inborn drives *are* strong, this can be a good thing! Those instinctive drives will be tremendously useful to you as your training progresses. Imagine having the perfect reward you can offer your dog whenever she does something you like! While using treats is a great way to train - all dogs like food: they have to, or they’d starve to death - you should also build in alternative rewards early on.

One of your earliest tasks will be to figure out just what your new puppy loves best so that you can use those things as rewards to get the results you want. And how do you work on getting those results you want, so that you can reward them? It’s pretty simple if you remember a few key points.

1. Dogs do what works

They have no wish to rule the universe (or your home) - they do what will bring them what they want. This is where understanding just what it is that they want is vital! You can use this to your advantage and your teaching and training will quickly become a win-win!

2. Always reinforce what you like

The stress here is on *reinforce* (reward). Don’t bribe! Don’t offer food in the hope of getting what you want. The reward should always come *after* your puppy has done what you want. Sometimes they’ll be surprised, sometimes they’ll be working methodically towards their reward.

3. Don't be stingy - reinforce the smallest things

What I mean here is that you don’t wait for a perfect, smart, snappy, sit before dishing out your reward. As soon as your puppy makes any move in the direction of a sit (a rear paw may step forwards) you reward that tiny movement. Gradually, as understanding grows, you’ll be able to reward the whole smart, snappy, sit. But don’t hold out for that at the start, or your puppy will have no idea what you want and give up!

4. Teach & train throughout the day

No need to have ring-fenced “training sessions” where you go on and on at your puppy till he’s bored senseless. Training is something that happens all the time, at any time, spontaneously. We don’t line up our children in the morning and run through their shoulds and shouldn’ts for the whole day! We just chip in as the day goes by, teaching them at appropriate moments. So your puppy learning to wait at the door happens because we never open the door till the pup is still. It takes an extra second or two each time and the reward? A treat? Nope - opening that door to let the pup fly out to the garden with you!

5. It's more about attitude than technique

So while a lot of your “training” will happen spontaneously, tiny bits at a time, there’s still a place for more formal methods - especially for the vital recall (call to come) and for comfortably walking next to you on the leash. There are plenty of “tricks of the trade” which will help you immeasurably. And this is where going to a force-free puppy class will be an excellent experience for you and your puppy - where you’ll meet other people and dogs in a controlled and calm environment where your puppy’s individual character will be recognized and nurtured.

But some of you will be in a force-free desert where it’s impossible to find a suitable class in which you’d take a dog flea, never mind a dog. Never fear! There are plenty of qualified, positive trainers offering one-on-one training as well as virtual classes. these days. Be sure to check their educational background and credentials and only work with a force-free, positive training professional to ensure that you and your pup get started off on the right foot...and paw.