Eager to get your lunch box, pencils and erasers and new shoes for school? Here's some helpful tips for those enrolled in puppy class and countin' the days.
1. Please do not take your pup to public dog parks and beaches as well as doggie day care facilities. Your pup will be more attentive to you in class if he's not allowed to be off leash in the presence of other dogs. Doggie day care facilities are not helpful to pups and always damaging.
2. Take the pooch for car rides, now. Short trips around the block make for a puke free ride to class.
3. Introduce him to kind, gentle strangers. Let your pup become more trusting of the human race with exposure to all kinds of people, now.
4. Do get your pup out into the world, now. Please see the Vaccinations and Class page for more information about vaccines and exposure. Take the pup to new environments where there are people and
not dogs. Your pup does not need exposure to dogs, he needs exposure to novelty.
5. Use a harness of any kind that you like to steer your pup through the world. We can find the perfect one when you come to class. For now, piloting him through the world is best done with a harness and leash, the cutest one that you can find.
6. Your pup needs to learn the skill of being alone without flipping his lid. The idea of 'staying at home' with a pup, a relatively new idea in the centuries of our relationship with dogs, will cripple the dog, emotionally. Pups who are not left alone will never be able to be left. Go shopping and out to dinner. Paint the town.
7. How long can you leave your pup? The often quoted admonitions such as 'pups can only be left for four hours....two hours....one hour....six hours...have no basis in fact. Pups, in the old days, were left alone during the work day then brought into the house when the humans arrived home. Please do have the pup sleep in the house, and preferably, in the same room with a human.
8. Crate training? Please leave the door open so the crate is a true den and not a box. Use an exercise pen around the opened crate, have the crate door open out to a doggie door or block off the kitchen. Yes, the pup needs to be protected from himself and be confined. But, he does not have to live in a box with the door shut, another relatively new addition to the world of dogs. Crates became the rage in the 1980s...somehow, before the popularity of crates, we all managed to raise happy and loved pups.
9. Attach a shoelace to his collar and let him drag it around the house, attached to his collar. Now, he gets the feel of a leash in a non scary way. After a day of dragging the leash, pick up the end and walk around the house with him, encouraging him to follow you with a nice treat in your hand.
10. Call your puppy to you at least ten times a day, and reward him with a tasty treat each time. Do this in the house as well as outside. Be sure that the pup is always leashed when outside the house; yes, he sticks by your now at ten weeks but at eighteen weeks, he'll be flying down the street. The habit of a leash on the pup at all times, when outside the house, is a life saver as well as legal.
11.No heeling! Let your pup explore the world as though he were Columbus. The more that he explores and satisfies his interest in new things the more stable adult he will be. Let him go where he wants to go as long as he is safe. Do not make him heel. Think of walks as exploratory and not in a straight line. No, you are not encouraging 'bad habits' when you let a pup wander on a walk. Rather, you promote a temperamentally stable and emotionally sound dog. We have lots of time to teach your pup to heel and now is not that time.
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