What should you be teaching your puppy ?

The most common training enquiry we get here at FMK9 in Ripon is by far people asking for help with their ten month old dog who can do every trick in the book whilst at home but yet outside the house the dog pulls like a train, has zero recall, severe frustration reactivity and offers no engagement to the owner.

With the launch of our new puppy course I thought I’d write a quick blog post about what you SHOULD be teaching your puppy.

Now I’m going to start this by telling you what you SHOULD NOT be teaching your puppy and it might surprise you….

What we don’t want to be spending our time on with puppies is fancy tricks like spin, play dead, give paw etc. As well as being entirely pointless these tricks take up a lot of time and learning time for our puppy and this is time we don’t have since our puppy is in its critical learning period until it is around 16 weeks old. This means we absolutely must be using this time to teach our puppy to be able to handle the situations we expect them to handle as an adult dog and we do this by SOCIALISATION. Now this concept is often misunderstood and I will explain how best to socialise your puppy very shortly.

Now for something we DO want to focus on. Recall. If we utilise a house line for recall in the house and a longline for recall outside the house from DAY 1 we will end up with a young dog with near perfect recall set for life and that is the most important skill in dog training for your dogs safety, happiness and biological fulfilment. (for a free recall course email the word RECALL to fmk9enquiries@gmail.com and we’ll set you up!)

Use a house line !- A house line is invaluable for your puppy up until about 6 months old. As a puppy they are naturally going to explore a lot of new behaviours, some of which are fine and normal but others can be annoying and downright dangerous and a houseline is the best way to correct those behaviours safely and clearly.

As promised we will now discuss PROPER SOCIALISATION. This concept is all too often confused and done wrong by dog owners and dog trainers alike. How we socialise our puppy properly involves exposing your puppy to every single thing they will be exposed to in their adult lives, this includes; cars,dogs,people,roads,animals,shops,restaurants,cafes,pubs,rivers,forests,crates,household items,vets,groomers,leads,collars and literally anything you regularly encounter in your day to day lives. Now how do we properly socialise our puppies to these things?

Well we start off by using generalising our learned behaviour such as recall and applying it everywhere for example and probably most importantly, around dogs. To socialise our dog with other dogs does NOT mean letting them run up to every dog and play with them as that looks cute as a little puppy but it’s less cute when it’s a 40kg full grown adult. So for example to socialise our puppy with dogs could involve doing recall drills around other dogs so they can see them but they remain NEUTRAL to them which is exactly what good socialisation is. Making our puppy NEUTRAL around everything.

There are too many puppy related pieces of advice to go into here so for more tips send the word PUPPY to fmk9enquiries@gmail.com and we can book in a free assessment and go from there !