Preventing Adolescent Problems

Ian describes the well-worn path from cute and cuddly puppy to abandoned shelter dog.  If you get a puppy, it’s your responsibility to train it!

Practice grabbing or recalling your dog when their distracted in a play session.  If you can’t control your dog when they get excited, they can get into dangerous situations very quickly.

If your puppy doesn’t learn to enjoy having their collar grabbed, you’ll end up with a dog that runs circles around you, which makes for a lot of potentially embarrassing or dangerous situations.

Puppy problems are serious business.  If you don’t take the time to properly train your puppy with basic manners, there’s a good chance they’ll end up at a shelter.

Dogs jump up to say hi and express affection.  It would be cruel to respond to their affection with painful corrections.  It’s far easier to train your dog to do something else when they meet people.  Something that they can’t do while jumping up.  But what could that something be…?

Puppies learn very valuable social skills during their play sessions, with the most important being bite-inhibition.

Training your puppy to enjoy having their collar grabbed is very easy.  Simply go up to them, grab their collar and give them a treat.  And hold onto that collar when you’re not paying attention, otherwise they’re going to run off.

Every time your dog performs an unacceptable behavior, it self-reinforces a bad habit.  The use of confinement training in puppyhood is going to result in greater freedom for the rest of their life.  Confinement allows you to supervise them anyime they’re free, and redirect bad behaviors into good ones.

The dogs and owners in this video have only been to 8 puppy classes.  The vast majority of their training took place at home, thoroughly incorporated into daily life.  Big thanks to them and to everyone who made these videos possible!

You can’t fully train a dog with positive methods alone.  You need to be able to tell your dog when it’s misbehaving, but there’s no need to be nasty about it.  Simply make them sit.