Bringing a puppy home is one of the most exciting things I have ever done. I remember the night before I got my first puppy (Rebel)—I couldn’t sleep! The anticipation, the joy, and the overwhelming thoughts of what life would be like with this new companion had me buzzing. This new adventure, however, isn’t without its challenges. We have the monumental task of training this tiny 8-week-old creature how to live with us, how to navigate our world, and how to thrive in it.
This article will guide you through three stages of puppy development to help you raise a well-mannered, happy, and joyful companion.
Let’s be clear: we’re teaching this puppy how to live with us, not how to listen to us. These are two very different goals. I want you to set aside thoughts about obedience, listening, and puppy classes for a moment. Forget about whether your puppy listens to commands like “sit” or “stay.” Instead, let’s focus on teaching them how to coexist harmoniously with you and your family. This article will show you how to do just that.
When Is The Best Time To Start Training Your Puppy?
The ideal time to start training is right away, as soon as you bring your puppy home. Puppies are most impressionable between 8 and 16 weeks of age, making this the perfect time to lay the foundation for their behavior. During this critical period, your puppy is learning how to interact with the world and you have the opportunity to shape those interactions.
Training doesn’t mean drilling obedience commands right off the bat. It means focusing on teaching your puppy how to live in your home, understand your expectations, and feel secure in their new environment. The key is to break their development into three stages, ensuring they grow into a dog that’s confident, social, and a joy to be around.
And here’s why: I know lots of dogs who don’t know diddly squat in term of tricks, obedience, or even know their own name. But because they have excellent manners (not jumping, barking, destroying things), they are housetrained, and they aren’t a nervous wreck, they are an absolute pleasure to be around.
I also know a ton of high-performance Malinois/german shepherds that can win every competition title known to man…but you cannot leave these animals unsupervised for a second for fear that they will destroy your couch, kill your cats or make your life miserable. These kinds of dogs are confined to a kennel for 23 hours per day. My point is that you need to be able to live with your new puppy in harmony and this is done in 3 stages:
Exposure (also known as socialization)
This article doesn’t cover obedience, because it’s not important at this stage. So before you consider obedience classes, please put in the time to the 3 stages listed above, because sometimes a dog trainer can’t ‘fix’ those mistakes. I personally have worked with a couple of dogs that were unable to be housetrained; by myself, by various rescue shelters and adoptive homes. Sadly these dogs are often given up, because there is only so much patience people have with this messy habit.
The same is true for dogs that are underexposed; they fear everything and become nervous wrecks. No amount of training is going to ‘fix’ a personality trait. Unfortunately, this is a trait that could have been reshaped had this dog been exposed properly in it’s youth.
Again, dogs that haven’t been housetrained, shown proper manners, or socialized are the ones that we see in rescue shelters all over the country, so get this stuff right! Without further adieu, let’s start with housetraining.
Housetraining
Whilst we went over housetraining in great depth in a recent article, I will condense some of the content for efficiency’s sake. To read the full article, please visit our website. Housetraining is creating a habit of not making messes inside the home. This is done by syncing our puppy’s bowel movements with our free time, and we sync together in a couple of ways.
Your puppy is going to want to go to the bathroom every time he eats, drinks, goes to sleep and wakes up. Your job is to time your pups bathroom breaks with these events. Regular feeding schedules are the place to start. You’re going to want to have set meal times for your puppy and in general, the less frequently they are eating/drinking, the less frequently they are going to the bathroom. I advise 2 meals per day. Your puppy is going to want to go within 15 minutes of eating or drinking so be ready to beat them to it and have them outside in their designated spot right on time.
For times that you can’t supervise your puppy (when sleeping, at work, etc) you’re going to want to crate train your puppy for a couple of reasons. Firstly, so they can’t make messes in the house. Although it feels mean to lock a cute, little puppy away for hours at a time, this is a temporary measure that will pay off big time later in life. So just endure the crying/howling/barking, it usually only lasts for 4 days or so and many of the dogs in our Board & Train programs will protest bloody murder…and at about 72 hours on the dot, they accept that the crate isn’t all bad after all. Crate training is complete in 4 days. Not bad.
If you remember from earlier, we talked about how your puppy will want to go to the bathroom every time he: eats, drinks, (here’s where it gets good) falls asleep, and wakes up. How do I know when my puppy is going to fall asleep and wake up? Crate training 😊
By using crate training as a sleeping routine, we are setting a schedule for when our pup sleeps, which makes it easier to snyc our puppy’s bathroom breaks to our own schedule. So you’re going to want to crate your pup when you are at work and probably at night, to prevent accidents. This is just a temporary measure and after 9 months or so your puppy will probably be ok to trust around the house.
Housetraining isn’t something to be rushed, so allow for up to 6 months to get this down. While you are working on housetraining as an ongoing project, you can also being to introduce proper manners.
Manners
You can start to address this when you feel like you are getting the hang of housetraining (expect 1-4 weeks). Teaching a puppy manners means to teach them not to annoy or inconvenience us. For example a puppy with bad manners, is chewing everything in sight, barking constantly, jumping all over people, biting hands/clothes/pony tails…. and generally being highly irritating. We all know a dog like this and they are hard to be around. The bigger they are the worse it gets.
General rule: if you can’t endure it forever, don’t tolerate it for a day. This means you gotta address the jumping, the chewing, the barking. To address a behaviour we don’t like, we discipline the behaviour, not the dog. I say that because it’s important to communicate to your puppy that it’s the behaviour that you dislike, not them. Here’s how to do it.
You take something your dog doesn’t like, such as a spray bottle of water, a shaker, a sharp tug on the leash, a scolding. We will call these unpleasant consequences. To discourage a behaviour that you don’t like (jumping for example), you apply the unpleasant consequence to the unwanted behaviour. So with the example of jumping… every time your puppy jumps, you would spray him with water (right in his cute little face!). You MUST apply the unpleasant consequence (in this case, the spray bottle) every time your dog jumps if you want them to make the connection of: 1 jump = 1 spray from the bottle. It must be immediate and consistent. If you are inconsistent, your puppy will be confused and will never learn it. If you’re consistent you’ll see rapid progress in the first day. After a week your puppy will probably never jump on you anymore. If you’re consistent (and not lazy about this) all it will take is ONE WEEK for your pup to learn a new rule. Not bad, eh?
I would expect you to spend a few months working through all of your puppy’s irritating behaviours one by one. More than likely you will have to address:
Jumping
Mouthing / Nipping
Chewing
Expect to see great progress within 1 week of addressing an unwanted behaviour, but allow 1 month for this new rule to be internalized for good. If the spray bottle works for jumping, feel free to apply to chewing, mouthing, and anything else. If an unpleasant consequence starts to lose it’s power, change to another one. If your dog likes water, then the spray bottle may not be appropriate as your dog might find that rewarding! In these cases, try a shaker (pop bottle with coins in it) instead.
Again don’t rush this. Work through each unwanted behaviour one at a time. This means that while you’re working on the jumping, you might ignore some chewing of shoes (for now) and place them on the shelf. Once you feel like the jumping is under control though, bring those shoes back to the floor and apply your most effective unpleasant consequence to the chewing and see where you are in a week. Start with the most annoying behaviour first and work your way from most to least annoying.
This is a great time to introduce any boundaries specific to your home. In our house, we allow our dogs on the couch but not on the bed. To communicate that we allow them on the couch but apply an unpleasant consequence when we catch them on the bed (we keep a shaker by the bed just for this when the pups are young). Even a 3 month old puppy absolutely understands boundaries and rules. So if you don’t want dogs in the kitchen or in the laundry room, now is your best chance to lay the ground rules!
Again, this will be an ongoing project that you may have to address as and when these behaviour crop up. If you’re doing well in the manners department, feel free to begin exposing your pup to the world they live in.
Exposure
The third stage is exposure and this can be done once your pup has had his immunization shots (consult your vet as some strategies differ) at around 3-4 months old. I am choosing to call it exposure and not socialization as the concept of socialization has come to mean something that may not be helpful to all dogs. When the average person ‘socializes’ their puppy, many people think that this means to force their puppy to meet every person and every dog that they see. Often this approach throws safety, consent and common sense right out the window!
Making your puppy meet every dog you see is no good. It forces interactions between dogs that might not even want to meet and I have seen many puppies hurt or scared by being thrust into an interaction with a dog that doesn’t want to meet your puppy. I’ve also seen the opposite, where a scared and timid puppy is forced by the leash or even help in the air to be smelled by another dog, which often leaves the timid puppy even more scared next time. No good.
Another unwanted side effect of this ‘socialize-at-all-costs’ approach is that your dog is too friendly! Sometimes puppies are socialized so much that they expect to meet every person and every dog in sight. This might not be a problem with your 20 pound labrador puppy. But when your puppy has grown to 100 pounds… now he doesn’t expect to meet every dog/person…. He demands it. Whether you like it or not, he’s going to go meet that dog and he’s gonna drag your ass over there!
This is often the time our clients enrol their dog in our Stratford Board & Train, and comment that their dog has a pulling problem. Could it be that this dog has been over socialized, and that has exacerbated pulling into a problem?
By the way, what is the point of socializing a puppy? It’s to expose him to the big wide world so that he doesn’t develop an irrational fear to something he’s never been exposed to (think all of those COVID dogs who has never met another human until they are 2 years old…and now they are petrified by them… no good). The goal of socializing a puppy is so they are comfortable with the big, wide world.
So because of all the ‘socialize-by-any-means-necessary’ dog owners, we are now going to call this exposure. All you have to do is expose your dog to things that they might encounter in the future. These things probably include people, bicycles, traffic, other dogs, slick floors, automatic doors, being poked and prodded (at the vets), having their feet and ears examined, etc. These are the typical things that dogs will need exposure to.If you're unsure how to expose your puppy to these situations safely, consider our private training classes, where we provide tailored guidance for you and your pup.
You only need to expose your pup to these things once per week. I mean, the more the merrier, but it only takes 3 or 4 visits to a pet store for your new puppy to LOVE going to stores (where your pup gets treats and cuddles from the staff and customers alike). The same is true with exposing your pup to traffic or handling their little footies. Once a week is fine, but more gets you extra credits.
If you have somewhere specific like a race track that you go to weekly and want to bring your puppy, then you should prepare them for that specific environment, but for the majority of dog owners you’ll want to check off the common spots listed above.
Don’t overthink it. Allow yourself 3 months to expose your pup to the big wide world. If your pup doesn’t like car rides, then take them on more car rides to show them it’s not a big deal. If your pup hates the slick floor of the pet stores, take them in there more frequently, otherwise this issue WILL crop up at the vets, where your dogs temper tantrums cost you money.
Parting Paws of Wisdom
If you have noticed, I haven’t mentioned obedience school, puppy classes, sits, or anything of the sort. You have 10+ years to teach your dog how to listen to you. But you have a shorter window (around 12 months) to train your pup how to live with you. Again, here’s why; if your pup fails at any of the three stages above (housetraining, manners, exposure) that’s when people rehome their dogs. So it is critical that you get the foundations in place for a happy, healthy dog before you care about whether your dog listens to you.
Assuming all goes to plan, you have given your pup until the age of 6 months to master the essentials of housetraining, good manners, and exposure. This takes a ton of pressure off yourself to make your puppy listen and it allows your puppy to enjoy their early days and soak in all that life has to offer. You have taught them how to live with you, and you deserve a pat on the back. You are now ready for obedience (listening). Congratulations!
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