3 Top Tips for Puppy Raising
There’s about a million things that could potentially go on a list like this. Bringing a new puppy into your home, there’s a lot of things to consider and undertake, but broadly speaking, these are three incredibly important aspects, that do sometimes go overlooked (after all, those puppies are pretty damn cute and distracting!)
Start as you mean to go on!
We’ll often bring home our new bundle of fluff, and inadvertently make a few mistakes. One thing to keep in mind, is that your tiny new puppy, isn’t going to be a tiny puppy forever. They will grow up, get bigger, and depending on the breed - potentially a lot stronger!
They’ll also grow in personality. So it’s important to set up our expectations and house rules from the get go. That means as a household, deciding on what your want your life with your new companion to look like, what will be acceptable behaviour and what will be non-negotiable.
Some examples might be:
Is your dog going to be allowed on the furniture?
How will you manage jumping?
Where does the dog sleep at night?
How will the dog be permitted to interact with other pets or children?
Once you have an idea about how you want things to go, start implementing them right away. It’s much easier to mould expectations from the beginning, instead of trying to back track later on when bad habits or undesirable behaviour have been practiced.
2) Management, management, management!
Bringing your puppy home for the first time can be an overwhelming experience. Your puppy has spent its entire life so far, in once specific environment, usually with its littermates for companionship, and its mother to shape behaviour. Coming to a new home, with new people and being alone (or sometime with only older dogs as new companions), possible with children in the new home - and being in a completely new environment is like hitting the restart button.
Us humans have a certain vision of how we expect this transition will go, and sometime our human vision, puts pretty high expectations on the new puppy, who will spend the next weeks and months of its life navigating its new world - and trying to decipher the rules!
We can help out puppies out enormously during this transition, but setting them up for success and easing them into their new lives. Puppies should always be supervised when “free”, and when we are unable to supervise, contained to a safe space (see out blog about “Setting Up Your Puppy Pen” for more information on this).
We need to assist our new puppy by guiding their behaviours and our expectations of them, too much freedom will often mean the occurrence of nuisance behaviours (such as chewing on things we don’t like, chasing other family pets, nipping at heels, stealing items etc…) more difficulty in toilet training, access to areas owe would prefer to keep dog free and so on.
Management can looks like using puppy pens, crates and baby gates in the house, using a drag leash while your puppy is free, tethering your puppy to you around the house, restricting access to certain areas, using a leash or collar to show your puppy how to be successful in behaviours such as not jumping on guests, keeping of furniture etc…
3) Be Consistent!
Dogs learn via their experiences, they see things in pictures. Therefore it is incredibly important that we are consistent in our expectations, and their behaviours. The whole family will need to be on the same page about how your are going to communicate with your new puppy, and how you will guide them through the correct behaviours. Only through consistently seeing the same picture will your puppy understand what is expected of them and how to life within those expectations.
This means if you have decided your puppy is not going to be allowed on the couch, then all family members must follow this rule, and know how to correct the issue if the puppy does go on the couch. If you do not want your puppy jumping on you or your guests, all they family must follow the steps to show the puppy this is the expectation.
It can sound overwhelming, but if we are careful and concise about what we want, your puppy will come to an understanding quickly. It is also better to start out with stricter rules, and be able to strip them back later, than it is to try and change behaviour and enforce new rules down the line (not impossible, but certainly with added challenges - it would be easy for me to not crave chocolate if I had never tasted it before)
If you need assistance with setting your puppy up for success in their new home, please reach out to us, we would be happy to assist you!