Taking training to the next level!!

After missing the first few weeks of D.O.G.S of Victoria’s 12 Week Basic Obedience Course – we have finally begun!! I was on such a high after yesterday’s lesson that I just couldn’t resist sharing it with you all!

Cooper is now 7 months old and is doing amazingly (most of the time). 

Although there are still a couple of things that we need to work on – hence the training;

• Pulling on the lead – especially when seeing other dogs. I can’t wait to be able to take him for a good walk with my girlfriends and not worry about the constant tugging and pulling.
• Over excitement when seeing other dogs. When we let him off lead in the park, he will charge at some of the dogs – although it is in a very playful manner some dogs can find this to be very threatening.
• Not always coming when called. This to me is one of the most important commands – your dog should come when called every single time.

I can’t even tell you how much fun the training was and the feeling I got from it.

We had a one hour catch up lesson before the class as we had missed the first three weeks due to Coopers desexing and other commitments. Henry the pug also joined us for the catch up lesson as he had been off with Kennel Cough. We learnt how to heal, come, stay, drop, give, and all these fun fancy turns. It’s like doing a routine.

The second hour was the actual group class with about 11 dogs – all different breeds; weimeraner, pointer, spoodle, cavoodle, kelpie, the list goes on! Cooper was surprisingly more submissive with the other dogs then I had anticipated, which we were happy about. As a group we practiced the routine and spoke about lots of behavioural issues people were having with their dogs.  As expected, Cooper did get a little distracted doing the routine with all the dogs around him, but at least we were able to learnt to correct this with the help of the trainer. Sandra (the trainer) has given us some seriously good take home tips to help with this.

The bonding experience you share with your pooch during training is really incredible. It is a time when you really assert yourself as the pack leader. Jase and I felt like proud parents at the end of it! Our boy did so well and played so nicely with all the other dogs.

And when we got home Cooper did not move from this position for hours!!!

What we have chosen to feed our dog and what we have done to ensure our pup doesn’t turn into a fussy eater…

There are so many differing opinions on what you should feed your dog and I am not here to tell you what is right and wrong. I am not a vet and I do not have a huge amount of knowledge on dog nutrition. I just know that we should all make sure we feed our dogs a balanced diet. Too much protein for example can cause aggression in dogs - so a good all round balance is key. So here is our story…

Jase and I made the decision very early on that we wanted our dog to eat dry dog food/kibble. We also decided early on that we wanted to be very strict with this and not feed our dog any human foods because we didn’t want our puppy to turn into a begging dog or a dog that annoys you when you’re eating because it wants your food. So when we brought Cooper home from the breeders we slowly transitioned him from the breeder’s food onto our puppy kibble that we had chosen. If you change your dogs diet too quickly, they will get an upset stomach and get diarrhea – so please make sure to change their diet gradually over about a week. 

At first, things were going well. Cooper was eating, although he was not guzzling his food down like you would expect a Golden to do. So we tried sprinkling some water over the kibble to try and soften it a little bit for him.  That worked at first, but slowly over a few weeks he started to become a bit fussy. We decided to buy some wet food thinking if we put a little on his dry food it would help him eat it. And it did – but only for a few days. And then he started getting picky again – he would only eat it if we put more and more wet food in his bowl. We really wanted to stick to the kibble and not fully change to wet food as the kibble is great for their teeth and overall nutrition. It got to the point where Jase and I were really worried – Goldens are meant to love their food and as a puppy, we just wanted him to eat so he could grow big and strong.

I posted my concerns on a few groups on facebook and had an enormous amount of responses! People are very strong-minded about this topic. Some say you should only feed your dog raw foods – like meat and veggies, some say cooked rice and boiled chicken, some say add grated cheese to the kibble, some say only dog food and some say only dog food is cruel, the list goes on and on.

The best piece of advice I got was from a friend of mine Dr Lisa Chimes – she is a Vet on the TV show Bondi Vet. She told me:

“A Golden Retriever should not be a fussy eater!

My advice – tough love! Don’t give into his fussiness! Try feeding him a different brand of dry food – one that he might find tastier (but don’t forget that dietary changes must be gradual over about a week). Don’t give in by giving him extras – he will have you wrapped around your little finger in no time! Trust me, if he’s really hungry, he’ll eat the dry food! If he doesn’t eat all of it, don’t panic, he will be ok.

Sorry to be tough – but fussy eaters are created by their owners!!”

That very day, Jase and I bought a different brand of kibble for Cooper and we saw a difference instantly.

A few other people suggested something similar on one of the facebook pages – and I also think this is brilliant advice that everyone should do with their dogs.

 

“He’s playing you. Put the food down, give him 10 minutes and then pick it up. Nothing until the next meal. Bet it takes 48 hours for him to get the message”.

This is also a good method because it shows the dog that you are the leader and the food belongs to you. If your dog or puppy is healthy – it will not starve itself. It will get the message pretty quickly.

Jase and I have also started using this method too – we now put his food down for 10 minutes and then take the bowl away. Cooper is eating his food and he is loving it!!!

Thank you everyone for all your great advice.

Training your pup to walk on the lead

Start from day one! A lead and a collar are foreign objects to your pup so they need to get used to wearing them and learn what it means to wear them.

We started out really well with Coop – for about the first week! He took to the collar and lead very quickly and didn’t mind them. In my puppy classes – we saw pups coming in at like 12 weeks old and had never been on a lead and they hated it! So make sure to get them used to it straight away.

 

The biggest thing I have learnt through our experience with Cooper is that you need to remember that your puppy is experiencing everything for the first time and they are SO curious! However, if you want a well-trained dog on the lead, you need to lay down the laws from the very beginning!

Start by putting the lead on in the house when the puppy is calm and you have made him ‘sit’. Open the front door and make him stay until you tell him to come. You should never start the walk with an over excited puppy or dog as it will make your walk impossible. Make sure he is calm and you walk out the door first and then tell him to follow you.

Positive reinforcement, as always, works best for a puppy.  The ideal situation is to have your pup on your left side with a slack lead flush with your left leg – so when this happens, make sure to give lots of praise to your puppy – ‘good puppy’ in a high pitched voice. Traditionally in Australia we like to walk with our dogs on the left so when you pass another dog they don’t come at each other head on – so try sticking to that from the start so you train your dog to always be on the left. If the lead tightens say ‘ah ah’ and stop immediately, acting like a post – don’t move at all and don’t shorten the lead - just wait. When the lead slackens, immediately reward with praise and move forward. Your puppy should be learning that pressure on the collar means ‘stop’ while no pressure on the collar means ‘go’. If your puppy is initially reluctant to walk be careful not to pull or drag the pup or get angry, as it will discourage and worry your puppy, who may already be unsure of the lead.

We had a big issue with Cooper getting tired and plonking on walks – don’t push your pup – if he has had enough, take him home. You need to take care of their growing bodies. However, there were times that Cooper was doing this to be stubborn – for example, when we would try to leave the park. So you do need to be strong with them and let them know who is boss. You also need to be the one who chooses the direction you go on the walk – not the pup. You’re the one who chooses when they can go and sniff the tree or the grass, not them. As soon as we started to show Cooper that he couldn’t boss us around and that we were boss – the improvement has been incredible. We’re also teaching him that we can go on a walk without going to the park and that we can go to the park and walk around without going off the lead. This will (hopefully) teach him to stop pulling as he wont always be let of the lead when we go to the park. It is not up to him – it is up to us! 

Teaching your dog to ‘heal’ – to walk flush by your side, is very important, especially if you want to walk your dog off lead. We did a lot of 'walk to heal' with Cooper from week one of bringing him home. I put him on the lead in a quiet area (your own garden is perfect or out in the street early in the morning when no one is around – the less distractions the better at first) and have a treat in my left hand flush with my left leg – you step off with your left leg first and walk slowly saying ‘heal’ – take a few steps and use the treat to put him in a sit and as his bum hits the ground give him the treat and say – ‘good boy’. And then build on this by taking more steps. And once he has mastered that – start including distractions (other dogs, people, cars, etc). It is important to teach him to be flush with your left leg – and not to walk in front of you as you don’t want to encourage pulling on the lead.

The aim is to learn to walk together not begin a lifelong game of ‘tug–o-war’. Remember, how important the first few months of your pups lives are – they are like a sponge and will learn very quickly from you so please make sure to teach them good habits from the beginning because it is much easier than trying to train bad habits out of them. A cute pulling puppy – is only going to turn into a strong big, monster on the lead.

Our Problem with Playful Barking...

Jase and I have been so proud of Coopers progress and we were thinking that everything was going smoothly, until about a week and a half ago when we got a knock on our door at about eight o’clock in the evening…

It was our next-door neighbour who had come over to tell us that Cooper had been barking every morning at 6am and waking up their baby. Jase and I apologized and promised that we would do our best to try and make sure this stopped.

Cooper sleeps in the laundry but has a doggy door to get out and had been toilet trained by using the doggy door. He’d obviously been getting up early and going outside to play on his own. Sometimes we’ve noticed that when Coop gets overexcited playing in his sandpit he playfully barks, and this was clearly waking up our neighbour’s son. The sandpit in our garden is used to try and redirect his digging from the garden to the sandpit by burring treats in there for him (it actually work pretty well – you should try it if you have a digging dog!) so we definitely didn’t want to get rid of it but we needed to stop the barking.

Anyways, barking has always been an issue that I have struggled to deal with, as it is hard to teach them to stop unless you can actually catch them in the act. I have a spray bottle with water that we now spray him with when we hear him barking and he doesn’t like that at all but as I said – it’s not often that we actually hear him. You can also use a plastic bottle with stones or coins in it and shake it and say ‘ah ah’ when you catch them – they hate the sound of that!

I posted my big problem on a couple of dog groups on facebook and had lots of responses. Majority of people told us to try locking the doggy door so he couldn’t get out during the night. I was scared that this was going to be a step backwards in the toilet training department but I was very wrong!

The first night we took him out to the toilet just before bed, we then put him in his bed and locked the doggy door. I was so petrified he would cry, bark or crap everywhere that night – but he did none of the above! We went down at 6am in the morning and opened the door to find a dry and clean laundry. We let Cooper out to the toilet and he didn’t the biggest wee we had ever seen.

A week and a half later and we have been doing this every night and Cooper is loving it!! Dog’s actually really like the security of a small, secure place when they sleep and they love routine. I am still not ready to have a big sleep in as he is still a puppy so we need to be careful of his bladder.

Jase and I are very proud parents and love our new routine with Cooper.

So thank you to everyone who gave us the great advice.

Cooper and his cousin diesel relaxing after a big play session - check out my facebook video for amazing footage of them playing - http://www.facebook.com/pages/mydogjourney/71624270773?ref=hl

The importance of Socialisation for your pup and Puppy school

Puppyhood is the most important and critical time in your dog's development. Socialisation and puppy training from the very beginning is so crucial – specifically within the first three months. You don’t want your pup to become frightened later in his life due to not being socialised properly as this can cause an anxious shy dog, or an anxious aggressive dog.

You want to make sure your pup gets to experience everything. Our breeders actually gave us a checklist as a guide for things we should try and socialise Cooper with – great idea! The list included things like; different sounds- bikes, garbage trucks, trams, vacuum cleaner, lawn mowers, storms, different feels – grass, concrete, pebbles, different people – children, elderly, babies, and the list goes on.

The main concern people have regarding early socialisation is that the pup is not fully vaccinated until about 12 weeks, making it hard to socialise with all of these things. I personally think that yes you do need to be extra careful as pups are prone to disease and viruses – however, as socialisation is so important we took Cooper to visit friends and family’s dogs that we knew were fully vaccinated. We also walked him very early in the morning when no one was around and we took him to puppy school.

Jase and I have a lot of knowledge on puppy training but we were always going to take Coop to puppy school – it’s the cutest thing! It is also such a great way to socialise your pup with other puppies and you and your pup can learn so much!! I 100% recommend taking your pup to puppy classes. We found our puppy school through our local vet and they were great. Tilly was the trainer – check out there website. http://www.secretdogsbusiness.com/make-a-booking/

Finally – please remember that if you want a well-balanced adult dog it is key that you socialise your pup with everything at a young age.

Plus, Cooper passed puppy classes with flying colours and made some great friends!

Mouthing/Biting/Teething

Dogs explore the world with their mouths. They want to feel and touch and taste it all! Puppies are curious little creatures and just want to explore everything – so you need to be prepared for this.

Mouthing/biting is definitely an issue that Jase & I have had with Cooper from day one of bringing him home. And let me tell you – they have razor sharp teeth!! The first week, both Jase & I had scratches the whole way up our arms.

So what do you need to do to stop this behaviour?

You need to teach your dog the difference between biting a chew toy and biting human skin. We want them to chew their toys and not us – but they don’t know the difference – so it is our job to teach them.

To a puppy, any attention is good attention so if your puppy tries to bite you – the solution is not to push him or wave your hands around or to run away – he will think this is a game and chase you and come back for more. Rather you need to stop playing with him immediately, stand up and walk away calmly. Or if that doesn’t work – say ‘no’ or ‘ah ah’ in a strong stern voice and take him into a room for 5 minutes of down time.

Another good trick, which I have only been using if Cooper tries to bite the couch or jump on the couch, is shaking an empty water bottle with some stones in it. The second he tries to jump or bite the couch – I shake it close to him and he hates it. Honestly, after doing this twice, he has not tried it again!!

In saying all of this - I am a very big believer in puppy’s responding and learning better from praise and positive reinforcement than punishment. So what Jase and I have also been doing to reduce the mouthing/biting is putting a toy straight into his mouth the second he is about to try and bite us. This is not praising his behaviour – it is rather redirecting it and teaching him the correct thing to chew on.

 

You also need to be aware that when your puppy hits 3-4months of age, the mouthing generally get’s worse because they are teething, so please make sure you have really good chew toys for your pup – kongs and ropes are good for this. Don’t freak out if you see blood on a toy, it means your pup has probably just lost a baby tooth and swallowed it – this is natural and nothing to worry about!

Finally, you need to realize that puppies aren’t trying to bite you on purpose - they don’t mean to hurt you. They just want to play with you, get your attention, sooth their sore gums and explore the world. You just need to be a good leader and make sure they know from day one that you are the boss.  

The Joys of Toilet Training...

Cooper Hendrix has been home with us now for 5 nights. He is a bundle of joy and so beautiful.

Although, let me tell you - raising a puppy is hard work!!

He is like an energizer bunny and then falls asleep, energizer bunny and then back to sleep and so on.

I have so many things that I could talk about now but I will take it one step at a time. So lets begin with toilet training…

Toilet training needs to begin the very second you bring your pup home. Take the puppy straight outside to the spot you would like them to go.

Avoid avoid avoid is my motto!!

Take your pup outside straight after he wakes up, after he plays and after he eats. Just make sure to take your pup out every hour. The key is to not let your puppy make a mistake – and make sure to really praise him when he releases himself outside.

We are using ‘good toilet’ to try and get Cooper used to the word ‘toilet’. Give him a good pat and even a treat instantly if you have one handy. Puppy’s and dogs have a pretty short memory so timing is crucial – don’t give him a treat two minutes later – only give a treat that very second he finishes. And that also goes for telling him off when he releases himself in the house – there is no point telling him off when you find it half an hour later – he wont remember what he did wrong. It really is all about being positive – you don’t want to scare your puppy while he is in the act, as you don’t want them to think that releasing themselves is bad – so yes – I totally disagree with rubbing your dogs nose in their business!! But you can tell him off when you catch him in the act.

We have been pretty lucky with Coop – he has peed inside twice and that is it. One of the times, I knew he needed to go, I waited outside with him for about 45minutes and then my patience grew thin and I brought him back inside – literally 20 seconds later he peed on the carpet. The trick is to make sure you have the right products to get rid of the smell otherwise your puppy will keep going back to the same spot. And be patient!

We are also lucky enough to have a doggy door that is in the laundry where he sleeps. After 2 days of being with us he could use it all by himself and after 3 nights – he was using it during the night rather than going on the newspaper in the laundry. Jase and I trained him by holding the flap up and having one on either side with a treat, encouraging him – he is a very quick learner!!

How have you gone toilet training your pup??

Cooper visiting my work at The Big Group

Cooper with his cousin Diesel