{"id":12377,"date":"2019-11-27T21:49:28","date_gmt":"2019-11-27T21:49:28","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/woodriverweekly.com\/?p=12377"},"modified":"2019-11-27T21:49:28","modified_gmt":"2019-11-27T21:49:28","slug":"great-expectations","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/woodriverweekly.com\/index.php\/2019\/11\/27\/great-expectations\/","title":{"rendered":"Great Expectations"},"content":{"rendered":"

BY FRAN JEWELL
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Notice how Pele keeps her eyes on me all the time, even in a highly distractive situation. While your dog may not be a service dog in training, \u201cwatch\u201d still provides the foundation for all other behaviors. Photo credit: Fran Jewell<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

It is amazing what puppies can learn at a very early age. If I have puppies, I start their obedience training at four weeks old! By the time they are five or six weeks old, they know things like sit, down, off, watch, their name and coming to their name, leave it, and bite inhibition. They are little sponges.<\/p>\n

What is important to realize is that waiting until a puppy is six months old to start training leaves that puppy with little direction and the ability to learn very bad habits that are extremely difficult to break. One of those very bad habits is jumping on counters and people.<\/p>\n

I am here to say that early training is critical. It is also important to have realistic expectations of what a puppy can do. Expecting a puppy to be able to walk on a leash in public with huge distractions, and this could mean just down your street, may be too much for your particular puppy to learn. Walking on a loose leash is something that takes a lot of practice in a non-distractive environment before asking a puppy to do it in a distractive environment. That non-distractive environment may be inside your home down a long hallway or in your quiet backyard. Then, you can gradually increase the distractions while your dog is still able to perform the task. I compare this to going to school. You can\u2019t ask a kindergartener to be able to do high school work. It is called \u201cproofing.\u201d Proofing is a high school activity for a puppy.<\/p>\n

\u201cStay\u201d is another activity that takes lots of practice in a non-distractive environment before going to a higher distraction environment. When we have a little puppy, our first focus should be on having the puppy come toward us, not staying away from us, since soon the puppy will begin to play \u201cchase me.\u201d Teaching the puppy to \u201ccome\u201d should be a first priority, or a kindergarten-through-junior-high activity. Having an off-leash return should be considered a high-school activity along with the \u201cstay\u201d command.<\/p>\n

Teaching \u201cleave it\u201d is one of the most important skills to teach very early on since it can save a puppy\u2019s life. Puppies are very capable of learning that activity the day they come to live with you.<\/p>\n

\u201cWatch\u201d and \u201cleave it\u201d are what I call the building blocks upon which we build everything else. If you don\u2019t have your puppy\u2019s attention with \u201cwatch,\u201d then you may find it incredibly difficult for to get the puppy to trust you and to respond to your commands. I think of \u201cwatch\u201d as a leadership behavior. When the puppy learns to watch you, she learns to pay attention, honor you, trust you, and respond to you quickly in an emergency situation.<\/p>\n

Taking training in the proper steps is so important in fairness to the dog. I think many times we simply are not aware of which behaviors we want to teach are the most difficult and require some basic knowledge before trying to teach them. Thinking about them in terms of levels like school for kids can help us put it into perspective.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Fran Jewell is an Idaho Press Club award-winning columnist, IAABC-certified dog behavior consultant, NADOI-certified instructor #1096 and the owner of Positive Puppy Dog Training, LLC, in Sun Valley. For more information, visit www.positivepuppy.com or call (208) 578-1565.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

BY FRAN JEWELL It is amazing what puppies can learn at a very early age. If I have puppies, I start their obedience training at four weeks old! By the time they are five or six weeks old, they know things like sit, down, off, watch, their name and coming to their name, leave it, […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":12378,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"tdm_status":"","tdm_grid_status":"","_pvb_checkbox_block_on_post":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-12377","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-commentary"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/woodriverweekly.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12377","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/woodriverweekly.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/woodriverweekly.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/woodriverweekly.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/woodriverweekly.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=12377"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/woodriverweekly.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/12377\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/woodriverweekly.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/12378"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/woodriverweekly.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=12377"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/woodriverweekly.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=12377"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/woodriverweekly.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=12377"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}