Training a Puppy to Drop and Feel Good About Her Puppy Play Pen

Lucy is a ten-week-old Maltipoo puppy who lives in Omaha. Her guardian set up this puppy training appointment to address a few puppy problems; puppy potty training and the puppy’s barking when left in the puppy play pen.

Lucy was great during the greeting. She showed good confidence, used her nose, didn’t try to jump up and could’t possible be any cuter.

Since Lucy is in our puppy training classes, she already had many of the basic commands down. Her guardian was having a little trouble with occasional accidents in the house so I shared some potty training tips including how to teach her to ring a bell when she needs to potty.

Because Lucy was starting to do a tiny bit of growling when she was in possession of some toys and higher value items, I spent a few minutes training the puppy to drop things on command.

Teaching your dog to drop things is pretty easy when you train them to do so as a puppy. It takes practice, repetitions and a really good reward. But once your puppy catches on, you can easily get them to drop things they aren’t supposed to have with ease later in life.

While she is too young to be a true resource guarder, Lucy was growling more intensely when she had high value items so I wanted to show her guardians how to teach her that humans are no threat to her possessions.

I like to use a marrow bone for this exercise as its a very high value item that just about every dog finds irresistible. It also gave me a valuable tool to help Lucy build up a more positive feeling of her puppy play pen.

By letting Lucy really get into the marrow bone before transitioning it into the puppy play pen, she was more interested in quality chew time with it than being concerned that she was confined to the play pen.

With some practice at these exercises, it shouldn’t take her guardians long to get her comfortable being in the play pen while preventing resource guarding habit from developing later in life.

We wrapped up the session by filming her puppy Roadmap to success video. You can watch it and all the puppy training tips by clicking on the embedded video below.