Sharing a Bunch of Puppy Training Tips in Brentwood

For this Brentwood puppy training session we shared a number of puppy training tips to help 5 month-old English Cream Retriever Blue.

Blue started jumping up on me as soon as I arrived for the session. This is not an unusual behavior for any puppies because people often encourage it when the puppy is small.

But when the puppy gets older, it continues doing the same behavior – but then we change. A full size dog is going to jump up and reach your chest and have a lot more weight. When this happens, we usually tell the dog it’s being naughty. In reality, we accidentally taught our dog to jump up on us for attention.

Blue’s guardian wanted to make sure he avoided problems like that which is why we set up this session.

Puppy Training Tips for Blue

One of the first puppy training tips I shared was how to introduce a marker word. This is the building block of all modern positive dog training and it’s something that every puppy and adult dog should know.

After I explained how to use the marker word, I showed the guardian how to use a hand targeting exercise to perfect his timing. Once the guardian was marking with good timing, I showed him how to introduce cues and then we discussed the last step of the process; how to fade the lure.

These are some of the most common dog training fundamentals there are, but sadly most people don’t know about them. Not having them in place leads to a lot of confusion, and contributes to many dog behavior problems.

Since Blue was not responding to his name as well as his guardian would like, I showed him an easy way to teach the puppy their name.

One of the most powerful puppy training tips I shared in this session was how to teach good puppy manners. Anything your dog or puppy is doing when you give them attention is what you are specifically rewarding. And the type of attention you give doesn’t matter.

That’s important to understand because correcting your dog or puppy, or telling it no or to get down is only going to teach your puppy to continue doing that action in the future because it got your attention.

The celebrate game is how I teach puppy manners and is one of the easiest dog and puppy training tips that I share with my clients. But this secret only works if you do it consistently. I recommended the guardian and his girlfriend call out “celebrate” any time one of them misses Blue offering a desired behavior. When they happens, they need to imediately say “yes” then pet Blue.

Next I showed the guardian how to use the positive interrupter to stop unwanted puppy behaviors. This stops people from giving attention for unwanted actions. Instead it allows the guardian to redirect his puppy’s attention, followed by the hand targeting cue to move him away from whatever the unwanted action was.

Of course when this is the case it’s important that the guardian provide the puppy with something else to do. Otherwise they will ususlaly go back to what they were doing before.

The Carrot Puppy Training Tip

The next puppy training tip I shared was that he get Blue comfortable with eating carrots. Carrots are dense, have cancer fighting properties to them and are a wonderful way to stop puppies from chewing the wrong thing. This is a very simple puppy training tip that many people are unaware of to their chagrin. It often ends up with chewed up furniture, shoes or other household items.

Once Blue starts to get his adult teeth come in, he is going to chew even more. But if the guardian has gotten him used to chewing on carrots, he can start freezing some baby carrots and then pull them out, use the positive interruptor sound to get blues attention, then drop a small handful on the floor from six or 8 inches.

Movement is a strong attracted to dogs. This will cause the puppy to run over to investigate, effectively redirecting them away from whatever it was that they were chewing.

Basic Obedience Puppy Training Tips

Next I showed the guardian an easy way to teach his puppy to sit, lay down, sit up and stand. It was a little bit challenging for blue to do due to all hardwood floors in the apartment.

I recommended the guardian go out and get a piece of carpet from a carpet store so that blue has something that has better grip to learn some of these exercises a little easier.

Another puppy training tip that we shared was how to teach a dog to come consistently. I have a training wheels version of this exercise that help helps put the behavior into context and then I showed the guardian the full exercise.

Puppy Training Tips – Cut Off Signals

Another puppy training tip that I love to go over is not actually a training exercise for the puppy, but for the human. Many people don’t know how to read dog body language, cut off signals or dog consent.

Because Blue is a puppy, he didn’t respond to thedemonstration  exercise the way most adult dogs do. When the guardian reached to pet him, Blue was more interested in trying to bite his hand.

Since this is such an important puppy behabvior to know, I went over the most common cut off signals for dogs which include:

• Ducking the head
• Ears dropping
• Ears rotating back
• Turning away
• Refusing to look
• Refusing to come
• Looking at you sidewise (you can see a lot of white in their eye)

These are some of the more common ways that dogs say no to us. But since most people don’t know what they are they continue interacting with the dog. But the dog has clearly said no.

After enough warnings go ignored, some dogs will turn to nipping, biting or running away from their humans This is why its so important new dog owners know how to read dog consent and cut off signals.

I try to aleways go over these signals as most people interact with dogs in ways dogs do not like. For example, these are 4 common ways humans interact with dogs and no dog likes:

• Direct extended eye contact
• Front facing approach
• Leaning over a dog
• Petting a dog on top of their head

Here is why.

Direct eye contact is interpreted as a challenge, walking up to a dog with a front facing approaches considered confrontational, leaning over a dog can it be intimidating and when dogs want to dominate another dog, they initiate contact on top of the other dogs head with their paw.

Most people do all of those things when they are meeting a dog or puppy for the first time. Most dogs or puppies will turn their head, drop their ears, back away etc. to communicate that they do not like what the human is doing.

But humans tend to think that petting, is always a good thing. But just like us, we are particular as to who touch us.

Next I showed the guardians how they can recognize signs of consent such as:

Dog nose moving up
Squinty or sleepy eyes
Leaning against you
Licking you
Putting its paw on your arm.

Knowing when a dog likes something or does not like something goes a long ways towards creating much more effective communication between human and dog.

It also is a big quality of life improvement for the dog because the human knows how to recognize when a dog does not like something. This allows the human to stop it or move the thing away so that the dog does not need to stop it themselves by growling, nipping or biting.

Puppy Training Tip – Stop Food Guarding

One of the main issues that blues guardian wanted to work on was his growling while he is eating.

Many people interpret a dog or puppy growling as being aggressive, in fact it’s quite the opposite. I always tell my clients that they should interpret a puppy or dog growling at them as the animal saying “I disagree,” or “I feel uncomfortable.”

The absolute worst thing to do when a dog growls is to punish or correct it. If you do this consistently, you will be successful and you will teach the dog not to growl or bear their teeth. Instead, the dog will simply move straight to a bite. This is a very common and dangerous mistake that people make with dogs. Sadly it has cost many dogs their lives.

A better approaches to move the dog or a puppy away from whatever it is, or stop the action. This solves the problem and removes any need for the dog to growl, bear their teeth, lunge or bite.

When dogs are eating, it’s a very important activity and something that you shouldn’t disturb. Blue’s growling was simply his way of saying “leave me alone so I can eat this food, I don’t wanna share it with you.”

You should never pet or interact with a dog while it’s eating unless you have trained it to feel comfortable with that sort of interaction.

That’s the next puppy training tip that I shared, showing the guardian how to condition a puppy to be comfortable being handled while he is eating without growling.

Once he has taught Blue that being touched when eating is ok, I recommended the guardian start feeding Blue out of treat dispensing toys and puzzles. Some of the toys I like include an omega paw tricky treat ball, a snuffle matt, A Bob a lot toy, the Kong wobbler dispenser, puppy chess feeder, etc.

Getting 4-6 of these then rotating them as you feed your puppy is a great way to develop problem solving skills. And if the device requires the pup to use its nose like the snuffle matt, its like a short walk each time they eat.

Puppy Training Tip for Chewing

Since  puppies have a tendency to chew and put everything into their mouth, it’s really important to keep the room free of things that you don’t want the puppy to get into. Instead, you want to have 8-12 assorted toys laying on the floor any place the puppy hangs out.

Giving a puppy appropriate chew toys is super important. If you dont have these out, pups will chew what they can find. Your shoes, furniture, cables, carpet, etc.

On the subject of pups grabbing the wrong things, I shared another puppy training tip – how to teach or condition your puppy to drop things easily.

By this point of the session, Blue was getting pretty tired. There were a few other puppy training tips that I wanted to share so I handed my camera to his guardian so I could record a summary video of some of the more sublte puppy training tips people shoudl know..

If you want to make sure your puppy does not bark at the window, counter surf or run out the door, you should definitely check out the free positive puppy training video below.

These puppy training tips are a little bit off the beaten path but will go a long ways towards blue growing up into an amazing adult dog.

A lot of what I do is teach humans so that they can replace me. At this point we’ve been going for a couple of hours and I could tell blue and his guardian were both running out of steam.

To make sure that blues guardian remembered all the puppy training tips that we went over in this session, I handed him my camera and got down on the floor to record a roadmap to success summary video.

I recommended blues guardian watch this video once a week until he is adopted all of the things that we covered.

But based on blues behavior and his guardians approach, I’m confident that all of the puppy training tips we shared are going to be put to good use.

I look forward to receiving updates on puppy blue as he grows up.

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