Puppy Training

Getting a puppy is very exciting.

But if you were to make a human analogy, a puppy is like having a baby that can run, jump, steal, and chew—with no diapers.

Think about trying to handle a newborn’s schedule and the terrible twos at the same time.

So yes, it can be exhausting.

The good news is that your puppy probably isn’t a problem puppy.

They’re just a puppy.

And right now, they’re learning an enormous amount about how their new world works—or at least, their perception of it.

Here’s the Good News and the Bad News: Your Puppy Is Already in Training

Puppy training doesn’t begin when you teach Sit.

It began before you ever picked up your puppy. And their new training begins the minute you carry them into your home.

Every interaction teaches them something.

Some of those lessons are good. Some—not so much.

If jumping on you or someone else gets your puppy attention, they may learn to jump.

If biting your hand starts a game, and they like games—which most puppies do—they may learn that biting makes people fun.

If pulling on the leash or running away gets them where they want to go, it’s more than likely they’ll pull on the leash or run away when they feel like they can.

If barking or whining gets the crate door opened, and they don’t particularly like being in the crate, you can anticipate hearing more barking and whining.

Here’s the good news:

You didn’t ruin your puppy because you accidentally reinforced something.

Puppies are incredibly adaptable.

And that’s one of the reasons why starting their training as young as possible is such a good idea.

More Than Basic Obedience

One of the biggest goals with puppy training is to make sure they’re learning the things we actually want them to learn—and learning not to do the things we don’t want them to do.

Of course, part of puppy training is basic obedience.

But raising a good puppy into a great dog involves much more than teaching commands.

We want to begin developing things like:

Engagement with you
Potty training
Crate training
Leash pressure
Impulse control
Confidence
Calmness
Boundaries
Socialization
The ability to settle
Along with a host of other things

Many of the things above aren’t simply commands you can attach a cue to and check off a list.

Because your dog can Sit, Down, or go to their bed doesn’t mean that when they become a mature dog, they’ll automatically be a well-rounded dog with confidence, good manners, and the kind of dog you actually enjoy taking for a walk.

What we focus on—and what we devote most of our time to—depends on the puppy in front of us and your lifestyle.

A puppy living in a Staten Island apartment may need a different set of skills than a puppy living on a farm in upstate New York.

A puppy who will eventually weigh 100 pounds shouldn’t necessarily be allowed to practice behaviors that seem cute or funny at 15 pounds.

That 15-pound puppy, ten months later, can become a 100-pound situation. And it’s definitely not going to be as cute as it was ten months earlier.

A confident puppy who wants to investigate everything may need something very different from a cautious or nervous puppy who isn’t sure about the world yet.

We don’t believe every puppy needs an identical checklist taught in an identical order.

There are no cookie cutters in our puppy training protocol.

It’s specifically designed for your puppy, your lifestyle, and the dog you ultimately want your puppy to become.

Potty Training, Crates & Management

Some of the most important puppy training doesn’t look much like training at all.

Potty training is a perfect example.

Nobody’s puppy comes home understanding that the living-room rug is a no-pee zone, but the grass 20 feet outside the back door is exactly where they’re supposed to go.

In fact, we believe that if puppies could talk, they would most likely say:

“No, no. The humans got this all wrong.”

So we have to teach them.

We teach them by giving them a predictable schedule, supervision, taking them outside frequently, always rewarding success, and limiting opportunities to make mistakes.

Doing those things consistently can make potty training significantly easier—and much quicker.

The crate can be an extremely useful part of that process, but crate training is also a skill of its own.

We want your puppy to learn that being alone, settling down, and spending some time without constant access to you isn’t a punishment. It’s simply a normal part of life.

And this brings us to something that doesn’t get talked about enough in puppy training:

Management.

If you can’t supervise your puppy, don’t give them unlimited opportunities to make decisions they’re not ready to make.

A puppy can’t chew your $200 shoes if they can’t get to them. They can’t have twelve potty accidents behind the couch if they’re not wandering around the house unsupervised.

Management isn’t a substitute for training.

It’s how we prevent your puppy from practicing unwanted behaviors while we’re teaching them better ones.

As your puppy learns and earns more freedom, we can gradually give them more of it.

In the puppy world, freedom isn’t a right. It’s an earned privilege.

Socialization

At BFF, we almost think the word socialization shouldn’t be part of dog training.

It should probably be called something closer to desensitization or neutrality training.

This is one of the biggest misconceptions about puppies.

Socializing your puppy does not mean your puppy needs to meet every dog or every person they see.

Your puppy needs to experience the world:

People. Dogs. Cars. Bikes. Sounds. Parks. The groomer. Your veterinarian. New places and new experiences.

Sometimes interaction is appropriate.

But more often than not, these should simply become things your puppy knows exist. We don’t necessarily want them to ignore everything around them. We want them to be able to notice something without feeling the need to react to it.

Eventually, many of those things can become as uneventful as the tree they pass every day.

You can see that. You can hear that. You can be near that. And that’s that.

That’s an incredibly valuable skill for an adult dog to have.

If every dog your puppy sees becomes an opportunity to run over and say hello, your puppy can begin expecting access to every dog on every walk.

Later, when a leash prevents that access, frustration can turn into barking, pulling, whining—or what we deal with more than almost anything else at BFF: leash reactivity.

Socialization isn’t just teaching your puppy to interact with the world.

It’s teaching your puppy how to exist comfortably in their world.

Build Confidence, Not Just Obedience

We want puppies to explore, solve problems, and learn that they can handle new experiences.

A puppy with self-confidence generally has more mental bandwidth available for learning. A puppy who is worried, timid, fearful, or unsure of themselves has to devote some of that bandwidth to figuring out whether they’re safe and whether they can handle what’s happening around them.

That doesn’t mean protecting your puppy from every uncomfortable moment.

Life will contain strange noises, unfamiliar surfaces, new people, other dogs, and plenty of situations they haven’t experienced before.

Our job isn’t to make sure nothing ever makes your puppy uncomfortable.

Our job is to help them successfully work through manageable challenges so they begin building evidence that says:

I’ve handled something like this before. I got this.

Those little successes can add up quickly.

Whenever possible, we find those little challenges organically. We give your puppy an opportunity to work through them, help when help is needed, and let them experience what it feels like to succeed on the other side.

That’s how we begin building self-confidence.

They’ll Grow Out of It… Right?

Maybe.

Puppies grow up.

That surely doesn’t mean they’ll grow out of every unwanted behavior.

Some puppies do. And some puppy behaviors naturally change as they mature.

But if a behavior is working for your puppy, getting reinforced, and they continue practicing it over and over again, there’s also a better-than-average chance they’re going to get better at it.

The cute little puppy pulling toward every person they see will eventually become a much stronger adult dog—potentially still pulling toward every person they see.

The puppy jumping up for your attention?

If it’s not addressed, there’s a pretty good chance they’ll become an adult dog jumping up for someone’s attention.

And the puppy who learns that barking gets them what they want?

If barking consistently gets them what they want, get used to that bark, because you’ll probably be hearing it more often than you’d like.

All that being said, we don’t need to turn every little puppy behavior into a crisis.

Hoping maturity fixes something certainly isn’t the same thing as training it.

If we see a behavior developing that we know we won’t want in the adult dog, we’d much rather address it now than wait to find out whether or not they grow out of it.

An Ounce of Prevention Is Worth a Pound of Cure

It’s usually easier to prevent an unwanted behavior than to spend months changing it after it’s been practiced hundreds of times.

This is one of the reasons puppy training is so important.

All puppies are cute. All puppies are fun. All puppies are innocent.

But not all puppies grow up to become well-behaved adult dogs without issues.

It’s a lot easier for an artist to create a masterpiece on a clean canvas than it is to paint over somebody else’s work.

If we—or you—can teach your puppy early that pulling doesn’t get them where they want to go, we may never have to fix leash pulling later.

If we teach four paws on the floor before jumping becomes a habit, we may never have to address jumping on guests.

If we teach them what they are allowed to chew, we don’t have to wait until they’ve destroyed three pairs of shoes or your furniture before we start addressing it.

If we teach calmness and independence early, we aren’t waiting for a problem to develop before introducing those skills.

We’re not expecting perfection from your baby dog.

We’re simply trying to point them in the right direction so they have an opportunity to make good choices while they’re figuring everything out.

Puppies Need Clear Rules That Carry Into Adulthood

Puppies—and dogs alike—understand black and white.

If something is allowed today, discouraged tomorrow, funny on the weekends, but unacceptable when company comes over, it’s not the puppy’s fault.

They’re not stubborn.

They’re confused.

Now they’re living in the gray.

And if there were no gray, dog training probably wouldn’t be a profession.

This is where you become a huge part of puppy training.

Yes, we’ll teach your puppy what to do. We’ll show you what to do, how to do it, and we’re really big on teaching you why you’re doing it.

But we’re only with your puppy for a small portion of their week.

You live with them.

Clear, consistent, black-and-white expectations are what turn lessons into habits. And if we all do our part, the chances of you needing us to fix problems in the future decrease exponentially.

Think about children.

What often happens when you teach a child good habits from an early age?

And what often happens when you don’t?

There are no guarantees either way.

But if your dog is allowed to make all of their own decisions, I can tell you with a pretty high degree of confidence:

Some of those decisions are not going to impress you.

Don’t Rush

There can be a temptation to see how quickly a puppy can learn to do things like Sit, Down, Place, Come—and maybe even sprinkle in some tricks.

Teaching things to puppies is fun.

Side note: We wish we could teach puppies all day, every day. Unfortunately, a lot of our time is spent teaching older, bigger, and stronger dogs what not to do—or trying to change behaviors they’ve already practiced hundreds or even thousands of times.

That’s another reason we love starting young.

Knowing a command in your living room and being able to reliably perform it when it’s required in the real world are two very different things.

We would rather build a strong foundation than race through a checklist.

Your puppy needs time to learn a behavior, practice it, generalize it in different environments, and eventually perform it around distractions.

They’re puppies, so they’re still developing physically and emotionally.

We can challenge them without overwhelming them.

We can have expectations without forgetting they’re puppies.

What Does Your Puppy Actually Need?

There isn’t one perfect puppy-training program for every dog.

We’ll look at your puppy’s age, temperament, confidence, breed, environment, current behavior, and what you ultimately want life with your dog to look like—and work backwards.

Then we prioritize.

Maybe potty training and sleeping through the night are driving you crazy right now.

Maybe nipping or biting is the biggest issue.

Maybe you have a confident little maniac who needs to begin learning impulse control.

Maybe you have a cautious puppy, and building confidence needs to be at the top of the priority list.

Maybe everything is going pretty well, and you simply want to make sure you’re building the right foundation before problems develop.

That’s exactly what puppy training should be.

No checkboxes. Just preparing your puppy for the life they’re actually going to live.

The Goal

Our goal isn’t to create a tiny robot.

If you didn’t love their personality, they probably wouldn’t be in your house. And our goal certainly isn’t to eliminate everything that makes your puppy the puppy you love.

They’re going to make mistakes.

They’re going to get distracted.

They’re going to test things.

They’re going to have good days and ridiculous days.

That’s part of the fun of raising a puppy.

Our job is to help you understand what your puppy is learning, intentionally reinforce the behaviors you want, prevent unnecessary bad habits, build confidence, establish clear expectations, and begin developing reliable communication between you and your dog.

A good foundation is where it all starts.

Because eventually, the puppy stage ends.

And the great news is:

The things they learn as a puppy can last a lifetime.