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The First 3 Things You Need to Teach Your Puppy

Michael Baugh CDBC CPDT-KSA CSAT

These are not the only things you need to teach your puppy. They are, however, the fist things I think we should be teaching young dogs.

#3 Come When I Call. This one takes priority for me because it’s so easy. Our little puppies are already following us around, curious about our every movement. Let’s use that to our advantage. Call them often and give a small bit of food every time they come. To make it even more effective, choose a word or phrase (also called a cue) that you will use every time, and every time they come you be sure to give that little morsel of food. Your dog will grow up having learned that coming when called is always good news. They’ll run to you every time you call.

#2 Potty Here Not There. Young puppies learn this pretty quickly too. And, let’s be honest, no one wants a dog of any size pooping and peeing in the house. My clients follow these simple dog potty training instructions and enjoy great success. Follow the link for some relieve. (haha).

#1 You are Safe. This is my number one pick of the top three because it’s so vitally important. More than anything we should be teaching our young puppies how to safely navigate the human world. You’ve probably heard this called puppy socialization. That’s a well-known term that’s often misunderstood as just exposing the puppy to a bunch of experiences. I like to think of it, instead, as thoughtfully introducing the puppy to the sights, sounds, and experiences of the human world that they will encounter throughout their lives. Let’s set our puppies up to have new experiences, yes, but to also learn these encounters are safe. We don’t flood the puppy with an overdose of stimulation by taking him to a huge family cookout. That can backfire and cause long-lasting fear. Instead we let him meet new people and process new stimuli at his own pace one or two at a time. Giving the puppy choices, rather than forcing him to “handle” new and potentially overwhelming situations is key. This this is how we teach our young dog behavioral flexibility. Follow the link to learn more about that. I also recommend the book Life Skills for Puppies.

Learning is a lifelong process for dogs, just like it is for humans. These first 3 things are a great starting point. But, let’s keep going. The possibilities are nearly limitless.

Michael Baugh teaches dog training in Houston, TX. He specializes in fearful and aggressive dog behavior.

Dogs are Good

Back in graduate school for becoming a counselor we had to write a position paper that addressed a pivotal question. Are people inherently good or are we flawed, destined by our very nature to ill will, crime, and other malfeasance? We then had to explore how the answer to that one question would likely shape our approaches to being a counselor and our techniques with our clients. It turns out I didn’t become a counselor. Still, the question resonates with me to this day, and it applies to our work with dogs.

Are our dogs, all dogs, inherently good? Or is their nature flawed, dooming them to misbehavior and conflict with us humans? I’ll skip to the end here. People: good. Dogs: also good.

But let me explain this thinking a bit further. I’m not talking about good versus evil. In the movies dogs are cast as moral icons. For a lot of people that image is comforting, dogs as spiritual exemplars. That’s a shame, though, and a disservice to dogs who are natural thinking and feeling beings. Like all beings (even human beings) they make choices – they choose behaviors that keep them safe and serve their needs. We like many of the choices our dogs make (and we call them good choices). Some we don’t. But none of that has any bearing on the goodness of dogs, born of dogs into our human world. It’s not up to us to assign any higher value to them. The dog is what he is and that’s enough. Good enough.

Dogs think (and learn). They feel. They perceive. They communicate. They engage their bodies with the world around them in work, play, and rest. All good.

So much of the time, the problem with dogs is ours. It begins in our own heads. We have this idea of good and we try, despite evidence of our folly, to plaster it onto our dogs. Good dogs, we say, think just like us. They jockey for power and adulation, like us. They fall victim to brooding over emotions like us. They see the world like us and understand words (sentences) like us. Their bodies are to be tempered, controlled, as we try (and fail) to control our bodies. It’s how we think of our dogs all too often. All wrong.

There are volumes written about the nature of dogs. I won’t do them justice here. But when we think about the real goodness of dogs, as they are not as we press them to be, then we begin to honor one of the world’s most amazing animals. They think and feel. There is new evidence emerging even now about how vibrant our dogs’ mental and emotional lives might actually be. They take in the world through all their senses, but most especially their noses. It’s a rich perception of the environment we can’t even begin to fully imagine with our ocular and auditory brains. They interact with other species, not just other dogs, with a rich vocabulary of body movements and facial expressions (we’d serve ourselves well to learn this language of dogs). And, they are physical, beautifully physical, athletic, elegantly so – and also calm at times, even languid, eager to cuddle and pleasing to touch.

How can we think of engaging these animals with anything other than deep admiration and respect? Exploring the goodness of dogs always leads back to this. They’re cool. There is so much to them. And the more we look the more we notice how much more there is. Our ideas of good dog and bad dog pale when we begin to see what they really are. And, so our choices are naturally shaped by the goodness at hand.

We teach dogs kindly in a way that honors their intelligence and emotional lives. This is how the question of goodness leads us to how we approach dogs and the techniques we use in teaching and communicating. Shame on us who impose our own damaged view of the world on to them. More shame if that view leads us to hurt them as perhaps we are hurting. We humans are stuck in a constant loop of need, to feel good, to feel in control, to achieve and flaunt. Not so our dogs. Better to take a breath and notice who they are than to put that on them. Listen by watching. Take in how they take in the world. Get lost in their motion, the subtle move of their eyes and ears. Be the quiet primate and move with equal measure of subtlety to a common ground.

The person and the dog, it is the stuff of stories, no dramatic embellishment needed. Here’s to finding our own human goodness, better still shared with another.

Better Than a Stuffed Dog

Michael Baugh CDBC CPDT-KSA

“What you want is a stuffed dog.”

It’s cynical dog trainer humor. When friends, relatives, and even some clients list the qualities they want in their dog we fire off that zinger. They want a dog who doesn’t pee in the house, doesn’t bark, doesn’t jump on people, doesn’t pull on leash, and doesn’t chase the children. Stuffed dog. They want a dog who doesn’t “have a mind of his own,” isn’t dominant, and won’t cause any trouble. Stuffed dog. They want him to be, but they seemingly want him to do nothing. Stuffed dog.

I think we sometimes forget why we love dogs so much, and it’s a bit ironic. While we’re tripping over all the things we want dogs to not do, we forget what it is about them that we like so much. Behavior. Their actions. What dogs do. The way they run, the looks they give, the tricks they learn, that’s what makes us smile, pulls us in, and draws us out of ourselves.

So much better than a stuffed dog, real dogs move and breathe and make noise. They use their eyes and faces and bodies, so that we look and move and talk in turn. We call it communication. Joy. Love. Dogs come toward us, walk the path with us, pick up and bring things to us, play with us, tug at a toy and our hearts. It is in their doing that we discover their being. Animated. Warm. Living. Just like us but also not at all.

And yes, they pee and bark and jump and tug at their leashes. They chase things and sometimes cause trouble. They have minds of their own. Yes. It’s that mind, and ours, interacting, working together. Our actions, kind and informative, replying to theirs. We help our dogs choose differently, discover new behavior. And their behavior helps us act differently, think more clearly. We call that communication too. Teaching. Learning. What each is doing informs what the other does. Feedback. Who’s training whom, and who cares?

And at the end of the day who your dog is is all his doing. He burrows under the blanket. He curls and presses his back to your chest. He slows his breaths and snores. He twitches and barks a muffled sound against some dream we cannot see. He is an amazing being, so different from us but so connected to us.

So alive. So warm and real. So much better than a stuffed dog. And, exactly what you want.