Puppy Training – Part 1
What age to start training?
by Toni Drugmand and Fred Hassen

By the age of 7 weeks the puppy has a fully developed nervous system and his brain is completely developed. This is the optimum age for a puppy to leave his mother and littermates in order to assure the strongest human ties and best socialization.

Puppies are capable of learning at a very young age. In nature, the mother dog , along with the littermates have been educating each other since about 3-4 weeks of age. By the age of 7 weeks the puppy has a fully developed nervous system and his brain is completely developed. This is the optimum age for a puppy to leave his mother and littermates in order to assure the strongest human ties and best socialization. If you get a slightly older puppy, he may be more oriented towards other dogs in the beginning. What ever age you bring your puppy home, the only thing your puppy will be lacking is experience.

This means that training can begin as soon as your new pup comes home! Training at this early stage will consist of the essentials. House Training, Chewing, Digging, Jumping , Learning to wear a collar and walk on a leash etc.

The most helpful way to begin training is to start out with the boundaries and house rules that will be in place for a lifetime. For instance, day one begins your house training routine.

Believe it or not, house training is one of the easiest things to teach a dog because they are clean by nature and do not want to soil their den. The biggest issues with house training is supervising close enough and giving the pup the chance to go outside when he has to relieve him/herself. The largest reason people fail with house training is that they make the choice to give the puppy more freedom than he is capable of handling and do not supervise his initial experiences going potty outside.

If you can utilize a crate to replicate the "den" environment that dogs need and feel secure in, it can aid your house training efforts enormously. The puppies natural desire to be clean and not soil the area he sleeps and spends time in will generally keep him from relieving himself in the crate, if he is given the opportunity to get out of his crate when necessary. We will shorthand the process, but as the puppy is let out from the dog crate, take him out to the spot you will want him to eliminate. If he goes, praise him. If not, put him back into his crate and try again in about 15 minutes or so. Continue with this cycle until you and your dog have a routine going. Success earns the pup freedom for twenty minutes or so and gradually extended the time as he grows older and more reliable. Remember a seven-week-old pup does not have a great deal of bladder control. Don't expect him to go more than a few hours without having to eliminate, and don't expect him to wait once he is out of his crate to eliminate. Begin the first time you take your puppy out to give a word to associate his behavior action that you desire. In the beginning the puppy won't understand the word, but if each time you take him out you say to your puppy, "hurry up", or "go potty" and continue to repeat the phrase until he goes, praising him/her when it happens your puppy will learn to associate these words with the action. Later when traveling or out in public it can be a cue word to get your dog to relieve himself in quick time, without having to wait in the scorching sun, or freezing rain An even easier system for house training is using a crate with a dog door and an enclosed dog run on the other side of the dog door. The dog crate goes up to the dog door. The dog door in the beginning may need to be taped or otherwise rigged up so the puppy can comfortably go through the dog door. The outside of the dog crate should be enclosed somehow to prevent the puppy from getting into any harm, or harm finding him!

When the pup isn't in his crate, you have to use constant supervision to keep him from making mistakes. The easiest way to do this is to literally tie or tether the pup to your waist with a leash or line, or tether him to a piece of furniture where he has no more than three feet of freedom in any direction. Remember that a pup tethered to furniture should be watched carefully or he may chew it. Crating, supervising and tethering are examples of a management system used to support the dog until he is trained. With the crate set up to the dog door system, your puppy learns quickly to let himself out of his containment area to relieve himself. It also helps him develop some independence from always having his human to hold his hand, thus increasing the need for the puppy to feel that he needs someone to take him out, he can't possibly go by himself. Because dogs are inherently pack animals, they prefer to be with us, than be alone. Most cases of adult "seperation anxiety" would never develop if the dog as a puppy had been trained in the crate/dog- door./dog -run management system just described because early on the puppy would learn to deal with being alone and without the opportunity to dig, chew or destroy things left available. One important thing to consider with this system is that when you first let your puppy out of his crate you would still want to take your puppy immediately to the outside area you are encouraging him to go relieve himself in. Even though your crate has access to the outside, puppy may have been resting and not recently "emptied out." It won't take much movement for the puppies need to "go" to be present and we don't want mistakes that could easily have been prevented.