Please welcome Beth’s new border collie puppy to the pack. Meet Sitka!

I am excited for Beth to put all of the puppy training she has learned working with us to the test with her own puppy! Puppy training can be really fun and also challenging at times. Here are some of our top puppy training tips.

❤️‍🩹 Practicing cooperative care skills should be your top priority.  Teaching your puppy to be calm/ cooperative during handling for grooming/vet care may save your puppy’s life one day and prevent unnecessary trauma during vet/grooming visits.  

✋ Don’t let your puppy have free reign of the house. Use crates, puppy gates, play pens, closed doors and/or a leash to prevent the puppy from accessing spaces you can’t supervise them in. This will prevent a long list of bad habits, miscommunications, dangerous situations and behavioral issues. 

🎾 There are a variety of games that lay a very solid foundation for building your puppy into a motivated, cooperative, and confident dog. Working with a trainer who prioritizes those games over obedience commands will result in much more fun for you and your puppy when you do start teaching obedience commands. 

🐕 Do not let your puppy greet every dog and person even if they want to. Quality over quantity is important when it comes to social interactions. If you don’t know how to identify healthy social behavior, find a trainer who can help you before you put your puppy in a situation that causes long term negative effects. 

💤 Puppies, like human toddlers, sometimes express how tired they are by being overstimulated/hyper. Like a toddler, your puppy needs to be put down for a nap even though they are acting crazy. They may bark, cry, and fuss in the crate when you do so. You are not traumatizing your puppy, they are just having a tantrum because they are overstimulated and tried. Don’t give up on your crate training, I promise it will be worth it in the end. 

😈 Puppies bite! It is a developmentally normal behavior and I am sorry their teeth are so sharp. Redirect them to a toy as much as possible and stock up on bandaids. 

I could talk about puppy training all day, but I will leave it at that!