People tend to underestimate what baby puppies can learn. I’ve heard many people say they don’t plan to train or take their puppy to classes until they are 6 months old. The reality is that young puppies are little sponges and learn what earns them reinforcement VERY fast with very few repetitions. The things they learn aren’t necessarily all behaviors you want to live with. Behaviors like jumping on people earn reinforcement in the form of attention. Counter-surfing earns food. These aren’t “bad” behaviors in a dog’s mind, but they are behaviors people don’t like and thus we tend to notice them more.
Before you get your puppy, think of behaviors that you DO want to reward. Oftentimes these are behaviors that we don’t actively notice, because the dog is being “good”. Some examples:
- Resting quietly in the kitchen while you’re making coffee
- Resting quietly next to you in the office
- Sitting next to you at the coffee shop quietly
- NOT jumping on someone that comes up to talk to you
- Paying attention to you instead of some other distracting thing
- Not barking when the doorbell rings or the delivery truck drives by
- Keeping four feet on the floor when in the kitchen or dining room
As you can see, these are things the puppy wouldn’t get rewarded for unless you actively notice them, and behaviors that are reinforced will become stronger.
I’ve started clicker/marker training the puppies, and they each have had about 6 sessions (though the first ones just involved learning to eat real food from my hand). The things I’m rewarding so far are sitting for attention, eye contact, choosing me over the environment, recall. For those that haven’t done clicker training, the click marks the exact moment the dog did something I wanted. One click *always* earns something that particular dog finds reinforcing, which is usually a treat. The really important and powerful part of clicker training is the dog learns to think about what they need to do to earn reinforcement, and therefore learn to make good choices.
Here are a couple videos of today’s training session with a couple puppies, where I also taught a hand touch. In these sessions I’m marking/rewarding any behavior I like in addition to the ones I’m actively training. I’m also trying to balance excitement and calmness. If the puppy starts to get overly excited where it looks like they will start jumping and biting at my hair (for example), I’ll lower my voice and do slow petting to bring the puppy back to thinking brain. 🙂 You can really see the puppies thinking, and see some lightbulb moments for them.
Hope you enjoy the videos!