I cant believe it is now a week since I picked up my puppy.

I wasn’t sure quite what to expect as I have only had bigger dogs before and recently have had crazy heading dogs although I work with a lot of varieties of puppies.

As always I drew up a list of goals – short term and more long term (12 mth plus) goals. These are much the same for each puppy.  

Long term goals/dreams include things like a well behaved dog that is happy and fits in well with my lifestyle as well as sport related goals that may or may not be achieved. Although these are not on a time frame I order to achieve the important ones I need to have a plan as no  dog suddenly magically starts doing the behaviours you want with out showing and encouraging the choices you want from early on.

 So to achieve these goals all my dogs have monthly and three monthly goals which are fluid and change as necessary. At the beginning of each month I decide what I would like to achieve and what I am going to do each week to achieve these goals. In many ways it is not achieving the goal that is important but the process towards the goal.

So with my new puppy I had a list of things I planned to work on in the first week.  Again achieving the objectives is not the most important thing but observing and starting to understand your puppy is the most important achievement so as every puppy is different what we achieved and where we got up to differs so week 2 goals will change a lot from my original and that is good as it is about where she is up to and our partnership.

What has my puppy taught me about her this week not in any order

1.       She was a lot shyer than my previous puppies so it was important that she set the pace on socialisation.  This plus her size has meant she has only been loose with my oldest dog so far and that was at the end of the week

2.       She doesnt like cold or wet grass so that meant doing solids outside took more time and will continue to be worked on.  I have also made a mental note that we need to work on getting her happy on cold or wet surfaces going forward.

3.       She is a picky eater at the moment so I need to build my reward values.

4.       She loves toys but I do need to make sure that I am part of the game and build it value for bringing toys back and releasing them

5.       She is feisty with opinions so it is important that training is a conversation.

6.       I got warned that she loves keep away and I am just starting to see that so I need to keep building value for coming to me and that is part of the game. She is responding very well to this

7.        She is quite noise and movement sensitive when they are unexpected or new so that is going to be an important part of her socialisation programme

8.       She loves her zoomies and is fast – so I need to incorporate this into the training