Get the First Few Months Right

Most puppy problems are not behaviour problems. They are timing problems. Something that would take ten minutes to shape at nine weeks takes six months to undo at nine months, and the only difference is when someone stepped in.

So the session starts with your house. Where is the puppy sleeping, and is that working? Where do they go when everyone leaves? What happens when they cry — and who in the house cracks first? Is the crate a safe place or a punishment box? None of this is glamorous, but the environment is doing more training than any command you will ever teach.

Then we tackle the big three, because these are the ones that make people cry in the first month. Biting: puppies bite, it is normal, and there is a right way to teach bite inhibition that does not involve yelping like a stricken bird or holding their mouth shut. Toileting: it is a routine and a supervision problem, not an intelligence problem. Settling: a puppy that cannot switch off is not naughty, it is overtired, and the fix is usually more sleep rather than more exercise.

Socialisation gets its own section because it is the part most people get badly wrong. The goal is not for your puppy to meet a hundred dogs. It is for your puppy to see a hundred things — bikes, wheelie bins, hi-vis vests, the beach, tiled floors, umbrellas, kids on scooters — and learn that none of them are a problem. One bad experience with a rude adult dog at ten weeks can create a reactive dog at ten months. We build a plan that gets you exposure without the risk.

And then we start actual training, which at this age is mostly play. Puppies learn fast when it is fun, and everything we teach now is a deposit against adolescence — which is coming, whether you are ready or not.

Puppy work has a longer tail than most services, because the puppy keeps changing under you. What is true at ten weeks is not true at sixteen, and what is true at sixteen weeks falls apart at ten months.

We work the immediate thing first — usually biting or toileting, whichever is making your life hardest — and the socialisation list gets walked through with you so it stops being a vague instruction and becomes something specific: surfaces, sounds, sights, places, handling. Puppies are the one case where the window genuinely matters, so that gets covered early even though everything else is staged.

Follow-up support through the first months matters more here than in any other service. The questions arrive on a schedule. Week two is usually toileting. Week four is biting escalating rather than fading, which is nearly always a sleep problem. Somewhere around four months the teething makes everything worse again. And at eight to ten months adolescence arrives and a lot of owners conclude the training failed.

It did not. That is a developmental stage and it is survivable if you hold the rules through it, which is exactly the moment most people stop. Knowing it is coming is most of the battle, which is why it is in the plan from the start rather than sprung on you later.

Inside the first week you should see the biting change. Not stop — puppies bite, that is the job description — but soften noticeably, and become interruptible. That alone transforms how a family feels about a new puppy.

Toileting usually tightens up within a fortnight once the routine is running properly and someone is actually watching for the signals. The accidents that remain tend to be supervision lapses rather than confusion, and those are easy to fix.

Settling is the one owners underestimate and then rate the highest afterwards. A puppy that can take itself to bed and switch off changes the entire household. It is also the single best predictor of whether that dog will develop separation problems later, which is why it gets attention early rather than being left to sort itself out.

The real payoff arrives at eight to eighteen months, when adolescence hits and your friends' dogs start becoming difficult. That is when the foundation either holds or it does not. A puppy that has learned to settle, to check in with you, to walk on a loose lead and to think of the world as basically safe will wobble during adolescence. A puppy that has not will have a crisis. That is what this work is really buying you.