In this article, I will share several ways to teach your puppy to make good decisions. This is the opposite of constantly directing your puppy or telling it what to do.
Imagine you're an actor in a movie, TV show, or a play, and the director keeps telling you exactly how to say your lines, feel in every scene, and exactly what to do. Doing this means you're not using your acting abilities to do what you've been trained. This would annoy you. This would likely annoy the director, and nobody would benefit from that.
When leading your puppy to greatness, you have to shift from being a director to teaching the puppy to make good decisions without intervening and forcing it. The puppy must learn to do good things voluntarily.
Stop directing them and start to challenge them
You want to encourage your puppy to do their best and set them up for success. Leash training is a great way to do this. For example, we teach the auto to sit in our puppy program, where the puppy will walk next to you on a loose leash, and when you stop, the puppy automatically sits. They're deciding to do something good, and you can look at the puppy and say, very subtly, good girl or good boy, you don't have to use food rewards.
You don't want to use a high-pitched voice, which will overstimulate them. We're trying to keep them calm. Puppy owners always want to know how to calm their puppies down, and we do that by not talking to them all the time. We do that by putting them in a position to make good decisions.
The Chair Exercise
You take a chair, put it in the middle of the living room floor, and grab some treats; the puppy will come over to you, smell them, and jump up. If they're a little puppy, they might jump up to about your knee level, trying to get the treats. If they're a bigger dog, that might put their paws on your lap. Regardless of what they do, you don't say anything. You don't do anything. You let them smell the treats, and they must consciously decide to sit. When they sit, you say ye and give a food reward. That's it. See the video here.
You don't give them any attention; you ignore them. They might back up and sit again. You say yes and provide a food reward. They jump again, for one or two seconds this time. Then they sit on their own. Say yes, and give a food reward. The jumping will go away when you practice this enough because they're rewarded for sitting, not jumping.
Target Training
Another thing you can do to teach your puppy to make good decisions is target training. I recently posted a video on my Instagram page of Top Gun Dog Training where I have a puppy that's been play biting and out of control and frustrating the owners to the point where one of the owners was crying during the week before I got there because she was so frustrated because the puppy was biting her so much. See the video here.
Picking the puppy up during that time of overstimulation and talking to them only makes things worse. I got out a target training pad. It's a round pad, about 12 inches, and it's blue. They also have yellow. They're made by Fit Paws. I, and I get them on Chewy. I put the pad down, and the puppy's paw touches the pad. Without saying anything, you can point to the pad, but you can't tell them to touch the pad and keep giving them directions. Remember, we don't want to direct them. We want to teach them to make good decisions.
While the pads are on the floor, they touch it. You calmly say yes and give them a food reward. You don't have to touch them; you don't have to pet them. When they get their marker and the food reward, start another repetition. Back the puppy up and bring them towards the target again, and they touch the pad with their paw, and you say, yes, give a food reward.
The target training pad is rubber. The floor is usually hardwood or carpet, so the training pad's texture is different from that of the floor or carpet. The puppy can sense this, feel it with its paw, and see the blue or yellow pad. It's hilarious to watch puppies do this without telling them because puppies are brilliant if you challenge them. Remember, we're challenging the puppy, not directing it.
Puzzles
The next thing you can do is give the puppy a puzzle. I use brick puzzles from Outward Hound. There are 20 compartments, and the puppy has to take out little pieces, slide pieces over, and lift up some compartments to get the food rewards out. This means they have to think and do it on their own. You're not telling them what to do, directing them; you're challenging them.
Agility Training
Another thing I like to do with puppies is light agility training inside the house. There's a kit that you can get that has cones with rods that go between the cones. You can have the height of the rod that the puppy has to jump over to be two, four, or six inches. You don't want to go much higher than that with a puppy because you don't want a high impact on their joints. You're just trying to get them to move a little bit and make good decisions without directing them.
Put two or three little jumps in the house and space them apart so the puppy has to go like an obstacle course. They jump over another and another and then touch the target training pads on the end. Do this about five rounds, and the puppy will be exhausted. They'll be mentally tired.
We're not talking about physical work here. If you take your puppy out back and throw the ball with them to tire them out, that won't work for a puppy because the physical exercise is just conditioning them to be a better athlete. We have to challenge the puppy to make better decisions to replace the unwanted behaviors. A puppy can't multitask, so if they're making a good decision, they're not doing unwanted behaviors such as jumping, barking, playing biting, or chewing.
You want to give the puppy a chance to succeed. Your goal as the owner is to set the puppy up for success. Every time you set the puppy up for failure, and it fails, you are annoyed and frustrated. This annoys and frustrates the puppy, and nobody wins. The cycle keeps going in the wrong direction.
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