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This is the Puppy Training Podcast Episode #48: Training Your Puppy in the Current Situation. This podcast is designed to help you on your journey of becoming best friends through love and learning as you train your own dog from home, and I'm here to help you every step of the way. This is the Puppy Training Podcast, and I'm your host, Amy Jensen.  

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Hey, everyone, how are you? I hope you're safe. I hope you're well. It's been an interesting couple of weeks for all of us, I'm sure, and we're adjusting here to home school, new schedules, and new routines, and I hope that you guys were staying safe. A small note on that: our puppies can sense changes in the environment, in schedules, in routines, and sometimes that causes them a little bit of stress, so be patient if your puppy's suddenly whining in their crate or waking up in the middle of the night when usually they're sleeping through the night, or maybe just some abnormal activity in general, let's just help them transition these next couple of days from chaos to maybe their new normal, and that will help them settle down a little bit. If we can all just have a little bit of patience in this, as we all adjust to a new way of life for a few weeks. Today I want to talk about raising a puppy today. Because of COVID-19 and some of the issues that it presents us, it's harder to socialize our puppies, but it can be done. We just have to be a bit creative, but there are some other things that go on as well that I want to talk about today to really just help you, especially those of you who have brand new puppies that are definitely in that critical socialization window time period, some ideas and things that you can do with your dogs to make sure that they're getting well socialized, but also to help them as a transition both from what life used to be like to homeschooling and working from home, et cetera and then again, when we transition back to our other schedule, there's going to be another phase that they're going to go through when we're not home all of a sudden, now we're back at work or we're back at school, and we don't want them to struggle with that. We want to be able to help them through that.  

speaker 0:   2:04
First of all, if you are a member of my program, awesome. I hope that you're finding it helpful and enjoyable, especially in this new phase of online learning that we all find ourselves in. I'm happy that you're there, and I'm happy to help you answer questions as you progress on your training journey through the units of study that we've provided. Today, we're hosting a live webinar for all members. It's a Q and A. Hopefully you'll come to class. You'll learn from other people. It's a new format that we're gonna try out. We're having live office hours from several different families, but we're doing on the Webinar today, so you'll be able to see me coaching people with their puppy on their screen and helping them really fine-tune their training. Super excited about it. If you're not a member, we encourage you to join and sign up. If you're looking for something to help with this online phase, or this phase where you're all home, especially you have children and puppies in the house, it's great to get them involved in the training, so check out my site, www.BaxterandBella.com./learn-more. We'd love to have you join us.  

speaker 0:   3:07
Back to the topic of the day. We again are talking about raising a puppy in light of COVID-19, and as we mentioned, your puppies are most likely experiencing some stress. They might be showing signs of it in that they're not eating as much. Maybe they appear not to be food motivated. Personalities will start to come out in a week or so any time that this stress hits. Any time you change a puppy's routine or change their daily schedule, you might see a difference in their personality, but within a week they usually settle in and they're back to normal. Let's talk about crate time. It's very important that during this phase that we give our puppies daily create time so that they are spending time alone now. Before this happened, we were hopefully crating our puppies, and we were away at work or away at school for several hours a day, or we're just out and about running errands and our puppy was getting used to the crate and being alone. Now we're all home and back in that environment, and it's a little tempting to just not use that crate or put it away for a while and just let that puppy be out with us all day long. However, I would advise that we continue to do some daily crate time so that that puppy is getting downtime, even though you might be home or your kids are home that the puppy is still getting that alone time. They need those brakes. They need that downtime, so make sure that they're getting that on a daily basis. That will help the transition in the future as we go back to work and back to school, which will make it easier for your puppies to make that change. I want to paint a little picture here for you. There's another transition that we've all experienced, and that was when we first brought her puppy home, and some of you are experiencing this now or you're anticipating this happening soon. But when a puppy is with their litter, they are always together. They're playing together. They sleep together, they often puppy pile or they'll jump on each other and just cuddle in and sleep. There's actually a picture that I'll post in the show notes, it's a super cute picture of puppies taking a nap, and they're all huddled as closely as possible to one another. There's also a video that I will share in the show notes as well. Basically, it's a puppy that jumped in the bed to take a nap, and then the next puppy jumps in the bed to take the nap. I think this went viral on Facebook a while ago. Anyway, the puppies all start to jump into this bed. Well, the last little puppy can't find a space in the bed, so he takes a running leap and jumps on top of the puppy pile in the bed, and he finds a little spot for himself. Puppies naturally love to be with someone, and when your puppy first comes home, that transition is real, they're adjusting from being with their litter mates and always having contact with someone. Then we bring them home, and if we put them into a crate and they're by themselves, they're going to feel that kind of stress. They've never been alone before. They don't know how to handle it. If you're going to experience that transition with your puppy soon, I recommend doing some initial crate introductions that are very positive. We want your puppy to view this as a good experience. We're going to give them maybe a really yummy stuffed Kong, something that really interests them so that they're busy licking something, say, a little teaspoon of plain yogurt or cream cheese or little pumpkin puree that they can lick off that Kong and start relaxing, and then we're gonna open the door within a minute or two and let them right back out again. We're gonna have them go in, come right back out again. We're gonna do a bunch of sessions where we're just doing these little, mini tiny create sessions that first day so that your puppy can be helped through that transition of I've never been alone before too, 'Oh, now I'm going to start spending some time alone, but it's okay', and then we're going to build that time up longer and longer. Within a few days, your puppy could be spending maybe even an hour in that crate by themselves and within a week or two, several hours at a time. It also helps to feed your puppy their meals in the crate, so every morning and every evening they're in the crate eating their meal, which creates that positive association. Again, with crate training, make sure that you've properly introduced the crate to your puppy originally. If you're just getting a new puppy, now's a great time to start this, but make sure that your puppies are getting daily crate time no matter where you are in your training journey, and especially in light of COVID-19.  

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Let's talk about some socialization ideas and how we could be creative in this time to make sure that our puppies are seeing and hearing, smelling and experiencing new challenges on a daily basis. The first tip is to focus on building a bond with your puppy with your family members. It's important that your puppy learns to trust you and every member of your family. You can play impulse control games together. In our positive section, we have eight of these games that teach your puppy patience and impulse control, and everyone can engage with your puppy in these short training sessions. They could practice the learned behaviors in every room of your home, as well as in your yard outside. Take what your puppies learning and really proof those behaviors. Take advantage of this time that you have to do in every room outside of your yard, in the front, in the back, in the garage, on a deck. Be creative and enlist the help of everyone in your home. It's great if your puppy can listen to you, but it's wonderful if your puppy will listen to everyone. Next would be dressed uptime. Let's put on those Halloween costumes. Pull out those masks, goggles, capes, gloves, hoods, crutches, canes, whatever you can find around your house to make you and your family members look differently. That will be helpful for your puppy as they go out into the world and they see different shapes, sizes, hair lengths, hair colors, glasses, different things like that, so put on helmets, put on gloves, put on goggles, whatever you can find around your house to look differently and let your puppy come up and meet you and greet you with these different items on. The third help with socialization would be mental stimulation. We want to make sure that our puppies are getting good mental exercise on a daily basis, so finding puzzles, creating obstacle courses for them, playing scent games where they get to search their toys out or search treats from around the house, or get a couple of food bowls and they get to find their breakfast by running around the house and looking for it, playing hot and cold games with them. This is essentially shaping where we pick a task we want a puppy to do, and then we mark and reward small steps leading up to the ultimate goal of what we're having in mind for a puppy to do. For example, I might blow up a balloon, put it on the floor, and I'm gonna reward my puppy every time he looks at the balloon. So he looks at the balloon, yes, here's a treat. Looks at the balloon, yes, here's a treat, and I might continue that about 5 to 10 times and then I'm going to wait and see if my puppy will do a little more than just look at the balloon. Maybe he walks toward it. Maybe he reaches a paw out for it, but each little step that he takes in the ultimate goal of me wanting him to paw that balloon. Then I'm going to mark and reward each little step until finally, he hits the balloon with his paw, I mark yes, and we throw a party. Other games include Hide and Go Seek. Puppies love to search things out, so have your kids hide around the house. Each of them can have a squeaky toy and a reward, and then they can take turns squeaking their toy, letting their puppy come find them, then they give the puppy a treat. I would actually even go a step further, and when the puppy comes to your child, help lure that puppy into a sit so that he's nice and polite and waiting for his treat to be given, the child can feed him the treat and then you can hold the puppy while they go and hide again. Super fun. Another idea would be in our come lesson in Unit Two, it's actually less than 2.1, we have several different ideas for games that you can play to build that behavior. Going through our program and finding things that you want to teach your puppy, usually you can find a game associated with it, or you can turn it into a game for anyone in your home.  

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As for sounds, YouTube is great. There are lots of playlists on there. You can search playlists for thunder, dogs barking, sirens, cars, people talking. I would always start these on a low volume and then work to louder volumes as your puppy feels comfortable. Another helpful tip is to play your puppy's favorite game while you're playing the sounds. Start with a super low level. Maybe your puppy love to fetch, toss toys for your puppy as you start to play these different noises and sounds so that he just starts to maybe habituate towards hearing these sounds, and he doesn't really notice them, and then we're going to slowly up the volume to the point where he doesn't really care that he's hearing all of these things. He'd rather be playing fetch, and he's having a good time, so he's creating that nice classical association between the sounds that he's hearing that could possibly make him a little nervous and the fun game that he's playing. Get outside and go exploring. We all our social distancing ourselves, but the outdoors often present spaces for us that we can be in, so drive to places where people aren't gathering currently. Maybe a park, a trail, a schoolyard, find an empty outdoor space and let your puppy go exploring. Now make sure that your puppy has its appropriate vaccinations before doing this, so if you have an older dog, this is great. If not, just simply carry your puppy because even getting out and seeing items and people and things from a distance is helpful. This is also a great time to practice good manners if you do see people. It's healthy for puppies to learn that they should not run up to a person for attention, we prefer instead a 'sit-to-be-greeted'. We can also use this time to practice seeing people from a distance and helping our puppy sit calmly by our side and not letting them go up to that person to say hi. It's a really valuable lesson to teach our puppies that just because they see someone doesn't mean they get to go say hi. This is a great time to do it. We're supposed to be far enough away from people that are puppy can see someone, but we're not necessarily going to go right over to that person. We just practice having them in a sit. We reward them. We move along and reward them for coming with us.  

speaker 0:   12:43
Finally handling and grooming. Let's spend time getting to know your puppy and getting them comfortable with touching their ears, their paws, tail, their head, their body. Have everyone in your family take turns going through these types of sessions. We want to acclimate your puppy to brushing, clipping their nails, cleaning their teeth, wiping their ears, and just relaxing. Have everyone in your family take turns, as it's one thing for your puppy to let you do it, but are they okay if someone else does it. This will be really beneficial when you head to a groomer or a veterinarian for an examination.  

speaker 0:   13:16
That's it for today, you guys. Thanks for joining me. Thanks for listening. It's so fun for me to be able to do what I do. And I couldn't do without your support, so thank you. I hope you have a wonderful week. Happy training, and I'll talk to you next week. If you have a question about anything you heard on this podcast or any other puppy training question, visit my site BaxterandBella.com to contact me.