The BIGGEST Mistake That New Puppy Owners Make...

Welcome back to McCann Dogs, I'm Kayl McCann. Because we train over 600 dogs a week, we end up seeing a lot of the same problems. People often come in and they feel so bad that their puppy's doing this one thing wrong, but we've seen it hundreds of times before.

We have over 40 instructors that teach here in our school and also online. And I thought it would be really fun to ask them all the same question. And that is, what is the biggest mistake that new puppy owners make?

Let's go see what they have to say. I would say the biggest mistake is giving a dog too much freedom. Too much freedom, too.

Much freedom. Too. Much freedom.

Too much freedom. Too much freedom Too soon. What is too much freedom?

Too much freedom is not enough supervision. Now, as you would imagine, supervision means you need to actually watch your puppy all of the time, but I don't know anybody that could actually watch their puppy 24 hours a day, seven days a week. So today we're gonna talk to you about two tools that are gonna make a massive difference in your ability to successfully train your puppy.

Now, before we get to that, I wanna spell out what supervision actually means. Cuz although a lot of people think that they're supervising their puppy, supervision doesn't count if you're in the kitchen and you're making dinner or you're in your office and you're typing an email and your puppy's just hanging out with you. That's not actually supervision.

I can tell you all kinds of times where people are distracted and behind them, the puppy's chewing on the table leg or they've had an accident. Supervision means you have two eyeballs on the puppy and you're actively watching and engaging with them. And if you're not able to do that, there's where these two tools are gonna come in handy.

The first tool I wanna talk to you about is this ratty looking thing here. And this is a very well used house line or long line. And this is something that we use to control our puppy's freedom in the house.

So if our puppies are out and about, they're having some play time or doing some training, we always have some type of leash or line attached to their collar always 100% of the time. I can't drive that home enough. And this is really important because it's going to allow me to very easily and calmly get control of my puppy in any moment's notice.

Now what I usually will do is grab a, a leash, could just be a cheap leash. We cut off the end of the leash, so that the handle doesn't get caught on things and they will sort of drag this around the house. Um, where we are now, we often will restrict them to, you know, certain areas with us, but this line is gonna be used for all kinds of situations where our puppies are gonna make normal puppy choices.

Things like chewing things or going behind the couch. Maybe they have an accident or jumping, nipping, biting, whatever it might be. Having a line on our puppy allows us to easily get control.

Now some people think when they get a line that they're just gonna hook it onto their puppy and boom, it just happens to train the dog perfectly on their own. But the line is just sort of that, that halfway point between them and you giving them good information. So it's not really the line that does all of the work, it's what you do with the line.

When the puppies, you know, go to make a mistake. They're babies. They're puppies, they are going to make those mistakes.

But if you're supervising them, you're able to catch them right in the moment of them making that poor choice. And now I can, can easily stop them by immobilizing them, stepping on the line, using the line to take the puppy away from wherever they're getting into mischief, and then I can redirect them to something that they should be doing. And by having really great, uh, supervision during that time where I'm giving them a bit more freedom, even though they're not actually completely free yet, it allows me to make sure that I'm teaching my puppy the rules of the house.

And I'm able to do that in a really calm and positive manner. With anything in dog training, there's lots of nuances you need to know about using different tools, but I wanna answer two of the most common questions we get about using the house line. The first is, how long do I need to use a house line for?

And really that's dog dependent. It really depends on, uh, how well you do at supervising. It depends on the relationship you have with your puppy, how consistent you are.

But basically the golden rule is you're going to use it until you can't remember the last time you had to use it. So if it's attached to your puppy and you don't have to step on it, you don't have to pick it up to follow through with anything, then you might start thinking about graduating to, uh, lessening the line. For most puppies, this takes months to do because as your puppy goes, grows from baby puppy to, you know, middle aged puppy to adolescent, they're gonna go through lots of little, you know, bumps and, and and, um, hiccups along the way.

And you may need to use the line, remove the line, use the line, remove the line depending on what that particular puppy needs in the moment. And the second question we get asked a lot is, I would love to use the line, but my puppy just wants to eat it. And this is really common.

If you can imagine, you know, it looks sort of like a dangly tug toy attached to the puppy's collar all of the time. But I assure you, if you use the line religiously, the novelty of the line quickly wears off. You know, when I got my new puppy, I put the line on the first day he came home and he was interested in the first couple days, but because it was there all of the time and I was supervising him, I don't just put the line on and let him go do his thing.

Every time you went to put the line in his mouth, I would address that and I would show him something else to chew. Instead, through a few days of great, uh, information and consistency, he learned that that was just an extra line on his body. So you have to work through it.

It's very common. A lot of puppies do it. Um, it's just as something that you have to work through, just like many other things that you'll come across with your puppy training.

Now I wanna tell you another thing that is really important about using a house line. And that is the house line is not a leash. And what I mean by that is that you're not really supposed to be having it in your hand and walking your puppy around the house.

This is actually gonna be used as like an extra appendage on your puppy. It's gonna just drag around on the floor. And if you need to stop your puppy from doing something, you're going to be better off just going up and stepping on the line to stop your puppy from wherever, wherever they're going.

If they go to boot down the hallway with socks in the mouth or whatever the situation is, you can stop your puppy, uh, with your foot on the line and then you can pick the line up and, you know, follow through with whatever you need to at that point. But it's not intended for you to hold it and walk them around the house. It's just supposed to give you a nice bridge between having complete off-leash freedom, which is the ultimate goal down the road to being able to get control whenever you need to very easily.

The second tool that we're gonna talk about in order to easily control your puppy's freedom is the use, the proper use of a crate. When I talk about the use of the crate, I'm not talking about the puppy being in the crate all day long because our puppies do need to be out and being given freedom to play and explore and be trained. When we're talking about the crate, we're talking about when to use it during the day that's gonna help you control their freedom and allow you to be a better supervisor.

Unfortunately, when people are crate changing their puppy, they tend to only use it in two different places. One, when they're going out and two when they're going to sleep, and then they're letting the puppy be free out of their crate all day long. And that's when most of the problems happen.

That's when most of the puppies are making their poor mistakes. What we wanna suggest to you is that you are gonna use the crate many times during the day, sometimes longer periods of time, sometimes shorter periods of time, you're gonna use them every time. You don't have the ability to keep those two eyeballs on the puppy.

They might be very simple situations like when you have to have a shower or when you're cooking dinner or you're helping kids with a homework, or you have to write that email, that's gonna take you a half an hour when your mind has to be and your focus has to be on something else. Those are perfect times to put your puppy in the crate With our suggestion of increasing crate time with your puppy. We certainly don't want you to be spending less time with them.

So one of the things I might recommend is moving the crate to a really localized place in your house so that you probably could be hanging out in their crate, chewing a bone or doing something that's, you know, fun, uh, but they're with you. Maybe they're in the kitchen with you or they're up in your office or wherever it might be. So you're still spending time together, but at the same time, you're not constantly worried about what they're doing.

Now with is increased, uh, crate time, some of you may fall into the trap of the dogs barking or maybe being a little bit unsettled. We actually have a ton of videos about crate location, about how to deal with barking and the crate. So I definitely suggest that you check those out.

Crates are used for prevention, not correction. So what I mean by this is we don't want you to wait for your puppy to make a poor choice and then banish them to their crate as a discipline for making that that poor error. That's not really clear information and that certainly doesn't teach your puppy to love their crate, which is the ultimate goal.

Instead, you're better off using the crate to prevent your dog from making poor choices so that when you take them outta their crate and you're ready to give them a bit of freedom, you're doing that at a time where you actually can pay close attention to what they're doing. So if they make a poor choice, you're there to help them through it. The crate needs to be a way to prevent those things from happening with repetition.

Um, and in the meantime, you need to make special effort to make the crate a special place for your puppy. We instill this in our puppies from a very, very young age, so that they feel safe and calm and relaxed in their little den area so that they're happily, uh, able to go there and chill out when we're busy doing other things. It's not uncommon for people to ask us how long they need to keep using a crate in their house with their puppy.

And, um, you know, the answer is sort of however long your dog needs it. You know, as long as your training is going well, your puppy's no longer chewing things, they have a really strong understanding of house training, they're respectful, um, they're learning how to behave outside of their crate, um, then you can slowly start to wean off of it. And if later on down the road you don't wanna use it anymore, that's totally up to you.

But it is something that we would encourage you to transition away from very gradually. Again, dogs are gonna go through lots of different periods in their life in terms of their success and how well they're doing. And then, you know, sometimes they have a bit of regression.

So being able to utilize the crate during those moments are gonna help you navigate that much more easily. The importance of these two tools are to allow you to have more control over your puppy, um, when you are giving them a bit of free time. And remember, the ultimate goal here is that we're trying to provide a lot of clarity and consistency in the setup of our dogs learning when they're at home.

Um, this is also important for your family members to be on board as well. You wanna make sure that everybody sort of has the same goals and the same ideas and expectations, um, that they want for their puppies. Because consistency with the different people in the household, with the rules, with your follow through, they're gonna allow your puppy to feel more at peace.

They're going to be less confused, and that leads to a, a happier and more well rounded puppy. In the end today, the things we've talked about is just the tip of the iceberg in terms of all of the things we wanna work on with the puppy. So if you wanna learn more about it, check out our online Puppy Essentials program where we're gonna walk you through the entire process step by step.

The link for that is in the description below. Great supervision only works if you are a great leader. So to make sure that you're not being a bad leader for your dog, check out the video right there on that note, I'm Kayl Happy training.