Avoid THESE Puppy Training First Week MISTAKES!

We know that what puppies learn first, they learn best. So that's why it's really important that you're intentional with what you teach them the very first week home. If you've been following our series so far, you would have seen that we are giving you tons of information about the first day home first night home with your puppy.

But if this is your first time visiting our series, let me bring you up to speed. This is our new puppy vlog. Now as a dog trainer, for more than 20 years, I have raised and trained a lot of dogs already.

In this series, I'm gonna share with you some tips and tricks that I've learned along the way. And I bet many of them you've never heard of I'm Kayl McCann. This is eight-week-old week old mixed-breed puppy, 5-Alive.

Welcome back to McCann Dogs Here on this YouTube channel, we make videos specifically to help you to have a four-legged family member. So if this is your first time here, make sure you hit that subscribe button. In today's video, we are gonna be talking about 5-alive's first week home, all the things we've accomplished in one week, how we did that and where you should be with your puppies after the first week home as well.

First, we need to talk about house training. Now, remember when it comes to house training, your puppy is gonna have to go to the bathroom. At specific times throughout the day.

It's usually gonna be when they wake up from a nap after they had a big play, after you fed them first thing in the morning, right before they go to bed, all of these times are gonna be times that you can be proactive in knowing when your puppy needs to go outside. Now we've done pretty good with our house training because I, we are pretty able to predict a lot of these things, but I will be honest. We have had a few accidents.

Now I can tell you exactly why or where we went wrong with our two accidents. Both times it was in exactly the same scenario. It was right after I had a little play time with him.

And this is actually where a lot of people make the mistake. They often will play with a puppy. They're having such a great time.

Oh, did you get a little Fox Fox. And then they don't really realize that after the dogs had all that en exercise, they actually have to go to the bathroom. And this was certainly the case with me.

Now, I had let him out for a pee. I had come in and played. I think I might have looked at my phone for two seconds or was doing something on the countertop.

And he squatted to have a pee feet. Now, luckily he was only within six feet of me or so, and I was able to catch him in the act. I was able to mark him right away and then get him outside.

And I actually think that because that happened twice and I was right there to catch him. It sort of propelled the whole asking to go outside thing even better. Now it's okay.

If your puppy has a, not that you want them to have a lot of accidents, but if they have one or two and you're able to catch them in the act with really good timing, it allows them to know the rules of the house. You can then say, Nope, this is wrong. But this is where I want you to go instead, when you take them outside, make sure you praise them and you let them know.

Because that sort of starts to teach the dog to have a little bit of responsibility. On the flipside, though. It is important that you are still really aware of when your puppy needs to go to the bathroom.

And what's nice about having a week with him is we started to learn a little bit more about his schedule. I now know, after seven days of having him, he's gonna go outside in the morning, he's gonna have two pee's and one poo. So if that doesn't happen in the morning and we come in and we start playing around, I know that there's still some left in the tank that he's gonna have to go to the bathroom.

I know he always has to pee when he wakes up for him a nap. I know he usually has to pee after we've had a play. So because I'm learning about his schedule, it allows me to be more proactive and prevent those accidents from happening now, with all of this really great information with little five alive here, midweek, the coolest thing started to happen.

And I am so glad that we had a camera set up to catch this, but he was, we were playing around in the kitchen. He ran over to the door and he started to just sort of look at the door, indicate at the door. And at first I wasn't really sure if he was actually putting it together or not.

So I just sort of waited for a second. And then, because I wasn't really reacting. He actually came to the door a second time.

And because I was watching him so closely, I was able to say, do you have to go outside? And then we went, and that actually happened a couple times and within the next day or so, he actually moved from just going to look at the door to literally jumping up with his paws on the door. He started to figure out by doing this sign, mom's gonna take me outside.

And then she is gonna go so crazy and excited because I go to the bathroom outside. But those things are really hard to do. If you're not supervising your puppy really closely.

And you're not aware of when they might have to go to the washroom, but it is absolutely possible within one week of your puppy being home, that they can at least start in the process of letting you know when they need to go out. So at the end of week one, your puppy should be at the point where they're not having accidents in the house regularly anymore. You also should also should be at the point where you have a good sense of what your puppy's potty schedule is knowing when they have to pee or poo throughout the day.

So you can be proactive. And lastly, you should at least be on your way to teaching your puppy. How to ask you to go outside.

There's lots of different ways to do that for us going to the doors, what works best for us, but you should be in the process of that starting to happen. You might not be perfect, but you should be on your way. Next, let's talk about crate training.

Go kennel. Yes. Good boy.

In terms of crate training, this is an area where we have really lucked out. This puppy has been really, really great with crate training. But I wanna break down a few reasons why I think it's gone so well.

Firstly, one of the reasons why 5 is fairly comfortable in his crate already is because we introduced the crate the very first day he came home. He'll be able to watch a lot of that in our first day home video, but basically we utilized it right away. Secondly is when 5 goes into his crate.

Often we put him in his crate after he's had some type of physical or mental stimulation, which means typically most times when he's going in there, he's kind of ready to go in for a nap or to kind of veg out for a little bit. Now that's not to say that if we've just played with him, taken him out for a pee and put him in, he hasn't whimpered a little bit for a few minutes, but typically he then sort of settles down and he goes to sleep. The other thing that we've spent a lot of time with is teaching him that going in his crate is a really fun thing.

So we played little crate games with him. I've taken some treats, thrown them in the back of the crate and by a week weeks gone by, he started to put together, if you want. Yes.

Good boy. You gotta go all the way in though. If you want these treats, you gotta go in your crate.

Good boy. Ready? Okay.

Go in. Yes. Good.

I just started off by Luing him in the crate a few times. Yes. Good boy.

We've done a little bit of offering. Okay, good boy. So again, anytime initially when he went near the crate, yes.

Good boy. Anything to do with the crate I would reward and then we've built up yes. To be able to actually remain in the crate.

Yes. With the door. Open me.

Not at much of a distance. Oops. I was not paying attention to you.

Yes. Good boy. Okay.

Okay. Yes. See, there's so much value for being in the crate.

Sometimes he doesn't wanna come out. Good boy. Another thing that's really helped with his crate training is we've been selective about how long he spends in the crate and also where the crate is.

So if it's time where we just want him to go in his crate and chill out. So he is not loose with us all the time, you know, late at night, if we wanna watch TV or, you know, if we just want, you know, a puppy break, I don't know how you would ever wanna break from this puppy, cuz he's so cute. But sometimes, you know, he needs to just go away and he, his crate and have a bit of just downtime.

We will sometimes put the crate in the room that we're at. So if this is our TV room, we would put him in the crate here. I don't always ask him to go in with a cookie.

Sometimes I just put him in there. I put him in there, close the door, he's got a Kong in there. He's got a chew bone in there.

And then we would sit on the, the couch and we would relax for a little bit. Some puppies will be more settled in their crate if they can see you. But it is also important that this isn't the only thing that you do.

And you should also have your puppy crate in a different room. So for instance, we might have him stay crated here in the kitchen where we would be in the other room, you know, watching TV or having dinner or maybe upstairs working in the office. So it is important that your puppy realizes that they should go in their crate and that it could be in a location where people are walking by all day long or maybe sometimes they're gonna be on their own.

And it's really helpful if you introduce your puppy to both styles. So they don't become too anxious or unsure. If they, you know, can't see you anymore, this is going to enable you to leave the house a little bit more easily.

So make sure you balance it out. Sometimes the crate's with you and sometimes it's not. So at the end of the first week, in terms of your crate training, you should probably be sort of near the following.

Number one, you should be utilizing your crate many times throughout the day. When you can't supervise your puppy and they should be comfortable able to pop in and out of the crate all day long, number two, the length of time, this is gonna vary per puppy, but they should be able to go in their crate for a few hours and be comfortable with that. Now that is provided that you've given them adequate exercise.

You've kind of trained them. You've done a little bit. So by the time they go in, they are ready to nap.

So if you are going to get to a point where you need your puppy to spend hours in the crate at a time, you need to make sure that what happens before that is really important. That's something that I've had to utilize immensely this week because I had to teach, I had to do a bunch of things and I needed to prepare him to be in the crate for a few hours. So what we did beforehand was really helpful.

The third thing is that trying to utilize feeding time to bring value to the crate. So a little bit of their breakfast, a little bit of their dinner every single day should be used in the crate, crate door closed and let them have it from there. You could certainly use the rest of it for training and for certain things, but that's just such an easy time to build value for the crate.

And last but not least by the end of the first week, your puppy should be comfortable being crated both in the same room with you. And then also when you're not in the same room. And you can start to work on this with your puppy for smart small periods of time, many times throughout the day, and also in the evening.

Let's talk about the house-line. Now our house line already after seven days looks really ratty. And one of the reasons why it looks like this is because we have used this on his collar every single second that he has been out of his crate.

Now, if you've watch any of our other videos, you'll know that we are big lovers of having a house leash or a house-line on our young puppies or really before they are trustworthy before they're fully trained to understand the rules of the house. And the wonderful thing about the house-line is that when our puppy makes a poor choice or if they get into mischief or we need to get ahold of them, we never have to chase after the actual puppy and scare them or intimidate them. We can utilize the line to get control.

A common frustration from some of our puppy owners is that the puppies can often chew on their house line and then people are hesitant to use it. And this has happened with 5 -Alive the first couple days. In fact, to this day, he still will chew on it from time to time.

You can see there's all kinds of bite marks on there, but again, because we're supervising our puppy, we can just stop them in the act of doing it. Typically what we've each time he's chewed on his line is we've marked it with a little ah ah or leave it. And then we've just compensated by giving him something else he should chew.

It's also really good practice for them to chew on a bone or something and have the house-line attached so that I can move it all around. And he just says, oh, I love this bone you've given me. That's great.

So make sure that if you are utilizing the house line and they go to chew it, that you're ready to switch them for something else, they, they should chew instead. And the novelty really does wear off over time. But the amount of times that you'll utilize this to get control of your puppy you will be so grateful that you have it attached to their collar.

So at the end of week, one, in terms of your house line, you should be really consistent and it should be just old habit of putting it on every single time they come outta their crate. And if you do have a puppy that's still pretty interested in chewing on it. You just need to be ready to be switching them for something else at this point.

And I promise you, the novelty will wear off soon. Next let's talk about skills. And this is my favorite thing to work on in the week, because this is just such a great way to start molding and shaping my puppy to learn all of the good things.

Now, we have been doing a ton this week in terms of training skills, but the kind of stuff that you've been that we've been working on might surprise you. Basically in the initial week, my biggest goal is to teach him that learning and working with me is a lot of fun. And I've done various things of starting to teach him about his obedience skills.

We've started working on a couple little tricks. Paw. Yes.

Good boy. Shake. Yes.

Good boy. We've started to work on getting him comfortable with handling so that I can start up his toils. We've done all kinds of things, confidence building getting him on different surfaces that might wobble and move.

Just giving him some worldly experience. I have practiced some luring exercises where I'm using the food and I've also worked on some rule out types of things so that he's learning yes, to have some manners, very good boy, around food, all kinds of things to teach him that learning and listening is fun. Now what's more important about what we have been working on.

It's what we haven't been working on. And this is the part that I think will surprise you at this point know with the McCann method, we are all about setting the puppy up to be successful because really what they learn first, they learn best. So this week we have not done any walking training.

We have not gone on even one walk together. I also really haven't used his name at all, unless I've been training him unless I've been backing it up with some type of food lure or tug toy or something, that's gonna get him to respond. I have not put him in any type of scenario where I have tested or just seen guessed as to whether he was gonna respond to me or not.

I need to remember that with a puppy. He doesn't know anything. It's my job in this first week.

And actually in the first couple weeks to mold and shape him to learn, this is your name. This is what you do when you hear it. Something like, sit for example.

Here pup. At this point, I'm not gonna tell him, sit and expect him to hold position. I'm gonna tell him sit.

Yes. And then I'm gonna feed him every couple of seconds. Good sit.

Good boy. Good sit. Yes.

Good sit. I'm gonna do things that are gonna help him to be successful successful instead of expecting that he's gonna come to my house, knowing what to do. And so in terms of what you guys should be doing with your puppies is you wanna model that training plan.

You're gonna set your puppy up to be successful by teaching them and showing them how to do things, right. And you're not going to put inappropriate expectations on them because they're just not ready for that yet. Now, eventually down the road, of course you can test all of these things, but try not to be testing your puppy for things that you have not really taken the time to train them to do quite yet.

If you're looking for a training plan that's specific to you and your puppy, and you wanna work with me and the team of McCann Dogs instructors, make sure you check out our Puppy Essentials online course. The link for that is in the description below. So at the end of the first week, in terms of your skills, you should be working on the following.

Number one, your puppy should have a pretty good idea of what the word yes is now because you've done lots of loading up that yes, command your puppy should also have a really good, a positive association with their name. So you wanna take a lot of time to load up their name. Again, we're not testing them or showing our puppies how to respond to their name.

You also could start some of their positions, teaching them to sit, lie down, stand, make sure their body can go in different positions. Again, we're not really worrying too much about the word at this point. We're just, luring our puppies and helping them to go into position.

I would definitely suggest that you start a few trick tricks with your puppy. They can be super simple things, but the tricks are really great for your puppy's and development. It's really great for problem solving.

It's definitely something that we would recommend that you start a lot of your time on and last but not least something to do along with your recalls. You know, whether you play some recall games up and down the hallway, maybe some restraint recalls things that are gonna start to build a lot of value for your probably following you and end coming to you. But again, none of these things incorporate any testing whatsoever.

We are still showing, helping molding our puppies to do what we want them to do by making it a really positive experience. So that our puppies are successful pretty much a hundred percent of the time. The great thing about having your puppy home for a week is it gives you an opportunity to really learn a little bit more about what kind of puppy they are.

Now, what we've learned from 5-Alive for this for first week home is that he is very food motivated. And we're very happy about that because that's gonna make a lot of the training and a bunch of other things really, really easy. He's also really toy motivated.

I've also learned that if he's really hungry, he's not interested it in going for the toys. He likes the food more than the toys. So this is an important uh thing to understand about your puppy because when it comes time to training or figuring out what's rewarding to your puppy, you should be able to start to build a bit of a value system.

You know, if I have a list of toys and a list of treats, I wanna be able to easily number them as top one all the way, like maybe the, the least valuable and compare that against one another so that when I'm in a distracting environment or any little bit more focus, I know exactly the tools to bring with me to that training session. The other thing I've learned about five alive is that he's a really energetic working dog. He likes to go and go and go and go.

And he's got lots of energy, which is great. So I could actually train him for a pretty long period of time. I have noticed though, is that if I'm working him and he starts to feel a little disengaged, or he kind of wants to move away from me that's sort of his sign that says you've trained me a little bit too long, or it's usually because he has to go to the bathroom.

So I need to get to the point where I'm able to predict those things and then, and quit while I'm ahead in terms of socialization and exposure. He's a pretty confident, happy go lucky dog. But this week I've specifically made you know, times where I can go and meet family members or friends, people I know that are gonna be really great with him, so that all the people he meets for the first time are gonna give him really positive.

And you know, easygoing experiences at this point in time, I'm not just gonna stop with any random person on the street or whatnot. I need to make sure that, you know, all of the first times that he sees people it's gonna be a really, really good situation. He's met lots of new people this week.

One thing that he has not done is he hasn't met any dogs this week. And I've been pretty strict about that because I wanna make sure that I have a pretty good understanding of the temperament and the type of dog he is before I expose him to any new dogs. Now I'm certainly gonna be very selective about dogs that are not our own for him to greet, but in terms of our own dogs, we actually haven't, he hasn't met any of them yet.

We've kept them completely separated because we wanna have a little bit more time to get, to get to know him a little bit more, maybe put a few skills under his belt so that he listens a little better. Maybe next week, we'll start to integrate some of the older dogs that aren't really gonna care and not gonna mind him too much. And then we'll go from there because they certainly don't want him learning to bother the other dogs, jump on them, bug them or be too much.

So we're gonna do that very carefully. What kind of things did you know about your puppy after the first week home? Well, you're gonna wanna know, are they food motivated?

What is their favorite treat at this point? Are they motivated by toys? Do they have a, a favorite toy that you could use for training and teaching them new things?

What about things at their attention span? You know, are they are a, a puppy that easily focuses on you or do you need a little work, work a little harder to maybe make less distractions when you're, when you're doing your training? And then what about their confidence level?

How do they handle, you know, new places, new people, new things. Is this something that you're gonna have to approach differently with your puppy? So making sure that you have a good understanding of, of the type of puppy that you're working with, again, it's not specific to breed, it's specific to brains and personality, because that's gonna allow you to make the best choices with your puppy going forward.

We have had a pretty successful first week home. And part of the reason why is that we have avoided a lot of the big mistakes that people often make. And if you wanna learn what those mistakes are, click this card right here, we're really enjoying bringing you along in this journey as 5-Alive grows up with us.

But if this is your first time on this channel, make sure you hit that subscribe button. On that note, I'm Kayl. This is 5-Alive, Happy Training.