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All the things I wish I knew before I got my first ever puppy!
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I think it’s safe to say that most new puppy owners are counting down the days till they can take their little bundle of fluff out in the big wide world and show them off to everyone! For a lot of people it’s the 12 week mark, although some vaccinations allow puppy’s out at 10 weeks as long as they avoid grass and water. For us with Cooper it was 12 weeks.
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It became clear the day we got him that:
1) He did NOT like having a collar on and
2) He hated the lead even more!
It’s just something you have to persevere with and not give in to them. The collar he got used to in a couple of days, the lead was a bit of a longer process and took many a treat and many a walks down the end of the garden before he would walk with it and not just sit and eat it.
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There’s a lot of debate between collar vs harness with walking, I’ve done both. Day to day I have Cooper on a harness, but the training school we’ve been going to recommends using a collar, and to be honest I just got fed up with the lecture from the instructors every lesson!
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Personally I prefer the harness, especially starting out. You have so much more control over your dog and where the lead is picked to their back instead of their neck, it’s a lot harder for them to get at it and eat it. It also seems to annoy them less!
As a larger breed dog, we’ve been following the guidelines re: walks, and that is, as I understand it, 5 minutes per month of age twice a day, so a 2 month old pup would have 10 minutes twice a day, and a 6 month old pup would have 30 minutes twice a day etc.
This all made sense until we actually put it into practice. I thought Cooper would be chomping at the bit to start walking, which was half true. He chomps at everything! Stones, leaves, twigs, peoples rubbish, if it’s on the pavement he wants to stop and sniff/eat it. Not to mention the fact that the first time he was out he was terrified by cars, vans and even worse…buses!
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Instead of what would have been 2 walks of 15 minutes a day, the trainer recommended to us, weather permitting, to do 5 short walks with him every day, just up and down our stretch of road to build up his confidence. Fortunately the weather wasn’t too hot at the time so I could follow through on his advice and it worked wonders!
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As we started to increase the length of his walks we were increasingly confused by the 5min/month rule, was it X min of actual time spent walking, or X minutes overall. Some days Cooper really is not interested in walking in the slightest and it can take 20 minutes just to get him to the end of our road, other days he would have done the 1.7km block in that time!
Fortunately I found a screenshot that someone had posted from a Labrador site. Both breeds suffer from hip dysplasia- one of what I understand to be the main reasons behind limiting their walks while still growing, therefore the person who posted it said it would be similar.
This was a MASSIVE help, and a great guide for us to follow, especially if we ended up doing a long walk in the morning or afternoon, we knew what ‘distance’ we had left, if any, to go in the evening.
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Another massive help for us was when we started going to the puppy training classes and the instructors explained walking in more detail. I didn’t realise how much there was to it!
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The first trainer we spoke to just said, if your dog pulls on the lead, just stop. Then start again, and just repeat over and over again until your pup gets the message. It was good advice, but Cooper didn’t really pull much, so it wasn’t overly relevant.
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The training school however explained more about the behavioural side of dogs. When you’re walking your dog, you want your dog to be walking at your heel alongside you. Going back to pack mentality, if you let your dog walk in front of you, in their eyes, that means that they’re the leader of the pack and they can do whatever they want. When they’re kept on a short leash next to you, that means you’re the leader and they should follow you. Obviously it’s all well and good just saying it, in reality it’s a lot harder to get your pup to do it!
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I have written an article on my top 10 tips on walking your dog. Please see the link below
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