How I'm getting ready for Puppy

I can’t believe there’s going to be a puppy here soon. It has been SO LONG since I have had to worry about managing a puppy in the house. Betsy was just a chill old lady who knew the rules and didn’t cause any trouble. She did develop one less-than-desirable behaviour in her old age (ahem ahem, counter surfing the kids leftover food) but overall was just a good, well behaved dog. And even the counter surfing I was a bit “whatever” about because she was old and it didn’t really matter that much for our day-to-day so I was fine to let her be a bit naughty in this area.

As a puppy she was honestly pretty easy too. We managed her environment to avoid problem behaviour and it seemed to work well. I can only think of 2 things she ever destroyed as a pup, during the odd moment when I got distracted while she was roaming the house: The cord to my hair straightener and the cord to my husband’s headphones. That was it. Otherwise she never really did anything bad or got into trouble. Her counter-surfing was a late-life addition, caused by the children gradually teaching her that this was a rewarding experience with no consequences.

Here’s a picture of Betsy at age ~4 months showing off her impulse control around food.

With this puppy I have no idea what to expect. Was Betsy an easy puppy, or were we just on-top-of-things and good at raising puppies? I have no way to know with a sample size of one.

I hear horror stories of people waking up to a trail of poop around their house, chewed up belongings, and aggressive biting and I’m trembling a little 😊

So! Here’s where we are at prep wise:

• In the kitchen I’ve set up a puppy zone. This is where puppy will hang when people aren’t available to keep an eye on it. It’s an x pen with a yoga mat for traction, a water dish, and a crate. We’ll rotate some toys and food-stuffed kongs in there most likely.
• We own 3 dog beds. 2 belonged to Betsy, which we’ll clean up and reuse, and 1 is new for puppy. They’ll be scattered around the house and puppy will be rewarded whenever she is caught calmly using one of them.
• Downstairs is where I plan on doing early training. We have a quiet boring room down there.
• We have collars, harnesses, leashes, poop bags, clickers, toothbrush, groomer towels, and more.

Here’s what I’m thinking training wise in the first few weeks, roughly in order of priority, although I’ll be working on all of these around the same time:

• Gradually introducing various handling & husbandry concepts in a way that means puppy will be able to tolerate it, including touching, tooth brushing, nail trims, and using our walk in shower for getting cleaned. I feel like I neglected this with Betsy and it wasn’t until quite late in life that I got her to be ok with nail trims (1 piece of cheese per nail was how I eventually got her to accept that nail trims are tolerable), and she NEVER was ok with getting washed.
• Some basics, like settling and calm behaviour, lying on bed when I’m cooking in the kitchen. We did this with Betsy and it definitely paid off, she developed a pavlovian behaviour of lying down whenever I was cooking in the kitchen and it was infinitely better than her getting up in my face and being annoying.
• Name recognition and eye contact
• Loose leash walking
• Simple obedience: Sit, hand target, down, come when called, heel position

From there we’ll see where we go. Proofing some of these behaviours & making them harder, for sure. Introducing some basic agility concepts (ground exercises only, nothing hard on the joints), and possibly introducing some ckc nosework scents. We’re enrolled already in some puppy classes with a local trainer which I think will be nice for working on training in new environments/with distraction, as well as just the socialization opportunity. Assuming that goes well we’ll sign up for more classes with the same trainer, or maybe try somewhere new.

Something I’d love to do but probably won’t do: Join a local dog agility club and show up with puppy at training nights to get puppy used to the chaos before we actually start agility (I am too shy to do this and have a bit of imposter syndrome just waltzing up with a puppy when I know NO ONE who is a member there)

Here’s Betsy at around 10 weeks meeting my mom and her two dogs.

Something I did with Betsy that I want to re-consider with this dog: How we socialize with other dogs. I took her to a lot of “puppy playtime” classes and also let her play with dogs we met on walks quite often. She loved it but developed a fixation with greeting dogs and it was very frustrating to manage. I want my next dog to be more dog neutral so I’m trying to modify this approach so that she’s still comfortable with other dogs, but doesn’t assume every dog is a potential playmate.

Anyway that’s it! We have most of what we need, we have a plan… How will it all turn out 😆 Time will tell.

Here’s the setup I have ready for this puppy: