Our focus this week will be on reinforcing all the skills we’ve been working on — all those obedience basics that are simply part of being a good canine citizen — in a variety of environments, with varying degrees of distractions.

We’re also specifically working on impulse control. There are lots of fun games you can play with a puppy to help them build their “think before you act” skills. Here are some of my favorites!

1. Fetch for a Price: Now that Waffles has a really good retrieve going, we’re kicking the impulse control up a notch. Before the ball-on-a-rope is thrown, he must either sit, lie down, heel-and-sit, spin-finish to a heel and sit from a front. Sometime he can “get it!” right away, sometimes he may be made to wait, mark, and go. (This is a favorite game at the moment!)
   
2. Tug: with our game of fetch often comes tug, but tug involves a release and wait to “get it!” again loop. We also play tug with toy at the end of a long line. This week, part of the goal is to turn to Tug as part of our bite inhibition training. Done right, when combined with impulse control training, it’s truly a godsend.
   
3. Leave it: food in a closed fist, wait until puppy stops trying to get to it, reward them for making the choice to offer anything other than “GIMME THAT TREAT NOOOOW, WAAAH!”
   
   
4. Same as number 3, but with an open hand. Make a move towards the treats and the hand closes. When they make the choice to leave the treats alone, reward with the other hand, from another treat source.
   
   
5. Place/Mat training, learning the art of relaxing and enjoying a good chew or Kong while resisting the urge to dart off whenever a squirrel farts in the wind out in the yard.
   

On the frustration tolerance front, we work using scatter feeding, introducing new puzzles that require a little more thinking and time, and more complicated food puzzles. He’s being encouraged to work on those things on his own and to stick to it.

He’ll also be working in earnest on communication button cues this week, shifting from passively learning to actively using the cues himself — this is an exercise in frustration tolerance in its own right! He’ll still work with “Outside”, “Play”, and we’ll be adding “All Done”, “Train”, and “Yard”. We’ll document how it goes!

The final thing we’ll be spending a lot of time on this week is settling and calming down from aroused states. It’s a skill every dog needs to learn, and it takes time to build up. It’ll come!

Here’s to another great training week ahead. I’m hoping that he has stopped summoning up demons (still haven’t found the pentagram) but I’ll be sure to call for an exorcist if we need one. Puppyhood, man. It’s a THING.