It was a quiet week in the Breakfast Food training world — Waffles is learning the basics like a pro and growing like a weed. He’s gone out to do some socialization work, some public training work, and a lot of distraction training. It’s been a great week! He handles automatic doors like a pro and can focus on basic obedience drills in a busy (and smelly!) store environment with a pretty decent amount of impulse control. I love watching puppies actively make choices when it comes to behavior. It so rewarding to watch the wheels and cogs turn in Waffles’ little head — seeing a shopping trolley come right by him, watching his nose twitch as he considers sniffing at it and the person walking by, but then turning his head to look up at me instead. Good puppy! Jackpot treat it is! The hardest part of that sort of thing, as a trainer, is staying quiet while they decide what behavior they’re going to offer you! With working dogs, we do need a dog who follows directions when asked — but we also need a dog who is able to be creatively disobedient if the handler’s commands will put the working team in harm’s way, or if the dog observes something the handler missed. You build that sort of skillset by allowing puppies to make choices without guidance and rewarding the choices you want them to see making without your input. It’s all impulse control at this age!

Now that he’s fully vaccinated, Waffles gets to enjoy training walks on well-travelled paths around the neighborhood and in the woods nearby. We’re working hard on our recall and on distraction training and so far, so good! He’s a very easy puppy — at least for now. We’ll see what the Adolescence Fairy does to our brain once we hit 6 months.

This week, we’ll be putting a lot of energy into distraction training and extending the length of our “stay” and “wait” commands. We also have Puppy Kindergarten graduation on Tuesday! Working with and around Jacques Hughes, the cat, is also in the plans.

We’ll also continue to work on our off-switch: Learning to be bored (and choosing to nap instead of causing trouble) is an important part of learning how to be a household companion and a good working dog. We’re also putting a lot of energy into building focus and impulse control — that’ll be an ongoing theme for the next year and a half! It’s all coming along really well!

Waffles’ focus during training is improving every day, and he really enjoys working and learning things. He’s currently particularly fond of the “middle” command, which involves walking between the handler’s knees at the equivalent of a “heel”, forwards and backwards, and automatically sitting when the handler stops. When asked to, the dog is then expected to walk alone forward and spin into a sit-at-heel. I think he thinks it’s just a fun trick! Later, this is turned into a very specific service dog task, facing both front and behind the handler. More on this at a later date! Right now, we’re just laying foundations down.

This age is one of my favorites — the chomps are starting to subside a little, and puppies are just really eager to learn and to please. We have about two more months before the adolescent brain settles in, but he will hopefully have some good foundations and habits in place to help us survive the rocky patch the hormones bring.

Speaking of habits, maintaining a schedule of sorts is super helpful for surviving your doggo’s puppyhood: I keep a set wake time (7am) and a set bedtime (9pm), and regular naps in their crates so they can’t get into trouble and can’t get overtired. Right now, Waffles is up doing stuff for an hour, then sleeping for 1.5-2.5 hours. He always naps in his crate and gets a wee puppy Kong with a single small frozen treat (super high-value, to him!) He always tackles the treat by licking, which is calming, and then passes out within 2-3 minutes.

When he’s up and about, we do in-house leashing while puttering around, structured training time, loose playtime (which is always educational in some way, he just doesn’t know it!), fun walks and enrichment time… all contribute to a puppy who is fulfilled and willing to just roll with whatever the day brings. Generally, when my puppy is awake there are eyes on him to keep him from doing naughty stuff, and we’re actively engaged together at least 75% of that time. (If I can’t have eyes on him, he’s in his crate or in his big pen where he can’t get into trouble!) That doesn’t mean he’s being interacted with for every second he’s up and about! But a puppy is pretty much like a human toddler: it’s best to keep them contained and supervised lest they eat the potted plants or stick forks into power outlets. The last fifteen minutes of the hour block of time he’s up and awake is spent doing relaxing activities: sniffing, licking, chewing, seek-and-destroying… things that send calming signals to his little brain and start putting him into “welp, naptime!” mode. It also gives me tons of opportunities to reward my puppy for being calm and quiet and for chilling out on his own while we’re hanging out. When I catch him just being chilled out, I silently reward him (no verbal praise) and walk on doing whatever I was doing. So now when I leave him in his big pen to hang out solo and I go do something else in the house he’s happy to chill on his mat and chew on an appropriate toy without feeling the need to follow me everywhere. Puppies can and do suffer from FOMO (Fear Of Missing Out) which can lead to separation anxiety!

A mini training tip for the week: one of the things I encourage people to do is to avoid giving their future working dogs a set feeding time. You just never know when breakfast, lunch, or dinner might be delayed! I feed within windows of time — between 7 and 9am, 11 and 1pm, and 5 to 7pm. This way, meals are just a thing that happens reliably but isn’t a party (or a strict expectation) — I do also portion out about 1/4 of the puppy’s food to use as rewards all day when I catch him doing something calm on his own or making a “good choice” on his own. That way I save the tastiest treats for the more complex of focus-requiring training sessions, and I get to reward my puppy for being quiet and chill!

Have a great week, everyone!