Essays · The first five months
It is the cheapest intervention available, it works within days, and it is the one nobody sells because there is no product attached to it.
About five minutes
If I could change one thing in most households with a young dog, it would not be a technique. It would be how many hours the dog is actually asleep.
A puppy under sixteen weeks needs somewhere around eighteen to twenty hours a day. An adolescent needs fourteen to sixteen. An adult around twelve to fourteen.
Those are not aspirational figures. That is the requirement, and dogs who do not get it behave the way people do not get it behave.
Most puppies in active households are getting twelve or thirteen, because a house with people in it is a house where something is always happening and a puppy who is loose will keep getting up to check.
Biting that gets worse as the day goes on. Frantic activity in the evening. Zoomies that end in something being knocked over. Grabbing at clothing. Inability to take food gently. Difficulty settling even when nothing is happening.
Every one of those gets read as a behaviour problem and gets a training answer.
The fastest results I have ever produced with a young dog came from adding four hours of enforced sleep and changing nothing else.
Offering the dog a bed is not the same as making sleep happen. A puppy with the option to follow you into the kitchen will follow you into the kitchen.
It has to be a closed space. A crate, a pen, a room with the door shut. Something to chew going in, so that the arrival is pleasant, and then nothing.
Ninety minutes to two hours at a time, three or four times a day for a young puppy. Set it on a clock rather than waiting for the dog to look tired, because an overtired dog does not look tired, they look wired.
People say it feels like locking the dog away, and that they got a dog to be with it.
Fair. Here is the other side of it.
A dog who has learned to switch off is a dog you can take places. They can lie under a table at a brewery. They can be in the room while you have people over. They can be left for three hours without the house being damaged.
The dog who was never asked to switch off is the dog who cannot come anywhere, which means they end up alone more, not less.
A young puppy will need to go out in the night for a few weeks. That is bladder, not behaviour, and it passes.
What you are deciding in those weeks is whether waking produces a trip outside and back to sleep, or a conversation. Keep it boring. Out, toilet, back in, no talking, no play. A fortnight of boring and the night waking resolves on its own.
A puppy who wakes and gets ten minutes of attention will keep waking long after their bladder has stopped requiring it, and there is nothing wrong with that puppy.
Somewhere quiet, out of the traffic of the house. Not the hallway, not next to the front door, not where they can see the street.
For the first week or two, in the bedroom is often easier for everybody. Then move it in stages. A crate that is going to be used for years is worth two weeks of getting the location right.
If you would rather just ask someone
Tell us the age, what is happening, and what you have already tried. You will get a straight answer about what we would do, whether or not that involves us.
More in The first five months
Socialization is not meeting dogs
The word has come to mean introductions, and the introductions are the part most likely to go wrong. It was never supposed to mean that.
The first five monthsThe biting is not a behaviour problem
Eight to sixteen weeks, hands in shreds, and everyone says it is a phase. It is, and there are still three specific things making it worse.
The first five monthsHouse training is a schedule problem
It is not about the puppy learning a rule. It is about never once giving them the opportunity, for long enough that the habit sets.