Wow!!!! Like the topic says, the day for pickup has been brought forward. We now pickup our little bundle in THREE days...... WOW WOW WOW!!!! Can you tell I am excited? The breeder is a volunteer bush fire fighter and needs to be back for the weekend, so she is going to be in Sydney on Thursday... Hubby is having to take the day off unfortunately. However, it does mean that he finally gets the weekend off that he has been longing for, as there has been a bit of complaining from him recently about the amount of distance we have been travelling, and the number of weekends we have been away.
Anyway, there is a lot that needs to be done around the house in the next couple of days to puppy proof it. We haven't even finished building the addon the fence outside. It is going to be a very busy couple of days.
I have my training rotation ready to go, after a couple of days of settling in. Let's hope this pup is what he seemed to be last Saturday!
I think I'll probably start some training on Saturday, and Saturday's suggested training behaviours are: tug, come, handling, scale, bath, car, front door and walker. I'll drop a few of those to make it a bit easier for his first day. No need for bath training that soon after arrival, nor car manners after his long trip. Instead I might add sit to that list. It would be nice to video his first sessions.
- Scale is where I am going to teach him to sit himself on the scale to weigh him by shaping it with a clicker.
- Handling is basic manners, so he is happy for me to touch his ears, feet, clip his nails etc.
- Front door is so he knows where to go when a) I open the front door and b) when the door bell goes.
- Walker is getting him used to both my walker (I don't use it all that often, but it's as bridging to my wheelchair) and my crutches - I use my crutches a lot.
- Tug is getting a nice firm tug, and eventually getting him to tug on command and drop it on command
Each day teaches him different things, as research these days seems to have shown that you shouldn't be teaching the same thing day after day for best learning practice. Well, you can, but it should be in short sessions. I am going to try having at least a day between each complicated behaviour training session, unless they are very short ones sessions with simple behaviours. The idea of this 'breaks help dogs learn' is shown quite clearly in the improvement a dog shows overnight just by sleeping on it. Their brains work on complex behaviours even when asleep. So make sure you give them enough time to process between training sessions!
Speaking of brains, mine is buzzing with what I need to get done before the pup arrives. Time to put all my theory into practice!!!!
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