20 Things New Puppy Owners Need to Know

If you're about to become a new puppy owner, you probably want to know everything you can about the breed. So in this article, Happy & Polly will talk about your dog's first week home and how to have a well-behaved four-legged family member.

1. Dog Crate

What will you need to buy to prepare for bringing your adorable one home? One of the first things is to get a crate to keep them locked in. It is the most important thing you need to train them in the future days.

2. Baby Gates

Then you will need baby gates put up around your kitchen or other places to prevent them from entering or exiting the house.

3. Indoor leash/house lines

You will need a house line and a smaller line for little puppies. You can also buy a puppy collar or a dog leash. It is very useful in future training.

4. Flat buckle Collar

A flat buckle collar is also the collar that most people are familiar with and use it. It is used for tying them to avoid hurting themselves and good for training puppies under 3 months of age.

5. Get Food Recommendations

What you were going to feed your puppy when you brought her home? You will need to get recommendations from breeders or professionals about what food should be used for what kind of dogs, and also how much to feed them each meal.

6. Lots of Short Crate Training Sessions

What about your puppy’s first night home? It will be better if your breeder did some training first. So their first night home will be in and out of dog crate to get used to it. After you have your puppy in for a short period of time, you can bring her/him out, and reward her/him when she/he is in.

A new owner needs to learn some crate training. You can have your puppy in the crate, feed your puppy in the crate. After just short periods of time, like in for maybe 10 minutes, and then let them out, go out for a bit, and then back in the crate again, so that your dog will be very comfortable in the crate. So small periods, short periods of time, getting her really accustomed.

7. Put on your House-line when Your puppy is out of their Crate

The other thing is really valuable about the crate is that anytime your puppy comes out, she's with you. You're immediately building a little bit of leadership, and a lot of value for spending time with you.

And certainly, any puppy can get themselves into trouble, so supervision is so important. You will need 100 percent supervision. When your puppy comes out of the crate, her/his collar and leash go on right away. So you can step on the leash if she/ he is gonna get into something.

8. Take Your Puppy Out On a Schedule to Start

For the potty training process, you need to break it down, how often to take your puppy out, and take them out on a schedule to start.

9. Take your Puppy out When They Come Out of Their Crate

If your puppy is in the crate, as soon as you let her/him out of the crate, outside you go.

10. Take your Puppy out after play sessions

If you are doing some playing, as soon as you finish playing, go outside then.

11. Praise is enough, no Need to reward with food

And you do not need to reward them for going to the bathroom outside. You can give them praise instead of any treats for that. It’s something really important to remember. If you give treats after going potty outside, the puppy will very quickly learn that the act of going outside, maybe even if they're squatting they aren't necessarily going, but pretending to go that's gonna get them a treat. So using praise is more than enough because it's a naturally rewarding behavior.

12. Mark That Moment With Your Voice

If your puppy has an accident in your home, what to do? If they have an accident and you catch her/him, you can scold her/him and right away take her/him outside. There were a couple of accidents that you missed, you can mark that moment is so important with "ah-ah" or "oops" or something is so valuable because you really capture that moment, and you really mark it for your puppy.

13. Accidents Will Happen. It’s Part of the Learning Process.

Accidents will happen in your home. This is a regular part of the puppy potty training process. For your training throughout the first week, you need a little bit of the exercises, some general training.

14. Do Simple Luring Exercises

You can do it with some basic exercises, such as the "sit". You can lure your puppy with a sit, with a treat, reward her; and then with the downs.

15. Response to name exercises

Then you can try to teach your puppy her/his name and then have her/his lure her/his tongue to you and reward her/him for lots of that. Simply loading value on her/his name's really important, so you'd say the name then reward. That can be a really valuable exercise.

16. Build Some Toy Drive

You can start with just a fuzzy toy, just tugging and playing with your puppy;

17. Begin to Work On Short Retrieves

and then you can throw it just a little bit, and let them bring it back to you. You can both have fun. You also need to have a line on, so that if your puppy doesn’t want to bring it back, you could guide her /him back.

If you haven't worked with any retrieving stuff with your fetch exercises with your dog, you also need a little bit of control of that item so that they can't choose to keep it away from you. Those things are so much fun to do with them, and a great way to burn off the puppy energy.

18. Control the situation!

What if your puppy comes into a household with other dogs, how to deal with socialization? Well, you need to put dog leashes on others, especially the large ones, to make sure they didn't jump on the new one. It will take a bit before you could actually trust them together. Even later, you need to supervise them together.

It’s really important for people to remember when you are introducing your member to your other dogs at home, or others, family members or whatever, you need to control the situation. You need to have control of those others, and you need to control your puppy because they're going to very quickly find value in playing with those others.

19. 100% Supervision Focus on Building Value on you!

So you need to make sure that you have your house line on for example, or you have a leash on them and that you can control the process a little bit, not only to keep them safe because that's really important but also to build value on you so that your puppy will listen to you, even in some of these exciting environments.

It's a great reminder for any owner if you travel a lot with your puppy. You can have crates in the car for the dogs, they will be a lot more comfortable in it.

20. Socialization includes different sounds and surfaces!

At first, you’d better not to go a lot of places because they haven't had all their shots yet, so just safe places, places that you know people or the dogs around. Or there's not a lot of dogs around, you don't know that there're others have been there that haven't had their vaccines. You just need to be a little bit more cautious. Better not go to parks where a lot of dogs will be at.

We hope you feel more prepared for bringing your new family member home. If you enjoyed it and would like to see more news, do not hesitate to visit Happy & Polly website.

Happy and Polly is an online pet supplies store, with a variety of dog leashes, clothes, breeder and cat supplies. Shop online with fast divery on https://happyandpolly.com/.