Need to know before/shortly after pupps come home
As a new parent, maybe you vaguely know some basics about how to set up the space for a new puppy and let them feel safe at home. You may already know that puppies take time and effort to finally become a family member. There are a few subjects that you need to train your puppy on. But when your puppy arrives at yours, some questions need immediate answers that training notes may not be able to help with in a very short time window. For example,
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Do you want them to live in a crate?
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How do you interact with them when they just arrive on the first couple of days?
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As a puppy they won't know how to hold their pee and poo and so, where do you want them to do their business?
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I'm sure there are posts out there giving you direct answers to these questions. But say you want the puppy to pee and poo in your garden and then gradually train them to pee and poo outdoors. But everything takes time... The potty training can take say a month time. Before they develop the habit of peeing and pooing outside of your hours, say in the first week, do I just tell them "no" when they pee or poo indoors? What happens when you are away upstairs sleeping? The puppy could be downstairs in your living room choosing where they would like to pee instead of doing it at where you want them to. Maybe you want to just pick a room downstairs and let them go there to do their business. But for one, if you cover that room floor with pee pads, your puppy may go there and chew up the pads and end up in the hospital. Also when you are away they may not go to that room voluntarily as you like. In some house settings, the living room, dining room and kitchen are open-plan like mine. There is no room to let them do their business, to begin with.
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As an alternative, you may set up fences indoors to restrict their activity area so if they decide to pee or poo in places they like, there is at least less cleaning for you to do. But then you need to get them to feel less sensitive about fences. Again that training takes time. They might feel anxious if you leave them inside the fence and disappear to sleep for the first few nights. How do I then solve this problem? By sleeping next to them for a while? But how long? They could wake up every couple of hours and would they wake you up as well? Could you handle it as you might need to go to work the next day? In this process, you may simply get so exhausted and start to dislike the idea of having a puppy.
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You may want to let your puppy stay in a crate instead. But problems could still follow. Crate training takes time. Your puppy on the first day or the first few days can feel scared of the crate and it would be natural for them to feel this way. No one wants to be locked up in prison. But if you just simply shove your puppy into the crate during sleep time, they might end up peeing and pooing inside the crate. This is really bad because if they develop a habit of peeing or pooing inside their home space, they could keep on doing it when they grow into adult dogs.
Other factors are also part of all of the above problems. For instance, training takes time so could I spend the first few days in full training the puppy? But this would disturb my work schedule big time. On top of that, when your puppy just got home and they don't even trust you yet enough to do the training with you, they may feel bored and scared when you impose potty and crate training on them, and that makes training even harder and longer.
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