I make no apologies, I have come to really hate the phrase ‘dog training’ when it comes to teaching our dogs and puppies basic life skills. It kind of infers to me, in my mind anyway that the dogs themselves have no input or right of say on the matter and need to do as we tell them, where in fact teaching your puppy how to cope in the modern human world is so much quicker and easier to achieve if we seek to involve them in the decision making processes right from the very start.

Let’s throw the word training in the bin and start here:

Learning to communicate with your puppy

Stage 8 – 16 weeks

Hopefully your new addition came from a great breeder who put some time into encouraging good toileting practice and ensures that the pups got to spend some time away from their litter mates and dams before coming home, but nonetheless this will be a massive change for your puppy and the first few nights away might be especially difficult for them.

Once upon a time it was recommended that you let a puppy cry it out, as was the advice for children who struggled to settle at night, but no one would advise the latter now, and increasingly people are recognising that there are kinder and easier ways of bringing young puppies through these stages too.

The most practical means I have found is to place a large tall sided box beside my bed for the first week with the puppy’s bedding, and a safe size kong or lick mat in there so that you can hear the puppy fuss as soon as it wakes up, and then carry it out to its toilet place. You might need to do this a few times in the night. Be calm, matter of fact, up out, back to bed and maybe another bit of something in the kong or lick ma to help them et back to sleep.

Puppy will very soon outgrow the box – no doubt within a week, but by the time you are ready to move on to a crate not so close to your bed, you will have learned to differentiate between the noises your pup makes when it has a genuine need to toilet and when it just wants to play and fuss, and it should be becoming a little more relaxed and able to sleep independently.

From then on, it’s not a bad idea to start working your way to your dog sleeping in a different room for at least part of the night, to help ensure your dog is able and comfortable to sleep independently if required, and this is easiest done sing a covered crate and moving it gradually a little further from your bed side.