jacqui835

My puppy also loves boxes and also toilet rolls. He also loves the soft squeaky toys but we have to supervise him with those because he's destroyed 3 already and we don't want him to eat the fluff. My last dog had no interest in soft toys, but was obsessed with balls. Was great because it meant a lot of his exercise could come from playing fetch lol.

Oh we have a 9 week old doberman cross puppy who quite literally walks around with his mouth open and bites anything that should land in it. When we first got him he was leaving scratches on us but now 2 weeks later my scratches are all almost healed and instead my arms are often covered in whatever he was last eating and slobber. What we find is the most effective is to just say NO really sternly so the dog knows it's not a game, and then put something he should be chewing in his mouth. We found saying ouch shocked him a few times at first but quickly stopped having any impact, whereas the longer we've had him, the more he reacts to NO and Ah Ah (which is the other thing we say when he starts to bite a bit hard as a kind of a warning, NO when he bites hard). As for the rest of the house, we applied the same approach to stop him eating shoes, the carpet, chairs, clothes, boxes in fact like I said he will actually bite anything but he is learning. Now I see him look at our shoes, and then turn around and pounce on his chicken (one of his favourite toys) and give it a good biting session. The other thing is, anytime we see him biting his toys, we tell him what a good boy he is. As for toilet training, I take him out every 1-2 hours and put him on the same patch of grass (poor grass) and say go toilet repeatedly. Now he goes on command and it's funny because if he's about to run off into the backyard and I say go toilet he stops and goes to the toilet lol. At the start though, and we still do it now, anytime we see him going to the toilet we keep saying go toilet while he's going, to really build up that association. And of course once again we give lots of praise when we see him do the right thing, and he expects it. Sometimes he just wonders over to you suddenly wagging his tail and looking all proud and then I'll notice over in the corner he's gone to the toilet. At night we put him in the laundry and he normally whines at about 5am in the morning for me to take him out. I just say need to go to toilet? when I go get him and carry him out to the spot, no playing or patting except the usual good boy when he does his thing and then back to bed. I leave the house without saying anything, and when I get home I always put my bag down, go into the kitchen and ignore the dog until he leaves me alone, then call him and say my hello when he comes-to reinforce him always thinking coming to me is a good thing as well, and that he can't ask me for pats, rather he'll get them when I want. And he doesn't make a sound when we're not there, just sleeps or plays with his chicken. Then again though I'm never gone for more than 4 hours, I wouldn't want to leave him alone for any longer.

Totally agree with what you said, particularly in regard to the differences between the steers and geldings vs a dog-I don't believe there is really any information to be gained by comparing them. I never had my last dog desexed, at first we were waiting for him to be a year old and then once he was well we didn't really have any trouble with him so we just left him untouched. After yelling at us about it for years, our vet finally changed his tune when we brought our dog to him at 15 years old. He was surprised to feel that our dog still had so much muscle and was still in such great shape, and he actually said to us that it was probably because we never desexed him. Now with my new dog I'll again be waiting until he's at least a year old, and then I'll decide what to do. I have a larger breed, and I can't stand the way larger dogs who were desexed young look, their legs are too long and they look puppy like in their faces. Honestly I think something needs to be done about who can have a dog, because if we're mainly putting our pets through surgery because people simply can't keep their dogs safe well I don't believe that should ever be an issue, and if it is, those people shouldn't have a dog. You guys claim that cropping a dog is cruel, but I personally think desexing them is a far worse procedure and if it's being done because we can't control them, then we shouldn't have them in the first place. After all, I think the people who claim that cropping has health benefits and hearing benefits for the dog have about as much ground to stand on as the people who say we should desex for health reasons-in both cases I think the procedures are mainly carried out because what's best for the people, not for the dogs.

I got my puppy at 7 weeks (he's a doberman cross-bit of rottie) and now at 8 weeks he knows sit, down, speak up, shake, go outside, come inside, leave it, NO, bring it here, go get it, go to bed, drop it, shh, go toilet and I'm sure there are others. He sits for his dinner and only goes to the bowl when I say OK. I don't use a clicker, I use treats with praise at first to get his undivided attention and to stop him from leaping on me, but I also do training sessions after exercise so he's not hyper. After he knows a trick though I just use praise. I do 2 10 min training sessions a day, plus in the beginning the dinner time thing. He quickly learned to sit and wait until OK that way, because he's very keen on his food. It might be his breed though, because I don't remember my last dog being this easy to train (he was a fox terrier cross). Funniest thing with this puppy is the first time we heard him barking we ran out to see what had happened (I was scared he was choking) and found him dancing around the cat's bowl which still had some food left in it, and barking at it, because he knew he wasn't allowed it. He does seem to be incredibly smart but just as importantly he's very keen to make us happy. I think my last dog was smart, but had a much more independent nature...

Honestly I think you're lucky in some ways. We have our new doberman pup and he thinks he's a lap dog. If you get down on the floor he stops whatever he's doing and comes and sits on your lap, he'll bring his toys with him and keep chewing, or even his food. When I'm cooking in the kitchen he sleeps on my feet, if I move just from the stove to the sink, he moves too, even though it's only like 3 steps... Normally I close the bathroom door while I'm in the shower, but one day I forgot and left it open. Well the next thing you know poochy is in the shower with me, even though he looked very unhappy about getting all wet. If I go somewhere, no matter what he has to go through he will follow. Which is great, until bed time. He sleeps in the laundry, which is actually right next to the main bedroom-sounds weird I know, but after a week of us ignoring his cries, he still cries every night. I take him to the toilet once and after that he just starts crying again, keeping us up for half the night. Must be breeds though, I knew dobes were known as velcro dogs but I now know they weren't exaggerating. The idea of a dog who wanders off to sleep sounds quite nice to me lol though don't get me wrong, I love my little boy.

He is a very smart boy, it's great in some ways, he learns new tricks so quickly and is very rewarding to train, but on the other hand, things that I've used in the past to trick my other dogs into behaving just don't work with him, he really does need full time supervision. From what everyone has said I think I'll get him a crate, I've been looking on ebay and do you guys think I should get him a soft one or one with bars? Would something like this be good? crate

Well we tried doing what they do when they train guide dog puppies, just took him out every hour and said go toilet and massive praise when he did. He doesn't give much of a warning, but he will come find someone, give a bit of whine and then you have about 10 seconds to get him outside before he will go. Best part though is that at night, he can hold it in from about 10 until 6am. His name was Milo until we got him, then we decided Tyler suited him better lol. We've had him for almost a week though, will that mean suddenly putting him in a crate will upset him more?

Does everyone think that crates are a good idea though? I've heard different things said about them but overall they came across as not being ideal.

So my 7.5 week old puppy Tyler comes and tells me when I'm in the shower that he has to go to the toilet... We're still working on his toilet training though so far he's doing extremely well, only thing is, when he says he has to go, it means within about 10 seconds he will be going. So I had no choice but to the leap out of the shower with shampoo still in my hair, grab him and race him outside. Yep I was butt naked. I tried to stay hidden but if someone was looking out their windows into our backyard they probably would have had glimpses of a naked girl running around, so sorry if that applies for anyone in here lol but at least he made it and boy does he look proud when he knows he's done the right thing. Now for the problem: Tyler is generally a very good boy, except right when we're about to go to sleep at night... Even if he's been desperately trying to sleep for the last hour or so and we've been keeping him awake to make sure he's sleepy come bed time, he finds an extra store of energy once we're all in bed. He knows he's not allowed to get off his bed, so he plays this game where he tries to throw his toys off the bed. His bed is pretty big for him right now, he's growing pretty quickly so we bought him one that would last him a little while. So he moves right over to the edge of his bed, throws the toy off the side and then leans over the side trying to get it until he falls off. This is also the only time of the day when he will dig, he digs on his bed. He won't dig in the backyard, he won't dig on his bed during the day, only at night when it's time to go to sleep. For some reason when it's dark he seems to go a bit hyper. We don't know what to do though, if we try and stop him and settle him in his bed, we encourage it because he loves the attention. If we ignore him, he gets fully out of his bed and starts attacking bits of the blanket on our bed. So every time he gets up (from falling off his bed via the toy throw method) we just immediately put him back in the bed and say bed in a serious tone. Anyone have any other suggestions? Usually after about an hour (but sometimes longer) he finally goes to sleep, and then the best part is he doesn't wake us up again until 6am. First night we had him I had to take him to the toilet at about 3am, but since then the earliest he's gotten us up is about 5am so I think we're very lucky, but if we could reduce the pre-bed antics a bit that would be great. We do play with him heaps about an hour before bed, until he's like collapsing on the grass outside and then wait a while before bed to make sure he's calmed down, but we don't let him sleep during that time. Any ideas or is this just an inevitable part of having a new puppy... Also, he can't sleep in a different room from us, although he's fine during the day if we go out (he just naps then) if we're away from him at night he actually goes berserk and makes the most horrible noises I've ever heard out of a dog. We did try ignoring him for an hour the first night but he just ended up actually having an accident in his own bed, which we think means he was way too distressed so since then we've had him in our room. Here's a few pics of him An action shot of him pouncing

Wow, we got our puppy when he was just 7 weeks old and we haven't even had him for a week yet, but already he sleeps from about 10pm until 6am. During the day we take him to the toilet every hour or 2 and he goes but only does a little, but in the mornings he does a lot more. Is this perhaps because he's a larger breed? I've read that smaller breeds seem to need more time with their litter mates whereas in our case, his mother had been ignoring all the puppies since they were about 6 weeks, to the point where the breeder had stepped in to try start their bite inhibition training. Originally we had wanted him to sleep in the laundry at night, but that distressed him so much that he actually had an accident in his bed (I'm guessing he's just too young to sleep alone) so now he sleeps on his bed in our room and he's very good about it, no accidents since. Now we can ask him if he needs to go to the toilet, or he'll tell us but when he does it means we literally have about 10 seconds before he goes lol. Are we just incredibly lucky with him or is this typical of larger breeds?

Oh we do play out in the backyard as well, but I just meant since we can't go for walks. And it's a pretty gentle form of tug of war, none of his feet ever leave the ground, no fast movements or shaking or anything. Basically we move his toy around and eventually let him catch it, and then play a bit of tug because he seems to love it. It's been good though, we've been able to teach him the command 'drop it' because of this game.

Hi Jacqui There was a thread on this subject a couple of days in the General forum that you might like to read: http://www.dolforums.com.au/index.php?showtopic=162343 I love tug of war and often play it with my dogs, just on my terms I don't let them keep the tug toy, but that is because I want to increase their drive for it - I always put it away and only take it out when I want to initiate a tug game. Oh thanks Reading it now...

My puppy still has another week and a bit before he gets his 3rd vaccination so we have to tire him out inside the house. One of the games we've been playing is tug of war, always started by us and ended by us. Throughout the game I will stop pulling and start just telling him to drop, and rewarding him when he does. Then I tell him to sit (which he's pretty good at) and then as a reward we play a bit more. I am always the one who picks up the toy, calls him over and so starts the game and we always finish with a drop and sit, but then I let him keep his toy. Is this ok or am I creating potential dominance issues?