"A puppy should not be trained in the first year!"
In our videos we show that we can train puppies at an early age and teach them a lot and quickly. Usually we get a lot of nice and positive response to this. But regularly we also get negative response. People then say that a pup must be able to be a pup and that the pup must not be trained yet. They find that he only has to play and be happy in the beginning of his life.
These are often the same people who say that in the first year of its life the pup must do nothing and may do anything it wants, without being corrected. The result of this is that the puppy develops a lot of unwanted behavior in the first year, such as biting, jumping against people or children and chasing animals like chickens, rabbits or cats. After a year these people then start training and suddenly everything changes for the puppy. He can no longer do certain things that he was allowed to do before. If he does these things now, he is suddenly (heavy) corrected for something he was allowed to do the year before.
Almost all of our puppies bite the leash in the beginning. By making it clear to the puppy from day one that this is not allowed and offering the puppy an alternative in which it is allowed to bite, we prevent problems in the future.
In the first 4 - 5 months the puppy is formed for life.
We think this is not fair and therefore we choose to raise and train our puppies in a different way. Of course we also find it important that the puppy has a nice life and can play enough and such. But this applies to all our dogs. The welfare and enjoyment of the dog is always the most important thing to us. But we are convinced that the first 4 to 5 months of a pup's life are very important and this is the period in which the pup is formed for life.
Therefore, we do not choose to do nothing for the first year. We are from day one that the pup is with us, honest and clear about desired and undesired behavior. This makes it clear to the pup from the start and prevents unwanted behavior from developing and we prevent having to heavily correct the dog in the future.
This puppy is taught its name and the command "here" with food. The puppy doesn't even realize it's being trained and finds it very enjoyable, which can be seen well by the wagging tail.
The puppy is never forced to train
We also spend an enormous amount of time socializing and playing with our puppies. We take them everywhere so they get used to everything. A day mainly consists of sleeping, socializing, playing and eating. Food is of course very important and like everyone else we feed our puppies 2 or 3 times a day. We only choose to use all this food to teach the puppy something, - thus train it.
We use a consistent food training system for this purpose. All the food the pup eats in a day, we divide over 2 or 3 short training sessions of about 10 minutes. So we don't normally feed the pup in his food bowl, but we do this during the 10 minutes in which he is trained. The training is done in an exclusively positive manner where the dog learns from his own behavior. Training is only based on the motivation of the pup. Does a pup have no motivation? Or doesn't feel like eating? Then we stop training immediately and try again at a later time.
We put the dog's complete meal in a bag like this, and then start training.
The pup learns that training is fun and that it gives him his reward. The pup does not even realize that he is being trained because everything is done in a positive way and he constantly learns from his own behavior. There is also absolutely no stress on the puppy because he is never forced to do an exercise. And again, if there is no motivation to train the pup, we stop immediately. This can sometimes already be the case after 30 seconds of training.
In our experience, it is therefore not fair if the puppy is allowed everything in the first year and is corrected for that same behavior later in life. We believe that dogs need a clear and structured life. This will make a puppy or older dog happy and it will prevent confusion and stress in the dog. By training this way we always have social and sweet dogs, that live and are trained with a lot of enthusiasm and pleasure.
