My new pup Thunder is now coming up to three months old. His training up until now has been more about keeping him friendly rather than trying to get him to do to many things for me yet. I have not worked on his sit and stay commands yet but have focused more on getting him to come up to me every time I want. An easy mistake for a dog owner to make is not give the dog enough time to interact with you. This is no different from how much time you give to your children. Where I see some adults go wrong is when they are focusing on something like the news on TV and their child comes up to ask them
something. This is where a mistake can be made by saying to your child you are watching TV so don’t talk to me now. Or you are on the phone so you tell your child to go away. What can happen here is that after a while the child tries to seek attention by doing bad things. Now if we have our young pup that comes up to us and we ignore it time and time again and the only time we call the pup up to us is when we are going to put the pup into its kennel it will very quickly learn that every time it comes up to you it gets put away.
To a pup this would seem like punishment so it will stop coming to you. Then you could make the next mistake of calling the pup to you and chasing it to try and catch it. This causes a dog to keep its distance from you. So with Thunder every time that he comes up to me I make sure that I give him a pat and a bit of my time. When it comes to putting him away in his kennel I have made that his safe place where he likes to go so it is so easy when I am
putting all of the dogs away thunder likes to go into his kennel. I regularly feed him in his kennel so that is one reason he likes to go their also I never made the mistake of picking him up and forcing him into the kennel. Instead I stood at the door and gave him time to get in on his own so that he could see it as his safe place. Another thing that I have done with Thunder is place sheep’s wool in his kennel to keep him warm at night. What gave me the idea for this was Thunder himself. At the time I was Lagging some of the water pipes at the hut with wool and Thunder just loved sleeping on this so I put some in his kennel, not just to keep him warm at night but also I wanted to see how this would affect his stock training because so many pig hunters are worried about their dogs taken an interest in sheep. If we look at this from a different angle a pig hunter will get a pig skin and tease their pups with this to give them the taste and smell of what you want them to chase. So by putting wool in with Thunder could be looked at as setting him up to chase sheep which is the obvious way to look at this but what I am seeing is a pup that is seeing all of these animals every day so I can direct his attention in which ever direction that I want.
For instance Thunder has just started barking at the sheep from the opposite side of the fence which to me is a good sign as this is indicating to me that he is starting to grow up and show an interest in an animal. At this stage he is to small to do any damage and I could stop him with one word but I do not want to knock him back to much just yet I want to try and build his confidence and keep his willingness to hunt strong . So while he is having a bark at the sheep from behind the fence he will also be watching all of the other dogs are not showing any interest in doing what he is doing. I have had him up with the pigs but I have not yet set him up to get him to bark at them as I do not think he is quite ready just yet. However he is not far off coming into the interesting stage of being big enough to start doing things.