Owner of first ever dog....a black lab puppy!

Hi...myself, my husband and our 8 children( well 6 as 2 have flown the nest) are the proud owners of a beautiful black lab puppy! We've had him 3 weeks and he's now 11 weeks.
We spent many, many weeks researching breeds and what having a puppy involves.
Buddy is the cutest dog ever and has settled in very well. He's almost fully house trained...we decided against using paper or puppy pads and literally took him outside to the garden every half an hour for the first week and got up twice a night to let him pee. Three weeks in and he's doing so well...he's go to bed in his crate at 11pm and hubby let's him out at 5am when he's goes to work. We've had no accidents for 5 days now!
He can sit, shake his paw and fetch balls back. We are complete newbies and are finding all the different training advice confusing....any simple suggestions or pointers as where to look with regards to what we should be doing and when?
Clara x

 

Hi Clara.
A warm welcome to you and your family to the forum.
Sounds like you are doing pretty good
x

 

Hello and welcome! Buddy sounds lovely, and you sound very much on top of things! With regard to what to do, I would be running around in the garden with him, encouraging him to follow you, and giving him lots of lovely treats whenever he comes to you. Take him out lots to see all sorts of different things, carrying him if he cannot be on the ground yet due to his vaccination schedule.

 

Lol I only have to walk out the room and he's following me
I've gone through a few packs of puppy treats...could I swap them with something healthier?

 

Hello and welcome! Congratulations on your new baby. My newest addition is 11 weeks today, and we haven't been as fortunate with our potty training, so good for you!

 

Hi and welcome Clara to the forum from Fred, Annie and me. Have you any photos of Buddy for us to see?

 

Have lots of photos. ..proud mummy lol...will have to work out how to upload
Thank you

 

Thank you...was quite tiring the first week but has paid off! I had read that it was possible to house train in a couple of week by doing this method but was very skeptical. ..but he really has done brilliantly!

 

Oh yes - turkey, chicken, cheese... You name it!

 

You can use your kibble for treats when they are little and little bits of chopped up cooked chicken good. Treat and praise for every bit of behaviour you want! I treated for every pee outside when mine was little and said the word pee (can be any word!) and now have a dog who pees on command which is very useful when it's pouring with rain or freezing cold !
I did a lot of practice with the lead (getting used to it) in the early stages which helped a lot when we started going for proper walks.

 

Welcome! Can't wait to see pics! And goodness, I hope you take this the right way, but if you've raised 8 children, I'd say that one little Lab puppy has got to be a breeze for you. You must be a master of organization!

 

Lol routine is key in our house

 

Hello!
I found Your Labrador Retriever Puppy- Month by Month by, Eldredge to be extremely helpful when Jubilee was a puppy. Also, the kikopup videos on YouTube.

 

Hello and welcome to the forum - Eight kids?! WOW! You must be mental. Mental enough to take on a Lab puppy anyway

If you haven't got The Happy Puppy Handbook, I'd recommend you grab a copy of that. It's got loads of information for first-time puppy owners, including some basics on training for the early days. It's a real help.

There is so much conflicting advice on the internet (and in books), much of it based in old-fashioned ideas of dominance. So, disregard anything you read about "being the boss" etc. Modern training methods are based around positive reinforcement, and there are some great resources for that. I'd start with looking at the Kikopup channel on YouTube which can show you some of what can be achieved with this type of training. She has loads of videos to help out from basic behaviours to solving problems, and teaching tricks. Something for everyone

Good luck and do let us know how you get on.

PS Photos please!

 

He's been able to go outside for walks since last Saturday providing we stay away from water and farm's. ..but he keeps biting his lead and walking from either side of my legs and getting tangled lol

 

For treats, you probably don't want to be overloading him with too many new foods at the moment, because puppy tummies can be very sensitive, so stick to a couple of basic things, then build up gradually. To give you an idea, here's a list of some things I use for training treats:

Kibble (boring, low value but always to hand)
Cheese cubes
Ham/turkey cubes (cut from those big blocks of processed ham)
Turkey frankfurters (one big one slices into about 100 treats)
Crab sticks
Oven-dried liver
Home-made sardine or tuna cookies
Home-made liver cake
Roast chicken
Raw salmon
Raw prawns
Sea biscuits (from the Fish4Dogs website)
Mini breadsticks
Pate (licked off a finger)
Tinned sardines, blitzed in a blender with some water and fed from a baby food pouch.

As you can see, it's a right old mixture, but I like to keep things interesting for them

 

Thank you....will definitely check that channel out. I've been trying in vain to post some photos but unsuccessful. ..I think I need to install photobucket or similar

 

Hi there and welcome! You are doing great with the toilet training, exactly right! There are loads of information on the main site about training and puppies, so browse through there and you will get lots of tips.
http://www.thelabradorsite.com/labrador-puppy-training/

I would also recommend Pippa's book (owner of the Labrador Site and this forum) The Happy Puppy Handbook. Great information there, too.

 

Ohh tuna cookies sound interesting....always have tuna in! Would you mind sharing the recipe please?

 

Heh, I'm not really one for exact quantities, but it goes a little like this - I get one of those massive tins of tuna in oil - I'm going to say it's about 7 inches across and three inches high. Obviously, you don't have to use that much, but I make a massive amount of dough and freeze half of it so that I can just defrost, slice and bake it when I need to stock up.
Then I cook about a mugful of rice until it's just about cooked through. Crush a couple of cloves of garlic and blitz it together with the tuna, including the oil. Stir through as much plain flour (of whatever "flavour" you prefer) until it's a nice, dry, firm dough.

Like I said, I then split this in half and freeze half. the other half, I roll out until it's about half a centimetre thick, score it into squares about 1.5cm across and bake in the oven at about 170C until the biscuits are dry. I generally then use kitchen scissors on them to break them into their squares, pop them into a freezer bag and keep them frozen until I need them. When I go out, I just grab a handful straight from the freezer.