Dog And Puppy
Havanese Puppy House Training Tips
Besides welcoming your Havanese puppy into your new home, you really should be making preparations for its house training – the earlier the better. But first, congratulations on getting this small dog breed – isn’t it playful? It’s preferred by many pet owners due to a lovely combination of its size, disposition, sturdiness (even though it’s a toy dog it’s not fragile), smarts, and the fact that it barely sheds. This breed will not consume hours on end per day in grooming, unlike other toy breeds. Let’s move on to house training. This breed, by nature, is quite sociable, outgoing, intelligent, cheerful, and loves to learn new stuff – because of these traits it is also easy to house train.
There’s really not much of a waiting period for you to start training your pups. The moment you bring your pups home, you can start training, and you need to be prepared since this will take up several months. But it may be hard to stay focused or patient when you really don’t love your pups. Still, compared to other breeds that shut down when it feels your frustration, this breed is easier to train. Around four months of age, you can start house training.
Exposing your Havanese to training also lets you see the problem behavior early on, such as nuisance barking. Barking is fine when it stops and doesn’t give you migraines, but when it’s over the top, you have to do something about it. When you take them out for walks, you don’t want to have to keep shushing them quiet when bark like bloody murder when other dogs or animals are around. And you don’t want to have to keep getting up at odd ours after midnight because your dog senses a presence – curtains shifted by the wind, a truck pulling close to the house, birds perched on a branch outside the house but visible through the kitchen window. Train your Havanese puppy properly and it will grow into a good dog, without much problems.
If you’re used to dealing with dog that you punish after it does an unwanted behavior, that tactic is not going to work all the time with the Havanese; you need to try something different, to get consistent results. Instead, using positive reinforcement on this intelligent breed How does this work? Every time the pup does something it’s told, or does something you approve of, you reward it with praise and attention and treats. The positive experience rewards the puppy and motivates it to keep seeking the same rewards by doing as it’s told. The rewards also tend to redirect the pup’s bad behavior rather than punishing it.
Just a note here, when you’re training your dog, you want to steer clear of a particular problem – small dog syndrome. You may have noticed that some small dog’s grow to become aggressive, unfriendly to people, and bad with kids. The primary cause of this doggy attitude is attributed to what their owners let them get away with. You want to avoid letting your small dog grow into an annoying bratty dog, and to do this you need habituate it to rules and boundaries, limits to behavior, so that it won’t be doing whatever it likes.
