The very basics of your training should start the same day you take your BarleyCourt puppy home, these basics will include socialising, toilet training and not jumping up to name but a few. These are 'working' type dogs and will need mental and physical stimulation and training for them to fit into a family, doing something like Agility (once older) will help toward a happy spaniel. Try not to get lost immediately with teaching your pup tricks, first they will need some ground rules and they will have to adjust to being a part of your family.  It is important to teach your pup good manners right from the start and to spend time enjoying your new family member to form a firm bond.

 

Allowing children/people to over excite your pup will create an over excitable, possible uncontrolable adult around visitors. Allowing your puppy to jump up at people while it's small could create an adult dog that jumps up at a small child knocking them over. Allowing a puppy to get overly excited when visitors knock at the door and allowing visitors to excite your pup when they come through the door could create a dog who barks the house down or runs around like mad every time the door bell rings.

 

My advice is to have a list of the things you want from your puppy, research online the different methods of training and find one that suits you.

 

Puppies play with their littermates by play fighting, they may try to do this with you or your children. Some people think that this behaviour is aggression and worry that they have an unruly pup, however this is normal behaviour for a young puppy and this play can be easily redirected to a toy instead of your hands/clothes etc.

 

Basics may include: recall (come), sit, stay, off (the furniture), not to jump up at people and fetch a ball/toy.

 

Repetition, patience and consistency are the keys to success. If you 'sometimes' let Fido get away with jumping on the sofa.... he will not understand the times when he's not allowed to do it.

 

The most important thing you can teach a puppy/dog is to come back when called. This could potentially save his/her life if they are heading toward a road or other dangerous situation.

 

I have found clicker training really useful with obedience basics. With clicker training, the first thing you need to do is 'charge' the clicker, which means: teach your pup to understand that a click = a reward (treat, cuddle, play with a toy - which ever you chose to use). So your first step is to spend time with pup simply clicking and rewarding. Once you get to a point where; when you click the puppy looks at you or comes to you for a reward, you're ready to start using the click as a reward for the correct behaviour. There's a great video on YouTube about clicker training.

 

Keep training sessions to no more than 10 minutes initially - or pup will get bored and lose interest. You can do this a couple of times per day.

 

I have found with my own dogs that getting them excited about playing with a ball is great, if you spend time with them playing with a ball, when they're a bit older, they will 'work' for the ball to be thrown as a reward.

 

​A lot of things will be 'accidentally' taught, for example if you unconsciously say "out" everytime you put pup out in the garden - you will eventually have taught them 'out'. If you habitually say 'bed' everytime you put your pup away in it's bed for the night, eventually you will have taught him/her 'bed'. If you raise your hand to your shoulder when you train them to sit, you will eventually have taught them that this hand signal means sit. Equally you can 'accidentally' train your pup to jump up at people, by not correcting the behaviour, or train them that it's ok to bite/nip if this isn't dealt with correctly.

 

​It is best that you know what you want and don't want from a pup/dog - if you don't know what's expected of them..... they wont know.