Are you one of those people who brought home a puppy, and plunged head first into dog parenthood without really understanding much about the nature of dogs? Are you noticing yourself trial-and-erroring your way through puppy parenthood?
Or worse, the puppy has brought you, a grown ass adult person, to the brink of your own sanity, because you didn’t expect it to be “like this” — The constant whining and crying of a young puppy. The housebreaking. The sleep deprivation (that’s right– you didn’t think a tiny puppy could make it through an 8-hour night without a potty break, did you?). The teething, and sometimes aggressive biting. The dog hair or pet dander. The puppy makes your kid’s skin break out in hives. Not knowing what kinds of of toys and supplies you will you need, so you’re practically living on amazon/ at target/ at Petco. The puppy ate a marijuana joint or its entire tennis ball, and you rushed it to the vet only to shell out a few hundred dollars more. All. the. things.
As a professional educator, and as someone who grew up with several puppies and raised my own for the first time ever, let me help. I can say that even after watching my parents raise several puppies in a very basic way, there were things that even I didn’t know about. Like when I first brought Nalu home, it was all, “why won’t the puppy eat, drink or pee?!? The puppy food seems like it’s too hard for him to chew with all 8 of his puppy teeth… am I supposed to mix it with milk or something?”. :: record scratch– NO! NEVER mix a puppies’ food with liquid cow’s milk! ::
I genuinely don’t understand how people delude themselves into thinking that raising a baby carnivorous mammal will be a walk in the park, LOL. That much I knew– I knew raising a puppy from babyhood would be an adventure for a little while.
But I was not prepared for all the troubleshooting and sacrifice that a puppy requires when you can’t just hand it over to your parents to truly manage. I can attest that it will be well worth it in the long run if you can dog-parent your puppy well. And yes, anyone can do this well. You just need to know what to do. You can do a basic AF dog-parenting job, and still do a pretty darn sufficient job. So here are my top tips!
- a newborn puppy is just like a newborn baby. They need you. They need you in order to be fed and watered frequently. They need constant supervision. They need frequent reassurance because they’ve just been forcibly separated and weaned from their mother and rehomed. They need to bond and connect with you, their new primary caregiver and leader of the pack. They need to pee and poop alllllllllll the time. They will want to play a LOT. And when they’re not playing, eating, or pooping, they’ll want to sleep a lot. They will probably will want to sleep on you. Gaaaaaahhh that new puppy smell! Gets me every time.
2. Also like a newborn baby, health wise, puppies are a little vulnerable at first, and follow a strict vaccine schedule. Oh hi, parvo. Until puppies receive the full schedule of vaccinations, especially Parvo, they should NOT be running around outside, touching the public ground outside, going to dog parks, they should not be exposed to very many dogs older than them, and they should definitely not be exposed to other unvaccinated puppies.
For several weeks, you will have to either keep them safe at home, or carry them around up off the ground if you take them out in public. You can’t even put them in shopping carts or put them down on the ground at the pet store– unless you want the puppy to get a major life-threatening illness called Parvo that will cost you thousands of dollars in vet bills to treat. You will need a puppy backpack or puppy carrier for a couple months to help you make it through this phase if you like to take the puppy wherever you go. So keep that in mind if you choose a larger breed dog.
3. A newborn puppy must be taught how to behave and what is expected of them. This will include how to wear walking hardware (leash, collar, harness), how to walk on leash, how to sleep and spend time in their crate, what is off limits, and that you are their new alpha leader. Some people think that crate training is cruel– let me tell you, you’re in for a wild ride if your puppy is NOT crate trained.
Crate training establishes where your dog’s “den” is. Just like wolves and all other wild mammals have a home base, be it a den, a hole in the ground, a lair– dogs are canine mammals. And canine mammals love them a den.
You can crate train your puppy both for sleep and train them to be in their crate on command in times when you can’t supervise and need to put them somewhere safe. Just to give you some ideas of when this applies, whenever I sweep or mop the floors, whenever someone comes to the house to do maintenance or repair work, or whenever I want to get it on (Yepp, you didn’t misread that), my Nalu baberz goes in his crate. He also likes going in there to relax and sleep throughout the day, on his own free will. The best crate training advice available for free online comes from McCann’s Dogs on YouTube.
4. Apparently not everyone understands that puppies cry a LOT, especially at first, when they have to be separated from you. That’s because they are still babies. If you left a human baby by itself separate from you, what do you think that baby is going to do? That’s right– they’re going to instinctually start crying and whining because baby creatures inherently seem to know that separation from the source of care equates to death in this big bad scary new world.
Additionally, the puppy has just recently been weaned and forcibly separated from its real mom and pack in order to become your new companion and family member. Some of them, in the process of prepping to be sold off, had tails or ears docked which is traumatic. Rightfully, they have separation anxiety. This is to be expected.
My puppy Nalu cried any. time. I tried to separate from him at first. He would even whine and cry when he wanted to take naps because he specifically wanted to nap ON ME. All the time. I couldn’t even go to the bathroom without him crying. I initially was convinced that he was going to cry himself to death at animal quarantine due to his barnacle-like behavior at my sister’s house before quarantine. His clinginess and crying when I tried to separate was so damn intense when I first got him. My oldest sister warned me and she was like “You better put that puppy down or you’re going to create a monster. He needs to learn that he’s not going to die without your constant contact”. I couldn’t even go to the bathroom, five feet away from the bedroom door, without him erupting into a loud puppy crying fit.
And yet somehow, much to my surprise, he **loved** and I mean *LOVED* being at Hawaii animal quarantine. Don’t ask me what the heck they do in there to soothe the incoming puppies. But I swear animal quarantine was genuinely one of the happiest phases of his puppy life, LOL.
When I look back on all the photographs from that phase, he is genuinely smiling because he loved it in there. And Brussels Griffon aren’t exactly known for their joyful faces. He may have whined once or twice the first couple times I had to leave him after visiting hours. But because I established a really good separation ritual where I would throw him the highest-value treats through the fence of his kennel and depart around the back of the kennels every time I left, he quickly realized that my departure time was also celebration time because that’s when the best treats would show up.
Needless to say, after puppy quarantine, when I brought him back to my apartment, the separation anxiety he demonstrated from my sister’s house resurfaced and continued. No longer was he in the small, quiet kennel of animal quarantine surrounded by a billion other dogs. His home was now an urban Honolulu apartment.
And I’m not kidding when I say this little boy would dog-scream if I tried to leave him home alone in my apartment. It was a blessing in disguise that I got a COVID puppy because I was working from home and had the luxury of being home with him basically 24/7 unless I needed to go somewhere dogs couldn’t go, which was rare.
I even got one of those Furbo dog cameras, and invested in this several hundred dollar calming dog Halo treatment device because his separation anxiety was so f*cking bad. You would never think he could scream-cry like baby satan because he looks like a sweet little angel in puppy form straight from God Himself. But I’m not kidding when I say he used to dog-scream-cry so loud I was genuinely scared we were going to get evicted. That’s how bad his puppy crying was.
How did I finally get him past this hurdle? One day I finally decided that I just had to “rip the band aid off”, leave him alone while I went grocery shopping, and here’s the kicker– I had to turn off the Furbo for the sake of my own guilt, and just walk away. I let the puppy cry it out, y’all.
I also forewarned all of my nearest neighbors, closed all the doors and windows to buffer his scream-cries, and I would put puppy calming music or Bob Marley on in the background to drown out the scream-cries. Legend has it, dogs like reggae. I figured since Bob Marley has a consistent voice, Nalu would learn to feel comforted by the familiarity of my favorite album, Catch a Fire. The “cry it out” method with Bob Marley & the Wailers worked.
5. Apparently not everyone knows how to housebreak a puppy. Or that that’s a thing you have to be responsible for. Either you learn how to properly housebreak the puppy, or that shit (literally) will break you. Like, you will snap and have an emotional breakdown because there will be dog shit everywhere. They will step in it and track it all over your house or their designated puppy area because you didn’t know what you were doing. Many first-time dog owners have this kind of story. For my sister it was a doggy diarrhea day that landed dog shit all over her apartment bathroom. For my friend David, it may have been tracked all over his Seattle house.
The only reason I knew what to do for puppy potty training is because we have raised several puppies in my house growing up. So I watched my mom housebreak every single one of them. And she did it in the era where there was no such thing as commercial puppy pads. People used to have to do it the old school way with big trash bags and newspaper. A newspaper was this gray bundle of papers that old people used to basically use as their internet before the internet was invented… LOL.
Anyhow, here is what you’re going to do:
- create a potty location, which I recommend setting up on a plastic puppy potty training tray or inside of an under-the-bed storage bin. Essentially, you want a plastic buffer between the pee pad and the floor so your floor stays clean. You also want a tray or bin that the dog steps into which physically delineates the puppy’s potty location from the rest of the floor. When they have to step into the potty or step up onto the potty, they just know that place is uniquely different from the rest of the floor.
- Every hour, and at predictable intervals such as 10 minutes after you feed them, you put them in their potty area and you say your preferred command “Go potty”/ “Do your business”, or if you’re Hawaiian like us, we say “go shishi/ doodoo”. I think I used to say “shishi doo doo!”, and to this day, he will still doo doo on command when I say “go doo doo”. Right after I picked Nalu up from his Southern California breeder, we spent the night at my friends’ house in LA. I put the pee pads in my friends’ bath tub at first, because I did NOT want him ever peeing on the floor of a house, especially not the house of my friend. The bath tub worked like a charm for his first 24 hours, then we road tripped down to my sister’s house in SF where she had a puppy potty pee tray they had already used to housebreak their dogs. During the road trip from LA to SF, I would put the puppy pee pads in the trunk of our rental SUV, and gave the same command “shishi doo doo”, and he would do his business on the pee pad.
- If the puppy has a miss, wipe up the pee/poop with paper towel, then put the paper towel with all the pee/poop residue on their potty spot (you can flush the turds down the toilet). Alternatively, you can use the pee pad itself to absorb up the urine puddle. Thoroughly clean the floor or carpet where they peed with a pet enzyme-based stain and scent remover. I personally like this one:
Once I brought Nalu home from animal quarantine, the very first thing I did was plop him on the grass in front of my apartment and give him the command–shishi doo doo. And like the smart and sweet perfect angel that he is, he went shishi on the grass first thing upon arrival to his Hawaiian forever(ish) home. Since then, he has never peed on the floor proper of any of my apartments. There were a few times where he just could not hold it, and in those instances, he would pee on other items. Like unfortunately pee in my bed onto a pillow. But never straight onto the floor. I would say that peeing on items happened maybe 3 or 4 times in his lifetime between newborn and 1 year old.
Another lesson learned is that if you have someone else care for your dog outside of your house, you can never be certain they are not going to pick up bad habits. After Nalu stayed with a Rover dog sitter for the first time, he came back from his puppycation and started to mark on his own crate cover. We basically had to take it back to square 1, and I had to dust off his belly bands, and remind him that we don’t ever pee on our stuff at our house.
While I’m on the subject… belly bands are a wonderful potty training aid for boy dogs. Just pop that sucker on anytime the puppy is indoors, and it will reinforce the concept that the dog is to only pee outside, and that he is not permitted to mark indoors– at his home or anyone else’s home, for that matter.
An alternative to pee pads is litter pan training. I wish I had known about this method because Nalu now will ONLY pee outside. This means he basically holds it in the entire time he’s home alone no matter how long he has to wait. I’m certain that’s not good in the long run of his lifespan. Nalu now will not pee on a pee pad, ever, ever, ever. Even if other dogs do, he will not.
So what is litter pan training? When you litter pan train, you use alfalfa and Timothy hay horse feed pellets on a potty training pan; and they learn to pee and poop on the pellets which are made of grass. This allows them to easily transfer the skill of peeing/pooping to the actual grass outside, AND gives them a place indoors to relieve themselves that also smells like grass, and doesn’t harm Mother Nature as much as doggy pee pads likely do. I know that human disposable diapers take like several decades to decompose in a landfill. Alfalfa and Timothy hay pellets, however, are literally just grass. Very eco-friendly.
Litter pan training is extremely affordable as well because you can buy a whole huge bag of horse feed. When I learned about litter pan training, I tried to set something up using commercial dog litter. It didn’t work for us– Nalu just liked digging around in the litter for fun, and trying to eat the litter which probably was dangerous for his digestive tract. But if you start off the litter pan training right away from newborn puppyhood, it’s supposed to work like a charm.
It is also worth noting that puppies need to be permitted to relieve themselves a LOT. When they first wake up from sleep or naps, every hour to two hours if it’s daytime, every 10-20 minutes after you feed them, and even once in the middle of the night. That’s right– you’re going to have to set an alarm, and wake up in the middle of the night to let the puppy out of their crate to go potty. So I recommend that you set that potty location up very close to their crate (but not inside of it).
OH! I forgot to mention– a dog should NEVER go potty inside their crate. Dogs instinctually tend to separate where they sh!t from where they sleep. This is another perk of crate training, and a good enough reason alone for dog parents to feel incentivized to crate train. If the puppy is safe and happy inside of its crate, they won’t be free ranging going potty all over your house. But if they sleep inside of a crate, they also need to potty in the middle of the night for about the first three months. Know that the middle-of-the-night potty break won’t last forever. I would say by six months for sure, we didn’t need to wake up at 3am anymore; and Nalu could make it all the way through the night.
6. Another rookie newbie dog owner mistake is that people don’t bear in mind the size of the breed they chose. People fall in love with adorable puppies because well, they’re small and adorable. First-time dog parents will often fall in love with the puppy-sized version of a large dog breed without realizing what it is they’re about to get themselves into. That guinea pig sized puppy is not going to stay that small forever.
My tiny little chicken nugget eats 1 cup of dog kibble a day. Large breed puppies may require an upwards of three cups of dog food per day. The larger the breed, the more and the bigger of everything that dog will require. More food, more water, larger sized walking hardware, larger beds, more of every kind of pet medicine which tends to be more expensive. A large breed dog requires more space (ie the entire back seat of the car versus just one person’s worth of space), they take bigger shits, and if they have challenging behaviors, such as stubbornness or aggression, you better be prepared to be in complete control of a large animal, or be prepared to shell out cash to get that dog properly trained by a professional.
However, don’t be fooled. A small dog out of control has been known to send a grown adult man to the ER for stitches (ahem… I’m talking to you, Frenchie). My small breed still randomly pounces up on strangers. Thus, a large dog breed out of control is legitimately dangerous. It should cross the mind of every large-beed dog owner that you can be heavily fined, sued, and your dog can and will be put down if they do anything significantly dangerous.
I recommend that everyone who thinks they want to become a first-time dog parent foster a small or medium dog first; and if you do well with that experience, you can become an official dog owner; and decide if you want to supersize your pup thereafter. If you have never owned any dogs in your life, definitely foster a small breed first and see how that goes before you commit to owning a large breed dog for the duration of that dogs’ lifespan.
7. You have to learn (quickly) how to keep a dog safe. From itself, from other external threats, and from other dogs that may attack it. Firstly, puppies need medicines (heartworm medication, flea and tick treatments) and core vaccines with periodic boosters. Secondly, puppies are curious AF and chew/ eat everything. For the first year of his life, not one day seemed to go by where I wasn’t fishing something out of Nalu’s mouth that he shouldn’t have tried to gobble up. About once a week I find myself googling “can a dog eat….”. Dogs will chew on strings. Dental floss. Power cords. They may try to devour a tennis ball or other toys. They may eat chocolate or marijuana, which are very toxic to dogs and can kill them.
Dogs can and do get injuries or have sudden health emergencies. They can get bitten or stung by other animals and have anaphylactic or allergic responses. Some dogs have special health needs out the gate, especially the infamous French Bulldog. Dogs can and do get attacked by other dogs and other animals. They need proper safety when riding in the car. Imagine you in a car accident, now imagine your 10 pound little nugget in a car accident, unrestrained. Yeah, nope. Dogs require vigilant supervision in various circumstances; and dogs require pet health insurance unless you’re prepared to let nature run its course with your dog. There’s even dog CPR and what to do if they are choking.
Pet health insurance runs about $40 a month on average with a several hundred dollar deductible. Hint: the cheapest pet insurance is through Costco. If you can’t afford pet health insurance, or if you have no idea what the word “deductible” means, you may need to do a little more growing up before you commit to becoming a dog owner. You can foster dogs, or maybe get a cat until you’re truly adult enough to know how to be responsible for another life. Because if you accidentally kill your own dog, you are in for a world of emotional pain thereafter.
8. Toys, movement, and exercise are life. A tired dog is a well-behaved dog. Dogs are very smart creatures with athletic bodies. It should make sense that a creature that comes with four legs is a creature that inherently needs a certain amount of walking and movement. Even snails and snakes move and they have zero legs. So it goes without saying that most dog breeds have a lot of pent up energy that needs to come out somehow. And when that energy is able to be expressed and discharged, the dog is happier, content, and well behaved.
Puppies need the highest amount of exercise, movement, and cognitive stimulation. Don’t ask me how but baby creatures are abounding with energy. Puppies need several walks per day, and they love to roughhouse, run around, and chew on things. They will need a couple toys at minimum; and if you don’t know where to start start with a puppy kong, a puppy nylabone, and a rope toy for fetch.
You will need to train your puppy to walk on leash; and then in addition to walks, playing fetch and tug of war are fantastic ways to exercise them without having to leave your house. Another great way to get them moving without having to leave the house or if you can’t leave the house due to inclement weather, is training. You can teach dogs to do agility-type moves on command, like up/ lay down/ jump/ roll/ crawl/ heel/ turn. Teaching movement-based tricks is both physically demanding and cognitively taxing at the same time.
A tired dog is a calm, content, happy dog. Sometimes you may find yourself dealing with a very young puppy who is overstimulated/taken out in public for too long, and is in need of a good nap… which you will know because they suddenly become like a wild maniac. When they exhibit behaviors like a Tasmanian devil, your baby dog is just overtired and needs to be put to bed. Young puppies need an upwards of 14 hours of sleep per day. So keep this in mind when you are tempted to take them out with you everywhere all day long– nope, they actually do well to stay at home and sleep, most of the time.
9. Dogs are still animals at the end of the day. You have to train and socialize your puppy from the start in order to end up with a dreamy, well-behaved dog. And trust me when I say training starts as early as day one. First you will start off with functional and basic expectations by training them through daily routines. When and where to pee/poop. When/where to eat. When/where to sleep. Who is in charge (you). What to chew, what not to chew. How to walk on leash. How to stay quiet when they need to pipe down, and how to “drop it” or “Spit it out” when they have anything in their mouth that ought not to be in their mouth.
From day 1 Nalu was crate trained and slept in his crate which was placed either on my bed next ot me or right beside my bed. I would zip the crate up most of the way and stick my hand in, stroking him until he fell asleep then I’d zip it up the rest of the way. Within two weeks’ time Nalu was practicing how to wear his walking hardware, and walk nicely on the leash inside the house, and could sit down and lay down on command. I can’t speak for all breeds but Brussels Griffon are VERY smart. I also know that some breeds (particularly any breed of Bully) are very stubborn and they need an alpha and lots of training right away. I alluded to the fact that bigger dogs also require diligent training.
Any puppy who is being raised as a sport animal (ie hunting), service animal, or even an emotional support animal trained to do a specific task needs to be trained in said tasks right away. They should also be selected from the litter with their future job in mind.
My dog is my ESA. When I chose him, he was the sweetest, most sensitive, most quiet and snuggly one from the litter, instead of being on the more sassy and spirited side like the rest of his loud siblings.
When I first picked him up, he immediately snuggled in and rested his little coconut head over my heart. Not only can he recognize when I’m going into a panic attack or an emotional flashback (he helps me recognize that I’m starting to lose my cool and grounds me back to reality by barking at me, pawing at me, or licking my face. If he starts trippin, it means I’m trippin), but he also hunts cockroaches because I have a severe uncontrollable cockroach phobia if I’m held hostage by a cockroach alone in my home. Now I don’t have to worry because my dog can find, chase, and catch cockroaches, even when I don’t know they’re there. That’s how good of a hunter this dog is. It’s pretty phenomenal.
The main training and socialization tip you’ll want to keep in mind is that habits die hard with a dog. Whatever you allow and reinforce is what they’re going to continue. If you feed them table scraps, they’ll continue to stare and beg at the table. If you allow them to pull on leash, unchecked, they’ll continue to pull on the leash. If you allow them to try and aggress and bark at other dogs, unchecked, they’ll continue that behavior. If you allow them to jump on you or others, they’ll continue that. If you allow them to chew on your hands, fingers, or ankles unchecked, they’ll continue that.
If you train them to stay quiet when other dogs bark, they’ll continue that. If you train them to sit before you open doors and invite them to walk through, they’ll continue that. If you train them to ignore other dogs on command, they’ll continue that. If you train them to spit things out that are yucky, they’ll continue that. Are you getting it yet? Whatever you allow and reinforce with training, they will continue. So start establishing expectations and training right away.
10. Groom from the start. Especially nail clipping, teeth brushing, and as soon as they’re old enough for their first bath, bathing. Many dogs *hate* having nails clipped. The smaller the dog breed, the more likely they are to need clipping because they’re not heavy enough for walks on pavement to naturally wear down their nails. Start from very early puppyhood by clipping just the tippety tip with a human straight-edged cuticle or toenail clipper. As soon as possible, graduate to a dog nail clipper. I recommend the Zen Clipper because it is pretty fool-proof against cutting too short. Just in case you ever do clip too short, you will need Styptic powder (it’s not a bad idea to have this on hand from the start for any other cuts/scrapes/abrasions. It’s basically a band-aid for dogs). If you train dogs to clip nails early, you will save yourself hundreds of dollars in groomer bills for a task that. you absolutely CAN do yourself.
Likewise, it is critical that you train your puppy to tolerate having its teeth brushed, again as soon as possible, so that you save yourself, no joke, possibly thousands of dollars in professional teeth cleaning or extraction procedures down the road. Have you ever seen an old dog with its tongue uncontrollably hanging out of its mouth? That happens when a dog has lost all of its teeth. We love toothbrushes like this and this. These days, Nalu will even let me use a descaler on his crooked bottom teeth.
Cautionary tale… my sister never brushed her dog’s teeth. When he was seven years old, she had to pay…I want say $4,000 dollars? to have her dog’s teeth professionally cleaned and basically remediated back to health. Uh… or you can just train your puppy from the start to tolerate having its teeth brushed on the daily. The mouth is the gateway to health or harm down the road. And a dog is like a seven year minimum commitment. Some dogs live to be 20.
Finally, many breeds don’t exactly love bath time. They can love water, and still hate bath time. It took me quite some time to hit the bocha (Japanese/Hawaiian word for bath time) sweet spot with Nalu bear. Turns out he hates water that is too cold, and he hates running water especially if the running water goes over his head. In order to get him to enjoy bath time, I used to pre-fill the tub with the perfect temperature warm water, fill a second basin with clean warm water, put in a drop of lavender or vetiver essential oil to calm him the eff down, turn on relaxing dog music in the background, and then pour the water over him with a pitcher. Like I’m bathing the queen of England a la Bridgerton.
It sounds like a lot, but in the grand scheme of things it’s no different from bathing a human baby or child in the bathtub. If you don’t have a bath tub or a hose outside, I think you have to use the sink or buy a plastic basin you might use as a cooler during parties kind of thing. I recommend Burts bees puppy buttermilk dog shampoo for pups.
Anyhow, thanks if you read all of that! I know it was a lot, but it will really help a lot of new dog owners to know what can otherwise be learned the hard way. Happy dog parenting ◡̈
puppy & paradise 