Training My New Dog: First 48 Hours

When adding a dog to your house, how soon is too soon to start training them? The answer is to start guiding your new dog's behavior immediately, with calm, gentle direction. Discover how, as a dog trainer, what the first 48 hours looked like with my new dog.

So I did a dumb.

For context, I unexpectedly lost my Orion on December 29, 2021, and I was still not over the death of Sparta in January 2021.

Needless to say, it was a rough year for pets in my house. Yes, they were all seniors, but still! I don't think Orion died of old age; I think after Sparta left us Orion died from lack of opposition.

So now it was just my pittie Ellis, two rats, and two cats. But hey, who's counting?

About a month ago I was contacted about a Border Collie who needed to be rehomed. She was most likely purchased from a puppy mill, and she couldn't stay where she was. She was a beautiful 5 month old girl, who was sweet as could be. I told them I'd think about it.

Obviously, there's a lot going on in my house, so it's chaotic. Introducing a new dog into the mix wasn't something I wanted to do anytime soon. Maybe I'd start thinking about it when the weather warmed up. Perhaps we should consider being a one dog family. Ellis was so well trained, and just a wonderful dog, so why rock the boat?

I played every scenario out in my head. How would I exercise her? How would Ellis do? The cats? I kept looking for issues that might arise if I took her in, and how I could address them.

In other words, I had a game plan for integrating and training a new dog.

Yes, she'd be a lot of work, but I'd always wanted a Border Collie ever since my childhood dog Pebbles, a Border Collie, died when I was 19. They are always one of my favorite breeds to train. I even made them a part of the Darwin Dog's logo! Yes, I named my company after my sweet Darwin (RIP 2007) but I included a Border Collie to commemorate Pebbles.

So, I guess I have another adolescent dog now. Meet Arwen.

Working through my dog's training and behavior issues

Now I had a dog with a lot of problems: she was a neurotic, hyper, destructive bunch of energy? What I was expecting was a young Border Collie. What I got resembled more of a humming bird on meth than a dog.

As with everything, you start with Piloting, Activity and Work, or what I call the PAW Method.

Now, not to be breed profiling, but I think we can all agree that Border Collies require a high amount of activity with a crazy amount of mental stimulation/work. Despite being intelligent, wonderful, dogs, unless you give them what they need, you'll never get what you want. So Activity and Work are paramount to working with this high energy, hard working breed. Obviously I'd already thought about that, and had a gameplan (and a contingency plan) in mind to address those issues. But when starting out with any new dog, first and foremost, you start out with Piloting.

There are three steps to Piloting your dog:

control yourself,

control the situation, and

start answering questions.

Each question your dog asks you is worth a specific amount of "money"; if you answer that question for them, and they accept the answer, you get the money. You can then use that money to spend on the next question. Pretty soon you have a big enough bank account that it doesn't matter how much money your dog's question may cost: you're rich, and it's now pretty easy to answer that $10 "Can I jump on you?" question your dog has, whereas previously, it was pretty difficult to scrape up that $10.

You are going to keep cycling through these three steps over and over again, so let me give you an idea of how this looked for the first 24 hours with Arwen.

I start by grabbing money wherever I could with her, without scaring her with harsh, painful "corrections", nor suffocating her with non-stop negatives. So what it looked like was gentle answers, both negative and positive. (Hint: learn how here)

Arwen: Can I drag you on the leash?

Me: No

Arwen: Should I jump into your truck?

Me: Yes. Nice jump!

Arwen: Should I bounce around the backseat?

Me: No.

Arwen: So I should be calm, then?

Me: Yes. Good job. Here's a small treat.

Arwen: I’m nailing this!

There was no big negative, or big money item in our conversations on the way back to my house, but the number of small ticket items created a workable bank account for what I faced when I got home. Furthermore, my positives were calm and gentle, and occasionally marked with a treat as well.

Now on to our life together at home.

First was introducing her to Ellis. (For information on how to safely introduce pets, check out this link.) Since Ellis trusts my answers to his questions, it took about 20 minutes before I was confidently letting them play together off-leash. It was a match made in heaven, but sometimes introducing dogs to each other doesn't always go so smoothly, so make sure you have control of the current situation before you move forward with more stimuli.

I cannot stress enough how important it is to have your current dog trained before you add another dog to your pack. Don't think getting another dog will help with your problem dog's behavior; it won't.

I've had Ellis almost 2 years now. He doesn't just love me...he trusts me as well, and that's just as important, if not more so. Love is what makes a dog want to protect you from anything and everything. Trust is what makes him realize he doesn't have to. I've worked hard on having Ellis trust me.

Arwen wasn't housebroken, so water bowls came up off the floor. She would be getting water at specific times throughout the day so I could get an idea of when she'd need to go outside. I blocked off a room in our house so the cats could get some peace from her, and I wouldn't have to deal with her getting cat litter box crunchies yet.

Despite my name, I've never really been a fan of "training". Some dog trainers believe that repetition and consistency are the key. That's fine, but I'm not going to schedule 15-30 minutes every day to work on the "stay" command with my dog.

Plus, once we start scheduling and orchestrating, it feels too much like a chore, and a chore is work, and I avoid unnecessary work at all costs.

For dogs and humans, the easiest and most efficient way to learn a language is through immersion.

So rather than spending 20 minutes going over the "come" command, I'd wait until it was dinner time and when she saw the bowl and starting coming towards me, I'd name that behavior "come". Rather than training her not to plow past me as I was going up the steps, I would just take a few extra moments each time I went up and down the steps to make sure I was facing her and giving her a negative/stay back body language. Instead of scheduling time for her to learn "sit", I'd just randomly come up to her and gently push her butt down while saying "sit".

Dog training is simply catching a dog's behavior so it can be recreated.

So all I was doing was catching behaviors she was already giving me, and occasionally creating those behaviors, and then naming it and moving on with my life. That way I didn't feel as if I was constantly training her; instead I was just constantly living life with her, and answering her questions about how life with me works.

As I always say, you don't train kids, why would you train a dog? Our job is to negate the behaviors we don't like, positively respond to behaviors we do like, and answer questions when they get confused. That's it.

So now, 48 hours later, what does Arwen know? Remember, when I got her, she barely knew her previous name, didn't know any basic commands, had a terrible case of submissive urination on top of not being housebroken, and didn't walk on a leash. So, here we are (with 100% being goal hit):

- 50% leash trained

- 75% no jumping

- 80% sit

- 90% doesn't pass me on the stairs

- 50% door manners

- 65% "to me" come up to my left side and sit

- 95% doesn't beg

- 100% her name

- 80% sits politely before I let her outside

- 50% housebroken (2 pees and 1 poop in the house, 6 pees and 4 poops outside)

- 90% following calm only protocol when in my office

Not bad for our first 48 hours.

At Darwin Dogs, we understand the confusion most dog owners face when training their dogs, which is why we created a dog training framework that focuses on simple, effective methods. Because your dog deserves to be a Best Dog Ever.

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