This is a very common question, but it is luckily easily answered. We have to answer another (much more) important question first though:
At what age can my Labrador puppy be taken from his mother?
And the simple answer to that one is: Not before 8 weeks of age. There is usually a lot of debate over this, and essentially it is because on the one hand, if you take your puppy at 6 weeks of age, she will probably bond better with the human family. On the other hand, leaving her with her littermates and mother for 8 weeks means that she will probably be better socialized with other dogs. Also however, during that last 2 weeks, she will learn bite inhibition, which will make things easier when you get her.
Another factor is that a lot of puppies that get taken away from their mother before at least 7 weeks of age seems to be more prone to separation anxiety.
So, in a nutshell, provided the breeder is interacting with the puppies, you won’t actually get any benefits from taking the puppies before 8 weeks of age. And if the breeder isn’t interacting with the puppies, you should seriously reconsider taking a puppy from him.
Very few reputable breeders will actually let you take a puppy from them before 8 weeks in any case.
So, When can my Labrador training start?
Very simply put, As soon as you get her. Labrador puppy training does not happen only when you decide it does. What you need to keep in mind is that you are always training your Labrador puppy. She is always learning and figuring out how things work, so you might as well make sure that you are teaching her the right things.
The first words you should teach her is NO! (and off, etc), Sit, Come, Down and Stand.
“No” is pretty self explanatory – The very first thing you need to teach your Labrador puppy is when you aren’t pleased with something she did. You have to remember that she doesn’t understand english and she doesn’t know the rules yet.
The way you teach “NO!” is to give her the cold shoulder whenever she does anything you dislike. The instant she misbehaves, say “No!” in a firm slightly lower pitched voice and fold your arms and turn away from her. Then as soon as she stops doing whatever she was doing, praise her lavishly.
After this, Sit, Come, Down and Stand is important, because they are the building blocks of anything that you are going to teach your puppies. Explaining how to teach these are a bit more involved, so I’ll talk about that another time.
There are several reasons to start teaching your Labrador puppy immediately
- The most important is that when they reach adolescence, your puppy goes through a phase where they just aren’t willing to learn new things and often will ignore you with things they do know. If your puppy is well trained at this stage, it makes things easier.
- Teaching a Labrador puppy to sit for her food reinforces the fact that you are the leader. Similarly, ‘Down’ is a vulnerable position for a puppy, and also reinforces that you are the pack leader and also teaches her to trust you in this vulnerable position.
- When a puppy knows the sit command, it is easier to teach them not to jump. There is many such situations where basic obedience can help you solve behavior problems.
Just remember that a Labrador puppy can be highly obedient and still have behavioral problems. A puppy can sit and chew, or lie and whine… Labrador training is not the silver bullet of all problem behavior, but it will help.
photo credit: Johnny Jupiter Photo
Successful Labrador training using positive reinforcement
This entry was posted on Monday, April 5th, 2010 at 1:06 pm and is filed under Labrador Training. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
