# Trainability for a Puppy



## Kobi (Oct 26, 2010)

Hello everyone, I have a Vizsla puppy, 10 weeks old today. I have had him for 10 days now.

I was just curious what I should be expecting as far as trainability at this age. This is my first dog so I'm kinda new at this. However, I've done a lot of research to try to prepare myself.

Behavior wise, I would say he's pretty good. He's pretty good about only going to the bathroom outside, and usually when he goes inside it could have been prevented (if I don't pick him up out of his crate he'll pee within 30 second probably). He's not the greatest walking on lead, sometimes I can't get his attention but usually when I have his attention he'll come eventually. 

The main problem I have is with chewing and playing. He likes to get a hold of things he shouldn't. Mainly wires, since I have everything I can out of reach/hidden, but I can't do much about wires. I always stop him and give him a toy when he is doing this but that doesn't always hold his interest. He can also get to being pretty nippy when he is playing. With these issues, it seems he doesn't seem to understand NO and has to be physically removed from whatever he should not have in his mouth in order to get him to stop.

Is this normal? Should I do something else with training? So far the only casualty was a $80 computer keyboard but I soldered that back together. Like I said, I keep a good eye on him, but I HAVE to take things out of his mouth if I don't want them chewed on.


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## Mercutio (Jan 18, 2010)

There have been other posts on what puppies can or should be expected to do.
To summarise Other people with more experience than me... At 10 weeks he is still a baby so don't expect too much. He will need to gently taught everything you want him to know. At this point in time he doesn't know what 'no' means. The chewing sounds pretty normal, the best way around this is to give him plenty of his own things to chew and, as you have already done, get everything important to you out of the way. In our house we lost more to our cat chewing things than to the puppy.

There have been lots of posts on how to teach walking on lead, look particularly for posts from gunner on this topic. You can't expect him to walk on the lead perfectly straight off, let him get used to the concept of a leash and just make sure it's all fun right now, don't force him to do things, make it so he wants to because it's fun and it means playing with you.

I discovered merc was a whole heap better at training me than I was at training him. A good trainer (who sold me on positive reinforcement methods within a week of starting to use them) saved both of us a lot of heart-ache. If you can, find a good puppy school as soon as you can. Good luck


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## Kobi (Oct 26, 2010)

Thanks for the reply. It makes me feel better to know that some of this is expected. He's certainly not super responsive to training, and I don't want to put too much effort into it when it is not working.

He should be going to puppy class soon, probably around mid to end of November, depending on when the class is scheduled. I'm looking forward to attempting some training in a more structured environment.


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## Chestersmum (Jun 21, 2010)

I found when Chester was little we really just concentrated on getting him used to different situations, dogs and people rather than actual 'training'.

I can just about remember the time he didn't really know not to walk on the flower beds, chew the wires or eat plants! We gave him a 'no' each time and either gave him a toy to chew on instead or moved him somewhere. He grew out of this pretty quickly once everything in his environment wasn't new to him anymore.

I think the most important part of training when he was little was things like, no chewing us, no jumping up at people, no stealing human food etc rather than, sit, stay, heel etc. This has really helped now and he does all of this without even thinking. Now he has a longer attention span we can work on the heel, stay, recall etc in training class.

Good luck - hope that helps!


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