# Puppy Training? How Old?



## fjm (Jun 4, 2010)

Pups are learning every moment they are awake, so their education starts well before they come home to you. When training involved choke chains, yanking and other harsh methods, the usual advice was not to start classes till the pup was 6 months old. With reward based training, and puppy socialisation classes, I think the general consensus now would be that you cannot start too early, but that you need to work at a pace suitable for your puppy's age and attention span. Full-blown agility needs to wait until the puppy is at least 12 months old, but many clubs and instructors run puppy agility classes that avoid stressing developing joints.


----------



## lily cd re (Jul 23, 2012)

You can start even the youngest puppies on basics of sit, down, come stay, etc in your home. Make the sessions very short and keep it light and fun. If you are planning to do obedience and agility you will want to start making things more formal when your pup is old enough to give decent attention. Puppies shouldn't jump big heights until they have finished growing, but you can introduce them to the concept with jumps set up with bars on the ground or floor. I recommend the book The Focused Puppy for foundation work that will be good for whatever you plan to do. I also recommend that you find an agility trainer who will give you very good foundation training with clear criteria for all equipment right from the start. I have spent lots of time retraining in agility because I didn't have a great start.


----------



## Lplummer52 (Oct 26, 2013)

*Thanks for good advice!*

Thanks all for your great advice. I have a friend with a Norfolk Terrier that competes in agility and earthdog work. She breeds puppies and starts teaching them sit and come at 6 weeks old! If a terrier can do that, certainly a poodle can! I'm going to start Madeline on some basics here with homemade chicken jerky treats I found on this forum. She's a good eater....not picky like my beloved Japanese Chin who passed away this year. She seems so smart already and so calm.....I gotta do this! I am retired, so have plenty of time to devote to Madeline. I've only had her for 3 days, but she hasn't had an accident here yet. Of course, I'm taking her out a million times a day to the same patch of grass! But I can tell she's very smart and comes from a line of competition dogs on her dam's side, so I am excited!


----------



## fjm (Jun 4, 2010)

I think you are going to have a lot of fun together - poodles are SO rewarding to train! I have noticed that my very good, very keen, agility instructor is gradually moving from BCs to poodles, after having a few in her classes - Poppy even managed to make me look like an adequate handler!


----------



## Poodlebeguiled (May 27, 2013)

I started training my pups the day they came home with me. I think of every interaction as a training opportunity. All fun and games...positive reinforcement, never harsh, never very serious...and very short little exercises, sometimes just a moment here and moment there for something. It's all accumulative.


----------



## Rusty (Jun 13, 2012)

Great advice so far! As the owner of a 1 year old spoo working at some agility training and continuing to work on good loose-leash walking and recall, one thing I think I should have spent a lot more time on right from the beginning is "watch" or "pay attention" to get my puppy to reliably focus on me. Without that focus, so many other things are more challenging to train.


----------



## lily cd re (Jul 23, 2012)

Rusty you are spot on. Good attention offered freely by your dog is the key to everything else. I went to a ring prep workshop the last two Saturdays with a trainer from my area who got a NOC (national ability champion) with his novice A dog. Much of what he talked about and the exercises we did were basically about offered attention.


----------

