We’re going to be going over ways to prepare your dog when you’re planning on adding a new member to your family. Arden and Catherine are expecting a new baby boy and they want to make sure they’re doing everything possible to ensure that their dog Sadie, the Shepherd lab mix, is comfortable with their new son.
Now, let’s go say hello to Arden Kathryn and their dog Sadie. I’ve had the honor of working with you guys, with Sadie a few times, and I got to say you’ve done an incredible job with her. You guys are really in tune. Congratulations on your new baby! Thank you.
How much longer until you’re due? We really could be any day now any time between the now in the next two weeks. This is great. I love this here, and this is actually quite smart. This is a baby. Have you really taken this seriously?
We certainly have. We would cradle the baby like it was our own. We’d walk around the house. We even downloaded a little phone app that makes a bunch of random crying noises while holding a baby and using the crying app here.
Preparing a Dog
It can really help a lot to initially prepare them, but having an actual human being in your arms that has smells that have unpredictable behavior lots of different frequencies when they’re crying and making sounds that’s still a completely different level. You’ve also made an effort to bring her around lots of kids. We have.
One of my great friends brought his six-month-old over a couple of months ago and said he did great the trials that we’ve had have been rather perfect circumstances and there’s always that unexpected. You know something falls on the floor or something runs out in front of Sadie and distracts her. So those are the things that we really need to prepare. We don’t want to underestimate how much changing a huge variable like bringing another person into the house can throw a dog off. It’s very important to have very tight fluid communication with your dog, for you, guys at home.
Teaching Dog All The Basics
You’ll want to make sure that you’ve taught your dog all the basics. Now I’ll have a link that’ll show you how to teach your dog all the basics in order, so that you can get prepared that should take anywhere between 6 and 12 weeks, depending on a variety of factors and where you are with your dog.
So, there’s plenty of time for most people to prepare for this. How is she with jumping on you, because, obviously, that’s a pretty big deal-breaker if you’re holding a baby, you can’t have your dog jumping on sure she does pretty well with not getting overly anxious and excited when people come in.
How To Control Barking
If your son Caden is sleeping, you obviously don’t want her barking. Waking him up a lot. So, it’s important, you have general barking under control, but I’ll have videos on jumping and barking. Also, in the description, you want to break this down into two major phases: by-and-large for most dogs you’re. The first phase, which we’re going to focus on today, is teaching your dog how to just chill out and relax so that you can tend your baby and do whatever you need to at will without interference from your dog.
The second phase is, then, introducing your dog to your baby. There should be no urgency to have them interact immediately. Sadie’S energy level is moderate, so exercise before training isn’t required here. But if your dog is a high-energy, dog you’ll need to exercise them sufficiently before teaching.
This fetch is generally the most efficient way to do this, see the description if you need to know how to teach or improve your dog’s fetch ability, let’s see where Sadie is on stay, while unexpectedly distracted that way, we can see where we need to start what I’d like to see initially here is kind of how Sadie reacts if we really sell her at least try and sell her on the fact that this is a real baby, you’re, just being a distracting dad.
You got okay and if you drop some of this, let’s see how she does as you’re walking around with the baby. She’s really interested in you because there’s a lot of action going on over here, down really good down-stay, so she’s got that. But with the distraction, she gets up a little. It’s like a lot of dogs she’s like whoa, okay. This is a little bit harder, especially if you can throw a chicken on the ground and make sounds with the toy.
That’s interesting to her. So, we have to show her that she still needs to stay, no matter how much she wants to get up and investigate you’re teaching your dog, something like this. It’s best to phase things in slowly. You want to take baby steps so to speak. You don’t want to just wait for your new baby to come and hope everything goes all right.
I think we should work with him for a few more minutes on this. Have her relax into a down stay and chill on the couch right here, while she does that, that’s what we want to be able to do. Okay, what I’d like to do next is to have you just walk around with only the baby for a second while she holds it down, stay and make sure we’ve got that solid, and then we’ll change another variable on her. This is awesome. She’s holding it down.
Teaching To Hold A Baby Doll
Stay while he holds a baby doll, our next step is to do the same thing, holding the baby and rattling the toy, maybe even dropping the toy. So now we’re doing two things walking around with the baby, making a sound with the toy. Expecting her to hold her down stay. You can see what she’s got the look right there! That’s X, oh nice job. Get her eyes on you when you drop it next time, okay, so she’s.
Looking at that now, I want to look at you for guidance, very good. Why don’t you try and make sounds, maybe even whistle a little bit to see how she does. Stay, stay stay, very good, so I think we’re making a lot of progress right now, she’s staying when you hold the baby she’s staying when you rattled the toy she’s staying when you whistle, which she’s normally thrown off by here now comes the real test. Will she stay as you do all of that, while you also dropped chicken, leave it good, good, good girl, good, maybe whistle and tell her to stay. You see this.
This is great. That’s progress. Celebrate progress, we’re not going to accomplish things when teaching dogs in one big step. You have to really break them down. That’s what you’re seeing here Sadie was trying but she was having a hard time grasping that she should stay while Arden sat on the couch.
Teach Your Dog The Right Way
When we teach our dogs, we need to make it a priority to anticipate how they’re likely to act. In this case, we have Sadie breaking stay and around the same point in the exercise since she is predictably breaking stay there. You’ll want to come up and reward her, so in other words, you’ll sit down and then get right back up and reward her. You know what I mean: don’t stall out too long, when your dog is repeatedly making the same mistake. You need to work through this by taking a step back on your training to help your dog understand a bit more clearly stay there leave it good sit down.
Slowly tell her to stay again. If you stay there, good! Stay there! Now whistle briefly vittor to stay, see how we’re going in slow motion really not trying to throw her in the deep and really overwhelm her good from the turkey. Be very clear about leave it. Leave it! Say now, look at me with me. That’s what I’m talking about. You see that this is an exercise.
Naturally Relaxing
You’ve got to practice a lot over a good few weeks. The next step is when you see her naturally relaxing in day to day life, where she’s just hanging out while you’re doing whatever you want to start to teach her. How to do that? When you ask her to do it, that’s called a settle. A settle is basically a down stay where a dog relaxes indefinitely, so it’s different from a down stay, because when you ask your dog to lie down and stay, it means lie down, stay and wait for the next thing.
Teaching A Settle
Settled means lie down and relax and when I get to you I’ll get to you, this is what a settle looks like. So, you would come up to and you would say, settle, relax, you’re not rewarding with food. You rather just kind of communicating with her. I, like the calm behavior. This is what we dog trainers, call capturing a behavior when she does this naturally, you’ll want to let her know how much you like the calm behavior over several weeks of doing this you’ll be able to eventually say: hey, Sadie, settle. The tricky thing about teaching a settle is that you’re not rewarding the position they’re in, but rather they’re in relaxed state of mind. I’m so excited for you guys, the biggest thing that I want you to get from a video like this is that you don’t take a wait-and-see attitude when there’s a major change in your life like having a baby.
