LauSai

Dear Adrienne, Oreo is 1.5 years old!!! He becomes a much mature little doggie than 3 months old ;) 3 months before, I started to fence an area for Oreo in living room to live his daily life. I normally walk him 1-2 a day, with an average of 30-40 minutes. However, he doesn't walk freely in my home since we are pretty busy for newborn baby stuff. Now we can squeeze more time out for Oreo and try to release him out more. We did a few trail: he played and destroyed our slipper - fine, I will do environment management - remove all slipper before he still ate the corner of my furniture - fine, I will do environment management and say "No" to him - he will walk away while I am here but now he brings his toys and jumps onto Sofa and play, which made me need to walk away ;):confused: - I think I could remove all toys before release him next time I think his pattern is like this: release from fence --> Super High Energy & Zoomies --> Tired and rest a while on Sofa / Ground --> Super High Energy to play toys and Run Question: Would it be possible to sharp his behavior and make him more stable in energy? Also, is it possible to sharp him not playing on Sofa, only Rest on Sofa.. just play on the ground? Personally, I think training a dog for a desired behavior (last for a longer period) is more difficult than a command. As some training advice may suggest, we can give treats / positive reinforcement when the dog does a desired behavior (calm). But after all they will need to drain up their energy and they will run around or play around. The Question is how to make the pattern more stable instead of a sudden-run and sudden-rest pattern which is more dangerous for me to carry a baby and walk around in the home. Lastly, Oreo usually goes out to Poo (remove to trash immediately). But when he poo at home sometimes, I go to eat Poo before we removed it. Is there anyway to prevent this? He will also eat diaper (Pee Pad?!)... which made us afraid that this will cause problems in his digestive system... p.s. I do think Oreo is a much better and lovely doggie. Just want to find a way to live with him happier together at home everyday! :)

Dear Adrienne, It is very nice to read your article and gives me a very complete picture of what I need to do in the coming few months! Let me try that and start with baby steps! Looking forward for reading your article! Just would like to show you my suddenly-become-naughty adolescent Oreo as a thank-you for so many useful advice! (and Oreo saying thank you for giving him treats! lol :))

Hi Adrienne, This is Oreo again ! Finally Oreo becomes a 7-month puppy (or adult dog?!)! Thank you very much for the detailed explanation. Oreo does learn a lot as he is a fast learner (thanks God!). There are some questions (that can hardly Googled) would like to ask you :) 1) When and How much for Treats? As learnt from what you have taught, and some experiments with Oreo, we finally managed to make him eat again in the bowl. But the trade-off is that we give up all treats during the day except we gave him just very little amount of high value treats when he does his business on the street (poo).So basically we have done no training during the day. But I am now thinking I would like to recall some tricks that we taught him, such as 'sit', 'settle', 'hand hand'; also new lesson such as 'brush teeth', 'heel' etc. Otherwise, I afraid that there will be no stimulation / boring for him. So may I know how would you balance between giving out treats and the normal meal in terms of portion and frequency? 2) Expecting a New baby coming to our home in December! It is expecting that a new baby will come to our home in December :) I learnt from some googles and forums that we should play some "baby crying" sound to him during the day to let him get used to it. Also, bring the clothes with the smell of baby to introduce to Oreo first. Pay less attention to Oreo before baby arrives to let him get used to. And give treats if Oreo shows good things to the baby. Any of the above is correct, and anything else? Much appreciate if I can have more references and readings for this topic as I am quite nervous about this, although I believe King Charles should be quite friendly. Just want to make sure that he won't be jealous and become the best buddy of us! 3) Dogs need stimulation. But I have taught what I knew... That's just an interesting question to me... should we need to learn continuously for what to teach Oreo in order to keep him stimulated?! and, thanks very much! Best regards, Oreo and Trevor

almost 5-months Oreo saying hi here - this is me again! Thanks for the reply and I research more and get to know more about zoomies. I worked on it a bit and found out exercises (2 or 1 walk per day) can help reduce zoomies times! I cant find any trigger for barking, but regular exercise reduce that barking, so we do accept it now :rolleyes: Now there are two issues that we are working on it, see if you have any ideas: 1. food Since in the past 1-2 months, we did a lot of training (most of it is about teaching Oreo be calm, and now he is better) using the food. For example, when he is calm, we will give him reward. Sometimes when we feed, we will drop down the food, requiring Oreo to look at us. He can only eat if we say "OK". He can do all these well. The problem is now he refuses to eat if we give the whole bowl down. I guess he probably wants us to hand-feed him, out give him a small plenty of food each time, so that he can interact with us. Yesterday it was a bit weird -- we put down the bowl, he refused to eat. But he accidentally flips the bowl, and the food is scattered on the floor. And he surprisingly ate some of them. And once he stopped eating, then I made some movement for the food, then he ate some of them again. The question is why he has such weird behavior (not too make senses for me) and is it possible to correct this behavior? 2. walk (with Leash) During the walk, Oreo is super hyper and pull the leash quite a lot. What we do here is to just stop moving when he pull, and move again when he is still. We are not sure that is it because Oreo is still a puppy and too curious about the outside world, so that he pull a lot. He will naturally behavior better when he grows? Or that's our problem and we should train him to have a structured walk right now, don't wait. We tried to use food to lure him looking at us while walking, but he will become a bit crazy jumping to our hand and bark for the food. So we stopped this luring at the moment, and would like to see what should we do. Finally, I am really interested in knowing more about how dog thinks and why dog sometimes have bad behaves. I am reading the Cesar Millian "How to Raise the Perfect dog: Through Puppyhood and beyond". Are there any other book recommendations from you? Thanks! By the way, such a good site and forum! Thanks, Oreo and Trevor :)

This is Oreo (3 months puppy) again. I am quite frustrated and would like to ask for second opinion here. Recently I have found a local dog trainer (train the trainer approach) who taught us to reward (including giving responses, pet, food, etc) only if Oreo does the right thing, i.e. most importantly be calm. This is basically the same principle as your training approach. The question is we have been taught Oreo needs to stay calm and hold, until we say yes in order to come out from the crate. Also, allowing Oreo run freely will make Oreo hyper. So we have been instructed to not to make Oreo hyper until Oreo learns how to listens and pay attention to us first. We asked the dog trainer but the answer is that he will get tired when learning from us patiently. Question - should we allow him to run freely for a while (out of crate) even though he will be crazy? The problem comes after dinner at night. Two questions: (1) He wants to chew (since he is puppy), but if we give him chewing toys, he will get crazy (to the points of no return... barking, jumping crazily). What should we do? (2) He likes to bark so much before he poo (only during day time, luckily not during mid night when we were sleeping). Is it possible to correct this behavior? Thanks a lot, this really makes me very headache these days.:(

Dear all, It is very nice to reach here. I have some questions about puppy behaviors. My puppy is a King Charles Cavalier 9 week puppy. 1) Food & Water I find out that he is quite hyper when I prepare food and water for him. He barks a lot and I find out it is difficult to make him calm before giving him food and water. Should I wait for him to calm before giving him food and water? If not, how should I make him calm? 2) Playing The puppy is quite full of energy. When I play with him, he finds no interest in toys. He ignores the ball when I throw a ball. He only wants to bite my finger or hand. How would you play with puppy usually when you cannot bring him out to the street? Thanks, Trevor