Today, I let Hector walk off leash for a while.
He is still a very slow puppy and I thought being off leash might add a little zing to his step.
Nope.
Even off-leash, he's still a plodder. He's coming along in his training, though. Now, he will sit even without a treat. He will sit in anticipation of getting a treat, too. When he sees the treat box come out, he sits and stares with all his hungry puppy soul.
Outside, he will follow me, but I walk too fast so he gets left behind a lot. I have to keep slowing down and waiting for him to catch up.
Here, I've called him to come to my hand and he's making his way there. No, he's not sniffing the ground, as it looks, he just walks with his head moving up and down, like he's ratcheting his feet to move by the motion of his head. I imagine little gears inside his body moving each leg based on where his head is.
He finally arrives to place his head in my hand - and there's a camera in the way! You get an up close look at his nose. He was a very good boy for doing exactly as he was told to do.
All that walking and pottying outside wore him out, so he napped.
His training is going very well. It usually does with puppies this young. He'll hit a rebellious stage when he's between 4 and 6 months old where he will "forget" all of his training, or resist it, or stubbornly pretend that it was what he wanted to do all along, silly human. The best time to start training puppies is around 4 weeks old, which means whoever has the mother dog and litter of puppies needs to work on their training that early. They learn quickly to be housebroken then because they don't get acclimated to pooping and peeing wherever they want. They learn the essential basic commands (sit, to my hand, drop it, door, heel). behavioral training is also essential at the earliest age possible - chewing, jumping, chasing, biting, begging, digging, and getting on the furniture.
Once they have their first set of puppy shots (around 8 weeks), they can start being socialized to fully vaccinated adult dogs and to other humans. Since most puppies are adorable at 8 weeks, it will be easy to get other humans to want to socialize with the puppy.
When they get to be 10-12 weeks old, they can learn more complicated commands like stay, down, shake, fetch, quiet, speak, off, no, and then start them on tricks.
And when they get to be about 4 months old, they will rebel, and start asserting their independence. A well-trained puppy will be easy enough to coax back into obedience, but you can expect some turbulence and head-butting, and struggles about who is in charge. Early puppy training will actually make the rebellion stage easier. Just revert back to the early methods of training, and the puppy will remember them and fall back into the right behaviors.
I hope whoever gets Hector will remember to keep up the training. He will be far too large a dog to go untrained.
And these are pictures from last night because he was cute.