Hi {{first_name}} ,

I get more questions about puppies than almost anything else. Most of them come from people who already have the puppy and already have the problem.

That is the wrong order.

In This Issue

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A puppy is somewhat of a blank slate. What you put on that slate in the first weeks and months becomes the dog. Good genetics and solid rearing from the mother lay the foundation. What you do after that either builds on it or tears it down.

The window I am talking about is roughly the first eight to sixteen weeks. During that period a puppy is brave in a way he will never be again. He has not yet developed the capacity to be genuinely afraid of things. He experiences the world and files it away. The vacuum cleaner, the bicycle, the child running across the yard, the shopping cart, the car, the dog across the street. All of it goes in.

When Goofy came to me he was spooked by bicycles. We went down to PCH on Saturdays and Sundays, busy with cyclists, and I fed him his kibble a few pieces at a time around them. Eventually he stopped registering them entirely. Same approach with flags, balloons, shopping carts. Things he probably was not exposed to early enough.

That counter-conditioning took time and work. Exposures at six, seven or eight weeks, when the puppy brain absorbs without resistance, would have made all of it unnecessary.

Most people bring a puppy home and assume everything will work itself out. The puppy will figure out children. The puppy will get used to the neighborhood. The puppy will settle in. And sometimes that happens. But when it does not, the thing that was missed at eight weeks becomes a suspicion at eight months and a problem at two years.

The most overlooked one is children. A puppy that has never been around a three or four year old will find them alarming when he finally meets one. Children move differently. They sound different. They smell different. They are unpredictable in ways adults are not. A dog that was never exposed to that will track them with suspicion and in a high-drive or prey-driven dog that suspicion becomes a real problem very quickly.

Good breeders handle this before the puppy ever leaves. They make sure puppies hear children, are handled by children, have children in their environment during that early window. That single thing makes an enormous difference in the dog's relationship with children for the rest of his life.

The same logic applies to everything. Sounds. Surfaces. Other dogs. Cats. Cars. Other environments. Puppies raised on farms sometimes struggle with traffic because they simply never saw enough of it early on. The experience was never filed. So when it arrives later it arrives as a suspicion or worse yet, a threat.

What you do not solve with a puppy stays unsolved in the dog.

A puppy raised without siblings, or without a mother for the first weeks, has a hole in his social development that is very difficult to fill later. The mother dog does things with a puppy that no human will ever replicate,as do the siblings. She is relentless, physical, corrective. She moves the puppy, disciplines the puppy, establishes structure in a way that gets written in at a level nothing else can reach. The littermates interact, teach and learn bite inhibition, tumble and play rough…  just rough enough!

Humans coddle. That is what we do. We hold, we soothe, we keep the puppy comfortable. A mother dog does not do any of that unless the puppy has earned it. The result of too much human coddling and too little maternal and sibling structure is a puppy who has never been told no by someone he respects, and who grows into a dog with exactly that problem.

If you are getting a puppy and the breeder tells you the litter was only one, think very carefully. Singleton puppies are harder. That pattern holds more often than not.

A very common thing I see is people letting a puppy run free in the house for the first few weeks and then wondering why the puppy has no structure. The crate gives the puppy a place that is his. The world has a shape he can understand. A puppy that learns from the very first day that there is a place for him, that the world has rules, that certain behaviors produce certain outcomes, that puppy is building the foundation for everything that comes after.

A Malinois, or any high energy puppy, running loose in a house with children running around is a problem waiting to happen. The puppy is doing exactly what a Malinois puppy does. The missing piece is the framework.

Feed in the crate. Keep exits and entrances calm. Do not let the puppy rehearse behaviors you do not want. Every time the puppy does something and nothing happens, that behavior gets filed as acceptable. You are always training. The question is whether you are doing it deliberately.

Start training the day the puppy comes home. Skip the formal commands for now. Lure and shape. Teach the puppy the physical movements of sit, down, stand, follow, come. Tag words to them later. Let the first weeks be about the puppy learning that engaging with you produces good things, and that the world has a shape he can understand.

I built my First 30 Days with My Puppy course around exactly this window. Day by day guidance on what to do, when to do it, and how to do it so the foundation holds. If you want the full roadmap, it is at training.robertcabral.com.

That is the window. Once it closes, you are doing remedial work on something that should have been foundational. The work is still worth doing. But it is harder, it takes longer, and some of what was missed in those early weeks leaves a mark that training can manage but never fully erase.

Get it right early. The dog you end up with at two years old is being written right now.

If you want a complete day-by-day guide through this window, my First 30 Days with My Puppy Journal covers exactly this. Every day of that first month, what to do and why. Complete with community support. 

1. Free Training Content on My Website

If you work with shelter dogs or you're evaluating a dog for adoption, I've put together detailed guides on behavioral assessment, what to look for in an evaluation, and how to read dogs under stress. No email required. Head over to [ROBERTCABRAL.COM] and dig in.

2. Membership and community support

If you want to go deeper on any of this, everything is inside my membership. 250-plus lessons, over 85 hours of instruction, organized so you can find exactly what you need. Right now for only $29/mo. [BECOME A MEMBER]

3. The Corrections in Dog Training Masterclass: If you don’t already have it, I recently launched this course for the person who has been working with dogs long enough to know corrections matter, but hasn’t had anyone sit down and walk through exactly how they work. - [LEARN MORE]

Until next Tuesday,

- Robert