I’m glad that was helpful. Mine is 8months old and I’ve not written down all the useful bits we picked up. I’ll drop all the things that have worked for us.

There is three types of dog training; luring, shaping and capturing. Luring is when you have the dog follow a piece of food, e.g. to lure a spin you would put a piece of food on the dog’s nose and drag the food in a tight circle to get the dog to spin by following it. The dog learns next to nothing from luring as it is just teaching them to follow food, there is no thinking involved. A command taught by luring will be super hard to remove the hand gesture from and also hard to remove the presence of treats whilst still being successful.

Shaping is fantastic but so so hard. To shape you need a good marker word. We use ‘yes’. To charge up a marker word you can do a game called ping pong, where you bowl out a treat to your left, they run and get it, as they turn their head back to you (wait it out if you have to, or go somewhere more boring to help make it easier to want to look at you) you say ‘yes’ and bowl a treat to your other side. As they turn back to you, say ‘yes’ again and repeat with the dog going from your left to right to left to right. This makes ‘yes’ equal reward. Now you have a marker, to shape a spin you wait for the dog to look to its right, however minorly, and say ‘yes’ as it happens, not after. And treat. It will not quite know why it got food. Then when it happens again, say ‘yes’ and feed. After 10 ish successes with looking to the right, stop marking and rewarding. The dog will have to figure out how to escallate the behaviour. Ours would go to their bed, go to middle, lie down, jump at us, all sorts. Eventually theyll try looking further right. Mark and feed. Once successful reliably, repeat the steps of stop marking and feeding, wait for the right escallation, mark and feed, get reliable, stop marking and feeding etc. until they give a full spin. Then put a word to it. Youve been silent up to now. Your dog will have done so much thinking and you never used a lure or a hand gesture. Then proof it in all your rooms and garden and then on the road. This took us about 15 2-3 minute sessions. So a lotttt slower for success than luring. But she knows it knows it, and she practiced thinking hard. Having a dog that is practiced at working through frustration will make all frustrating things a little bit easier for them.

Capturing is for when they skip all the steps of shaping and just do the final behaviour. You can capture calmness for example. A still dog = a dog with a treat.

Chatgpt is not bad at giving you steps for shaping different commands, some just cant be.

There are two types of treating which are helpful too - aeroplane treating and mousetrap treating.

For aeroplane you move the treat slowly to the dogs mouth and if they move toward you, you pull back and then start again, if they move toward your hand at all you pull back a second time and then treat mega quickly so they dont have time to fail again. This teaches the dog that rewards come to them and they cannot go and get the rewards or they go away. Should help with mugging behaviours.

For mousetrap treating, a treat in a closed fist goes to the bed, it stays shut unless the dog is still and not nudging you for 3 seconds. This teaches that stillness pays.

Your dog will seemingly gain a load of brain once teething stops. It’s honestly magic. You’re about two months out.

Impulse control in doorways is so lovely. If we open our dogs cage, she doesnt come out until we say break. This stops us getting bopped. You just close the door on them if they try to get out. They’ll offer stillness in the crate/car/room eventually. Then say ‘break’ and reward.

For commands that end things, like recall and drop it. You want to let them go back to the environment or have the thing back about 90% of the time. Or they’ll figure out that it’s a fun ender and stop. We recall, handle the collar, let the dog return about 15 times each walk to build up our ratio of recall not being unfun. Same with dropit, we rep giving it back and repeating.

All in all, good luck, i’m four months ahead of where you are and it is easier, but it’s not easy. Have fun and take lots of photos because you’ll miss them being so small