PuppyLog

Here are some general things we noticed or had trouble with regarding training that don't fit into any specific trained behavior.

• Puppies come in to your life to teach you patience and understanding. She bites out of affection, out of curiosity, out of learning about controlling her environment (what is that? can I pick that up? what does that taste like?) She literally cannot control her bladder, her biting, or her general excitement about the world.
• While it's important to properly socialize a pup with both other dogs and with people (and cats, ducks, whatever is appropriate to your situation), we have noticed that too much play with another puppy makes Lila less interested in pleasing us. We will need to limit the number of times she is taken on a play date. Five or ten minute chance interactions with other puppies does not seem to have any negative effect.
• The main difficulty in training a dog in partnership with another person is making sure you both have the same vision and idea of what you are doing. Clear communication with your human partner is at least as important as clear communication with your dog, and much more difficult to achieve.
• Extinction, as a technique in dog training can be difficult to achieve because it requires an awareness of yourself. Although we both have a fair amount of experience it has been a while since we trained a dog from scratch. We both found that we were trying to calm down the biting puppy with our hands before disengaging, spending too much time disentangling ourselves from her, or simply not being abrupt and pointed enough about ignoring her to get the point across that she was being ignored specifically because of the biting. It took about a week for us to realize that we were not doing what we thought we were doing on this regard.
• You WILL make mistakes in training. You will even find that things that you thought were really good things to do will turn out to be mistakes at some point - maybe years later. A good thing to keep in mind is that as long as you are acting out off kindness and love pretty much all mistakes are recoverable and forgiveable.