When your sweet baby joins your family after long weeks of waiting, you’d rather spend every minute patting and hugging him or her. While it’s absolutely natural, it’s also crucial to start their training as early as possible to be able to establish a healthy family life for the human and furry members alike. The TomKings Puppies team share with you their experience from the farm and knowledge gained in professional training academies.
What are the basic rules when training your Frenchie?
Before we discuss the basic commands to teach your pup, there are five principles you should always remember. Each puppy and each family are different but these rules always apply.
#1 Start your Frenchie’s training as early as possible
There is no reason to wait. You might think that your pup needs to get used to the new environment, but it actually makes it more difficult to start later than sooner. Discuss in the family what rules you’d like the pup to follow, as it’s important that everyone is committed.
#2 Be consistent with your Frenchie’s training schedule
The best is to spare 15-20 minutes every day. If you can’t do that, keep the regular schedule and don’t take long breaks between two sessions. French Bulldogs are intelligent dogs and learn quickly, but if several days pass between sessions, they might forget what they learned.
Consistency is also crucial in terms of what you let them do and what you don’t. If you make exceptions at random occasions, they will learn that there can be exceptions, and they will always beg you for that.
#3 Be patient with your Frenchie
And don’t start the training if you are stressed or frustrated, the puppy will feel your state of mind and soul. Let’s be fair, training a pup can be a tedious process and they will not do everything right for the first time, (and there’s little chance they will do it right for the second time). It’s a lot of repetition, there could be fallbacks, and you’ll need to have a lot of patience. Otherwise, your pup will associate frustration with the training and won’t do it. If you do it when you’re not tired, it can be a lot of fun.
#4 Give lots of recognition to your Frenchie
Even if there are small steps ahead. Keep a treat bag with you when doing the training. You can fill it with treats designed for training, but you can prepare it yourself with bitesize food your puppy loves – it can be anything, which is healthy. Never give them chocolate or sweets, as it causes them harm and they can get sick. Do the training before feeding them, so that they are motivated. Make sure you reduce the quantity of their food by the number of calories you give in treats to prevent them from being overweight.
#5 Never, – never ever – punish your Frenchie
If they don’t proceed as you’d expect. They will remember that training, learning something new is painful, which makes mum or dad angry so they will not want to do it the next time. Just to give you an example: there are some sites where they recommend parents to push the nose of the pup into his or her poo. Never do that, as this will only teach them that poo is horrible and they shouldn’t do it at all.
The article was written based on the experience of the TomKings Puppies Team. TomKings Puppies have been breeding French Bulldogs for 10 years on their farm. All the pictures in the post belong to them and show a puppy from their breed. Check their available puppies here, or if you have any questions or comments let us know below the article.