So it’s no secret that we recently added a 4th dog to the K9 Trail Time team and this time we got our paws on a puppy. Yogi was a pup born in rescue when his husky mum was picked up as a stray and then gave birth to a litter not long after being placed with a foster home. We are not 100% sure of his breeding (other than that his mum was a husky) and it doesn’t matter at all to us what he is, as long as he’s a happy and healthy little dog.
Not having had a young puppy to train for the dog sports before we thought we would do a little diary blog detailing a few things we are doing to introduce him to canicross from a young age, so he will hopefully enjoy running as much as the rest of the team do when he is old enough.
The first thing to say is that he will NOT be doing any running in harness for a long while yet, he is currently coming up to 5 months old and all we are doing is laying down the groundwork for a happy and balanced dog at this stage. Yogi still has a lot of growing to do and when we got him at 10 weeks, he actually didn’t go for any ‘walks’ with the others for another 2 weeks to allow him to settle in and get used to life in his new home before we did anything physical.
We did quite a bit of training getting him used to coming to his name in the house and the very basics of puppy training to get him started but because he’d had all his vaccinations he did come with us to the Tri Dog event at Box End Park and got used to being outside with lots of others dogs around.
For us it’s really important Yogi doesn’t feel stressed surrounded by other dogs and particularly other dogs barking. At canicross events you get a lot of noise and activity at the start of races and if you want to have a calm and controlled dog on a start line, the sooner they get used to be around that kind of noise and understanding it’s not frightening, the better.
The next thing we’ve done is get him used to wearing a harness. It might sound obvious but so many people walk their dogs on a collar then just expect their dog to be ok with having a harness put on and learning to pull in it. The feel of a harness can be very different for a dog and so Yogi has been walked in a harness since we started proper walks, so he can learn a harness signals something fun and going out for activity.
The other thing we have been actively training is voice commands on walks. It is never too young to start training the voice commands, so we have been working on ‘wait’ ‘go on’ ‘gee’ (for right) ‘haw’ (for left) and ‘steady’ (if we ever get that one mastered it will be a miracle!). So far it appears that Yogi is picking up his cues from the other dogs, as his responses are faster when he is with another of the team and can see how they react to the command but this is all part of his learning process and eventually he will independently know what the voice commands mean.
It will be interesting to see how Yogi gets on with everything over the next few months as he grows and we can begin to do more activity with him. At the moment some off lead running and relatively short lead walks, along with reward based training at home is plenty to keep his mind and body occupied as he learns about life as a K9 Trail Time team member. We will continue his training in this way for at least another few months until he has developed a bit more and experienced being at some more races when the season starts again in September.
We hope you’ll enjoy following his progress and will blog again when there’s more we can do with his training. Happy trails!
