Advice for naughtiest puppy in the world!

junior_j

:beer: I 100000000000% adore my 14 week old puppy! As does my mum and brother who I live with. Yet despite all our experience with puppies ive never met such a hyper one! HE chews everything and anything , will yap and bark when he doesnt get his way , won't toilet outside if he is tired or its dark (despite outside light and one of us with him) Refuses to walk on his lead more than 5 minutes! I have all the books and used pretty much every tip out there but was wondering what do you do for a naughty puppy. I wont smack him nor will my family because we don't believe in that. Also I understand he just a hyper little one who doesnt understand right from wrong. Raising out voices, putting him in his bed , taking away his bone if he gets growly with it , putting him in the other room to calm down , telling him off , doesnt work , nor does a pet corrector spray I brought him , anti chew spray , taking him to the garden every 3 minutes work!

also if we eat infront of him at the table or anything like that he goes nuts , when he realises he wont get anything he chews some thing as revenge. lol. Hes just a little terror tot.

That was him a few days ago when he wasn't feeling well.. butter wouldnt melt eh?

dontone

First of all he's lovely.

Consistancey is the key. What I found when my pooch was a pup was that anytime he got too rowdy, he was put into his crate for 5 mins till he calmed down. Crates are marvellous things, to bring a pup down to earth. I'll admit that my dog drove me nuts for the first 3 months, they are masters at winding their owners up.
My dog now quite happily sleeps in his locked crate all night (he's mischevious if the door remains unlocked - he can open drawers)
When he growled when we went near a treat or toy, we took it and told him to "give paw" only until he did it, did he get it back. When he had his meals, I took the bowl away and did the same thing - he had to give a paw to get it back. I can now go to any toy, treat, bowl of his without incident - he knows that a paw = receive.
Those pet spray things are a waste of money. Our pup was a tinker for pinching the kitchen door wedge or having a gnaw at the table leg. Instantly cured with curry powder and a firm "NO" He still will nick a slipper or shoe if he thinks he can sneak past us quick enough. Then again when he was with the rest of the litter, the people who we got him off just gave them slippers to chew, so it's something that he hasn't grown out of.
I can't really say much more, as a lot of it was patience - which you need a lot of. There will be some more people who will come on and give you help. Good luck.

junior_j

Thank you. I totally understand that patience is the key and he is NEVER left alone he has at least one adult with him. Sorry apart from the other night he was left with the other dogs for 2 hours whilst my mum took my bro some where. He does however now sleep downstairs in the kitchen/dining room with the my 2 yr old dog and does great there! I think a lot of behaviour is down to having 2 other owners in the past and no consistency. I feel sorry for him when I think of what he has been through , he had kennel cough , fleas , worms and bad belly when we got him all that has cleared up thanks to us and the vets! x

Person_one

Two other owners before 14 weeks? I take it that doesn't include the breeder, so you're his fourth 'home' in his short life? Bless him, the poor little mite!

Do you know how old he was when he left his mum? If it was too young (before about 7-8 weeks) then that might explain some of the trouble you're having as those last few weeks with their brothers and sisters are vital socialisation where they learn the beginnings of 'doggy manners'.

Once he's got his jabs finished I'd take him to puppy socialisation classes, your vet should know of a local one, and get him out and about meeting other well behaved dogs as much as possible. Do you know anyone with calm older dogs you can visit? I'd get him booked in to start training classes if you can as well, that will reinforce the bond with you and give him some mental stimulation and get him paying attention to you!

For the resource guarding, taking away his bone when gets growly about it won't work. That will just reinforce that he does need to guard it because you'll take it away if he doesn't! You should offer him treats as you approach, get him to willingly surrender his bone for the more tempting treats and then give it back. Do this repeatedly until he associates you coming towards him and his precious bone as a good thing rather than a threat.

junior_j

We have barely any history on him . He has finished his jabs and has had worm/flea treatment from the vets and treatment for his kennel cough so he is now clear to socalise with other dogs and walks. He has 2 walks a day. One in the morning and one afternoon early evening. HE socialises brilliant with our other two dogs and last night we couldnt believe it , he slept soundly and we woke up to no mess at all And today he is using his puppy training pads and the garden perfectly! Although he has been told off for chewing wires and the fire place. When I saw we take the bone away what we do is , if he growls if we walk past him and a bone or toy and he growls or gets snappy we take it and he has to sit and give paw to get it back , this method is really working. We are hoping to get a crate for him to have some down time. x

OnAndUp

What do you feed him?

Some foods can make Pups even more Hyper than they already are!!!

krlyr

junior_j wrote: »

Thank you. I totally understand that patience is the key and he is NEVER left alone he has at least one adult with him.

I would try to get him used to being left alone for a little while on a semi-regular basis or you may be setting him up for seperation anxiety issues.

Has he got many chews to help with his teething? Could be why he's going so mad with the chewing at the moment, his adult teeth are about due to come through around now.

junior_j

Yes he has a million and one toys and loads of special teething toys. Everytime some one comes round they have brought him a toy. We left him for 2.5 hours today alone (well with our other dogs) and he done great! His only mess was on the training pad , clever boy. So far today (touch wood) he has had no accidents on the carpet of laminate which is great. My brother will take him for another walk in the next half hour. also he is left alone with the other 2 dogs for around 9ish hours at night. He is fed on science hill plan , because of being moved around a lot and people literally feeding him crap he has such a weak belly. We are slowely weaning him to Bakers as thats the only one he really likes and its dry food not wet. x

krlyr

Please don't wean him onto Bakers, full of colourings and well-known for causing hyperactivity and behavioural issues!
If you want a food that's good for a sensitive tum then I would perhaps suggest Naturediet (or Wainrights is PAH's version) for a wet food, or for a dry food something like Fish4Dogs, Arden Grange, James Wellbeloved. You want to look at the ingredients because they tell you a lot about the food.

Here's Bakers ingredients and I will point out the (many) red flags

Cereals, Meat and animal derivatives (Minimum 4% fresh meat in the soft moist kernel, minimum 4% duck and minimum 4% rabbit in the red and brown kernels), Vegetable protein extracts, Oils and fats, Derivatives of vegetable origin (0.5% beet pulp in the red and brown kernels), Various sugars, Minerals, Vegetables (minimum 4% vegetables in the green and yellow kernels). With antioxidants, coloured with and preserved with EC additives.

In order as they appear on the ingredient list, the issues are
- cereals as the main ingredient. Dogs mainly eat meat - some people will even argue that they are carnivores, due to the structure of their teeth and digestive system. However, even if they ate some plant matter, it would not make up the majority of their diet, and it would not be processed cereals. Strike two against cereals is the lack of specifying which cereals. This is often done for the convenience of being able to order the cheapest cereals at the time of manufacture. If Bakers specified that it was "Wheat, rice and oats" instead of "cereals" then they are legally bound to only use wheat, rice and oats. However, if they say cereals, it can be any cereal. If wheat is cheaper in January, January's batch will be mostly wheat. If maize is cheaper in February, they will switch to maize. This can cause havoc on sensitive tummies because the ingredients can constantly change but you will never know and can never guarantee what each tin/bag will contain.

- meat and animal derivatives. Again with the lack of specifying. Is it lamb, beef, chicken? They don't want to tie themselves to one in particular because they want to shop around. If your dog is intolerant of lamb then you're playing doggy roulette, never knowing whether a bag will upset your dog's tum or not. Animal derivatives can be an iffy one too. A derivative by itself is not a bad thing - sounds gross, because it's all the leftover bits of an animal once you take the meat off. The chicken's feet, beak, feathers and so on. Fine if it was in small quantities, but these things are cheap because they're by-products of the meat industry and often just binned. When you have a cheap ingredient and you want to make money, what do you do? Use more of the cheap ingredient than the expensive one. Chances are, cheap foods will have more derivatives in there than actual "pure" meat. 70% chicken beaks, 30% chicken breast? I don't know the figures but it's yet another unknown in there.

- the percentage of meat. Lets analyse this. You have the moist kernels, the red, the brown, the green and the yellow kernels. 5 different kernels. Assume there's even amounts of each - being cynical, you'd say there'd be more of the cheaper-to-make ones like the vegetables and cereals, but let's just assume it's even. In a 2kg bag that means you have 400g of each. 4% of meat in 3 of those types of kernels - I make that 16g of meat per kernel type. 48g of meat per 2kg of food! What is the other 1.952kg made from?! OK, the meat amount is a minimum but most companies will want to maximise profits so why use more than is necessary?

- oils & fats, various sugars. Why does dog food need various sugars? These ingredients are mostly to make the food taste nicer, if your dog wolfs down its dinner then you're likely to buy it again. But you'll give your dog a sweet tooth and make it more difficult to change. If you let a kid eat McDonalds for a month, then tried to switch it to homemade dinners with hardly any salt, puddings with hardly any sugar, everything will taste bland until their tastebuds adjust.

- last but not least, colourings. Blue Smarties were taken away for a reason, Bakers is the Smarties of the dog world and so many people don't make the link between food and behaviour, yet it can account for so much. I used to work in petshop and when someone came in wanting a non-pull harness for their totally hyper dog, or a bitter spray to stop their crazy dog chewing everything in sight, we always asked what they fed and the majority of them fed something like Bakers. We recommended switching foods and in many cases the behaviour stopped.

Compare the above ingredients to one of the brands I named, let's go with Arden Grange.
Chicken Meal* (min 27%), Whole Grain Rice (min 26%), Whole Grain Maize, Chicken Fat*, Beet Pulp, Fresh Chicken (min 5%), Dried Brewers Yeast, Egg Powder, Fish Meal*, Linseed, Fish Oil*, Minerals, Vitamins, Nucleotides, Prebiotic FOS, Prebiotic MOS, Cranberry Extract, Chondroitin Sulphate, Glucosamine Sulphate, MSM, Yucca Extract. * Preserved with mixed tocopherols and rosemary extract.

Firstly, they name the meat they use - you know what you're feeding your dog, hooray! Chicken meal is good, meal means that they've taken chicken meat and dried it out. They use the dried product in the food. It's drilled into us that fresh is best, but in terms of dog food it can have a negative - if ingredients list, for example, 20% chicken it includes the water in the chicken. So in a 1kg bag you're not getting 200g of chicken, you're getting 200g of chicken plus water. Chicken can be 60% water so once they process the food to make it into a dry food, you could end up with only 80g chicken. But if they use 200g of chicken meal, you still end up with 200g in your 1kg bag at the end because there's no water to be lost. With the ingredients stating 27% chicken, you're getting 540g of chicken in your 2kg bag, much better than the 48g of unspecified meat in Bakers!
Rice and maize as their bulking ingredients - again, they've named them so you know what it is. Maize isn't the best of ingredients but it is quite common in dog food. To see it listed below rice is a good thing though, better to use more rice. There's some more chicken in there, some fish meal, then pretty much just various vitamins and supplements for their various benefits. Prebiotics for the tummy, cranberry for the urinary tract, chondroitin, glucosamine, MSM for the joints. Again, all specified - this company have nothing to hide in their ingredients, they're confident enough to let you know exactly what's in there and they don't want to chop and change the recipe so no need to stick vague ingredients or group them all together as "meat" or "cereals". I'd much rather feed this than Bakers!

Another sidenote is that Bakers can work out more expensive to feed than you think. You have to feed a lot more of it because the ingredients are poor, the cereals are poorly digested and don't give much nutritional value, and they make up the bulk of the dog food! Not to mention the amount that goes straight through the dog..to put it crudely, you are paying for a lot more dog poop than you will be scooping at the moment! I remember showing a customer the feeding guidelines for Bakers and for James Wellbeloved. Bakers at about £15 a bag, JWB at about £38. The guy was having to feed his dog 6 cups of Bakers (large breed dog), but for JWB he would only need to feed 2. That's a third less food for something that wasn't 3 times the price, so it actually cost him less on a daily basis to feed a top quality, well-known brand of food. Food for thought, anyway - always work out the cost per day rather than the cost per bag, because it will vary so much depending on how much of it your dog needs to eat. Like I said, it can very hugely, from 200g a day for a particular dog with one food, to 800g of food of another brand for the same dog.

Oh, and in terms of him not liking other foods, bear in mind my point about the sugars etc. in Bakers making it appealing. Personally I would recommend you get a decent quality dry food and if he needs tempting, add a small amount of wet food to it. Naturediet/Wainwrights trays are good and you can zap them in the microwave which really brings the smell out (you may need a peg for your nose!) which appeals to a dog. You can use 1/4 of a tray for example and keep the rest in the fridge to use at his other meals. My last dog wouldn't eat dry on her own but I only had to add a tiny amount of Naturediet, so a tray lasted for days, adding very little to the cost of feeding her.

OnAndUp

junior_j wrote: »

Yes he has a million and one toys and loads of special teething toys. Everytime some one comes round they have brought him a toy. We left him for 2.5 hours today alone (well with our other dogs) and he done great! His only mess was on the training pad , clever boy. So far today (touch wood) he has had no accidents on the carpet of laminate which is great. My brother will take him for another walk in the next half hour. also he is left alone with the other 2 dogs for around 9ish hours at night. He is fed on science hill plan , because of being moved around a lot and people literally feeding him crap he has such a weak belly. We are slowely weaning him to Bakers as thats the only one he really likes and its dry food not wet. x

DON'T Put him on Bakers if he's hyper now he would be bouncing off the walls after?!?! :eek:

junior_j

Blimey! Thank you guys! Shows I am not much of a expert eh? We are going out tomorrow to get him some James wellbeloved! for the minute he will stay on science hill plan as its the only food that doesnt give him a runny bum! He also has a small amount of fresh cooked chicken mixed in for protein because his belly was so bad when we got him that he lost some weight. We will give him 2/3 science 1/3 Jwb and wean him like that.
He has has improved behaviour today , no accidents in the house at all and only 2 wee's on the training mat the rest outside! He has only been told off 3 or 4 times , chewing , yapping ,clawing.. he is now crashed out on the floor snoozing! We will speak to the vet next week to see about dog training too.
No matter how naughty he is we would never rehome him because its not fair he just needs love , attention , reasonable discipline and a home that won't get rid of him!
We are putting the xmas decs up tomorrow wonder how he will like them hehe x