The First 5 Things Every Puppy Must Learn!

I've got to ask you, when you have a puppy that's going to grow up to become an adult dog, do you want that adult dog to be a weird clown that does a bunch of party tricks that you wouldn't want to have around your kids? Or do you want a dog, like Thanos, that you can take here, there, and everywhere? That is the absolute envy of the entire neighborhood. Everywhere you go, people stop and ask like, God dang, where'd you get that dog trained? If you want that type of obedience, we're going to show you the five most critical commands you must teach your puppy, and more importantly, the order you should teach it, and how to teach it. Make sure to stick around to the end, because we're going to kind of crack open the industry and tell you the truth when it comes to actually training a puppy that's going to be reliable, instead of promising you that your puppy's going to be perfect, just with a bag of treats. All right, the first command that you have to teach every dog and every puppy on the planet, they have only one command that they know. It's the recall, and the best way to charge up a high-speed badass recall is what's called a restrained recall. So Steph, show him the food, what we call flashing the cash. He sees the cash. She runs away. Very excited-like. I hold him back like a rubber band with this, and call him. Drax, here. And off he goes. And we mark yes, and we pay him. And then as soon as she's finished paying him, it's my turn. Now I don't have to go as close, all right? More advanced. Drax, here! And run away. Two things are happening. A little bit of pack separation, a little bit of prey drive activated as I run away. There's food drive. There's fun. You can get the whole family involved. Now the important thing with a restrained recall, it's so fun. Don't do a hundred reps of this. Less is more. We're talking a handful or less. Show him. Run away. Call him now. Now the trick, the hardest part, is the person holding the collar. You want to make sure the dog doesn't spin, doesn't back out, otherwise you're creating really weird behaviors. You let go the moment that he drives forward, and you release him like a slingshot. You're wondering who the star of the show is? This is Drax, a 12-week-old Italian Mastiff, aka Cane Corso, and he's part of our Build a Puppy series sweepstakes giveaway. What we're doing is we're taking folks behind the scenes and showing them step-by-step how we raise and train a puppy from zero to hero. We're talking potty training, crate training, and everything we need to have a dog that's fully on and off leash trained before they get six months of age. What we do here all day, every day. You want to get involved, and more importantly, have your chance to win either $25,000 cash or this exact puppy here when he's fully finished. Check out DIYCanine.com so you can get involved, and you can see everything it takes to raise a puppy, to be the best that they can be, or just win the puppy. Let's get back to the video. If recalls is number one, I would say place board is number two. Once your dog knows place, you're never going to want a dog to not know place. Everything that we're doing in this, because it's a puppy, it's all food luring. The food, magnet to magnet, is like, come on off, my man, and we'll pay him. We'll use the food to teach him to go on. We mark and pay. Eventually, you can start naming it. The other thing that's cool about the place board is it's one of the best ways to introduce early on the concept of stay. In fact, this is going to be the first time he ever hears it. Stay, walk one step away, wait a second or two, mark yes, or use a clicker, come in and pay him. Now, the reason we're doing that is it's a very clearly defined area, either on the place board or you're off of it. This is where they get paid. Might as well stay on there, because this guy's going to come back and pay me. Let's contrast that with, okay, we bring him off, and now he's in the rocks, or the carpet, or the grass. I'll even put him in a down. But if I walk away, what's the chances of him staying there? I don't know. Not very good, because technically, he's still in the rocks. Here's the rocks, there's the rocks. He's still technically on the rocks. It's not as ideal as, guess what, place. Perfect. This is why we use it. Now, when you need to use the restroom, when you need to make dinner, when you want to eat dinner, and you want to make sure the dog is staying where they're supposed to be and staying out of trouble, and while they're on there, they can eat food, they can play with a toy, they can chew on a bone. They come to love this, but they stay out of trouble. Now, when we take a breed like the Corso, any type of guardian breed, power breed, or even just a wild-ass golden retriever that you don't want to knock Aunt Betty down to the floor, when that doorbell rings, or whatever distraction is present, and they're going bat----- crazy, you simply tell them, place. They go to place, and they stay on place. That's the ticket. So you can open the door, get those deviled eggs from Aunt Betty, or take the package from the mailman, without fear of your dog killing them, running them over, or just whipping them with a tail to death. And the other thing that's cool about the place board, I'll show you one last thing. Okay. It's freaking movable, y'all. Oh, my God! It's movable. You can take it to the beach, you can take it to the park, you can take it to a restaurant, and wherever you place it, the dog already knows what time it is. Go on, stay on, love life. Most professional dog trainers don't know how to do what we refer to as clean sits and downs, or competition style sits and downs. So I'm going to walk and talk you through them now. What we're looking for is that down, they need to drop down like an elevator, see? That's why we're using this little positional box, which we'll talk about in a minute. On the sits, I want his butt to scoot forward, like he did, like a little pro. Most people, and I don't know how professional dog trainers are still doing this, they'll put the food here, and then drift the dog way back like this. He just sat right out of the box. If later on, we're in heel position, if we're doing this technique here, look where he ends up, way back. Now instead, we're going to do it proper, we're going to get him on plane, and drift him up into a sit, so we call it a booty scoot sit. You see how beautiful that is? You see how he's still in line with me? That's all the difference. And by the way, this is the same with the downs, let me show you before we move on. Get him first into a stand, and we're going to drop him right here. Once again, still on plane with me. So the position box, you don't need it, but it's super helpful. You can buy them online, you can make them, you can use an old shoe box, and try to size it to your dog. It's very helpful, and it'll help gauge, are you doing them right or not? The next thing is, you got to have the right food, y'all. Kinetic Performance Dog Food is the only food we use, we've been using it for years, because they've been making food for police and military dogs for well over a decade. That's where we first fell in love with them. They just developed a brand new formulation that we helped them develop, which is for pet dogs. It's called Core. I can't recommend it enough, and it's perfect. This is to keep him safe, and to keep me sane. There is no way you're going to be able to safely raise a puppy or any dog without having a little dedicated space that you can guarantee they're not going to get in trouble. Now, PlaySport's wonderful, it can buy you up to four hours once it's fully developed of the dog not coming out, but four hours is not enough to keep your dog or puppy safe when you got to go to work for eight, 10 hours, or you got to sleep eight hours overnight. That puppy or dog will wander off the PlaySport and get into mischief and mayhem. That's why we charge up the crate very early. In fact, it was one of the first things that Mr. Drax learned within 24 hours, which is to go in the crate and love going in. Now, how do we do that? We're going to use Food Baby. We're just going to ignore him, look where we want, he goes in, we mark and we pay. We may use one piece of food to get him out, but he gets two, three, four, five, 15, 10, 20 pieces for going in. Now, if you're struggling to get them to go in, I'll show you a couple little hacks. Using a wire crate is wonderful because you can drop food in right over the top. Come on in, my man. Yes, and we'll drop it in the back. That's one technique. I'll show you another one. So you throw it in the back, off he goes. Now, once he gets back there, you can start to flood him with food because a lot of times you'll get a puppy to go in and then they shoot right back out. What I want to make sure you don't do is just put them in, right? No food, no love, no nothing, and then walk away. That sucks. Why would you do that? Why would you do any of that? And that's what you'll repeat maybe dozens of times a day as you let them in and out of the crate to go pee, to go play. So I don't want you to get 15 reps a day of go in the crate, I walk away, life sucks. So we can charge this up, and last but not least, to make your life easy, you can always leave a little bowl or a pouch full of, guess what, Kinetic Performance dog food. This is their puppy formulation, and these little pieces right here keep him hunting, keep him searching, and it has all the nutrition he needs. So if he goes in, yes, we put it right there. You can add more. It's kind of like, instead of, it's raining men, it's raining kibble, baby. And he's loving life, and he's going to be more inclined to go in, it's like a little game for him, and then you can sneak off and go do whatever it is you do with your free time when you're not keeping an eye on a puppy. Just be careful that this doesn't knock over and it becomes a tsunami of kibble. At some point in your dog or puppy's life, you either will not have food on you, the food you may have on you is not going to be powerful enough to overcome another dog, a cat, a bunny, a squirrel, a knock at the door, and you can pull all the treats you want out of your ass, but your dog will not listen to you. When you know your dog is going to be, like it's in his case, 130 plus pounds, you're going to need power steering, power brakes, everything we've shown you up to this point is all positive reinforcement, using food, hugs, kisses, treats. It's all wonderful. We are now using food to show him what we want him to do, but later on we're going to actually need to use tools such as a leash, such as a prong collar, such as an e-collar to make him do the things he has to do. What I don't want you to do, as much as I love these tools, so many of you see us using them to a high level and getting incredible obedience, and then what you do is you just slap this on them, right? And then just start going to town, having no idea what you're doing, having not conditioned the dog or puppy properly to it, and so what we do at an early age, knowing for a fact that we'll be using these tools going forward, not just using them, having to use them to get real obedience in the real world, while I don't need it right now, is a perfect time to start to introduce him to it. At some point you need to drive a car to get to work, but there was this whole year build up when you were probably 15 to 16 years old where you had your learner's license and you maybe learned how to drive in a parking lot. That's exactly what we're doing here. We're saying, you see this cool thing here? Yes, it's not here to hurt you. It is here to mean amazing things. When I put these tools on, we're going to train. When I put these tools on, we're going to go for a walk. Just to show you how much we've already charged this up, just in a little bit, is I'm going to present this here and then you tell me, you tell me if he's under any stress or duress or if he actually does what we call dress themselves. Look who put it on. This is what we're talking about, y'all, and tail wiggling, and this is what we're going to do for weeks until the dog understands what these tools are, which is party. Awesome. Just like when you grab a leash or your dog's collar at the front door, they get excited. When we pull out the prong collar and we put on an e-collar, he's going to get excited. There's not like you just do this and then you can start pressing buttons. No, it's not how it works at all. This is just the first step of many steps to get a dog to be 100% reliable, both on leash and off leash. Anybody that tells you you can have 100% reliable dog on and off leash without the use of tools is smoking crack. Well, we need money to buy crack. Oh, I'm sorry. Did you get addicted to crack? Did somebody get addicted to crack? They are liars. They are fakes. They are frauds, and they're trying to sell you a dream that just doesn't exist. We're realist here, and we have the video proof to back it up. Any dog of any age, of any breed, of any temperament can achieve incredible levels of reliable obedience, but only if you do it right, and that's what we specialize in here. If you want to find out more, check out any of our incredible courses and memberships available right now at DIYCanine.com, where we dive in a lot deeper, show you step-by-step how to do it, and more importantly, have an entire community built around it so that at any time, 24-7, you have a question or a concern, you raise it in the community, and me and my team of world-class trainers will be right there on your phone, on your computer, replying right back to your DM, letting you know exactly what you need to do to overcome any issues you're experiencing, because we want you to have real results, real fast, that work in the real world. And, unlike anyone else in the industry, if our methods don't work for you, which would be crazy, you get all of your money back 100% guaranteed, so there ain't nothing more real than that. Like, share, subscribe. We'll see you in the next one.