Puppies are almost illegally cute at times, filled with joy, love, adorable puppy noises, and mouths full of needles. Watching them play and explore to discover the world can be highly entertaining and enjoyable – except when it’s not. Welcome to puppy blues!
Those razor teeth hurt! And all that running around the house doing cute stuff becomes so much less cute when it’s interrupted by peeing all over the place. Those adorable puppy noises are no longer cute when they’ve been going on incessantly in the middle of the night and you’ve got work in a few hours.
Then there is the training. Your puppy mastered sit in a flash, but they can’t seem to grasp how to chill out, how to stop chewing on everything they see, and that barking directly into your ear isn’t going to get them anything nice. And we haven’t even talked about the nightly chaos when your home is turned into a racetrack.
Overworked and overwhelmed is the state that I often find puppy owners. A lot of them express regret at purchasing a puppy and some even are on the cusp of returning the pup. Their puppy didn’t come with an instruction manual, and for the new puppy owner, or for someone that hasn’t had a puppy in a long time it is very easy for a puppy to be an absolutely terrible stress fest. This is what we call puppy blues.
The thing is that it doesn’t have to be this way, at all, and you don’t have to be a trainer to make things easier for yourself. In my experience puppy blues can be entirely mitigated by having basic structures in place for raising you puppy. The most important pieces of this is having a good management plan in place, and also beginning training your pup in house manners starting day 1. Every client that I’ve ever met who is having trouble with their puppy has missed these critical pieces. And it’s not their fault at all, they just don’t know what they don’t know. Once we get these structures into place and up and running the puppy blues magically go away, because they’re no longer lost about what to do when.
The sad part is that so many people, and their pups, suffer needlessly from the effects of puppy blues. In contrast to this, I’ve never met a trainer who has ever had issues with puppy blues. Likewise, for owners who work with a reputable trainer, there is a reduction in puppy blues or complete elimination. This is not chance or luck. The common factor that I have found all boils down to how much an owner knows and whether or not that info is the correct info.
Puppy blues is a real experience that people go through, and it potentially lands many young dogs in shelters through no fault of their own. The reality is that it’s completely unnecessary and preventable from the start. Having a puppy doesn’t have to be stressful and there are ways to make the process as smooth as possible. We’re not saying that it’s easy, even trainers know it’s hard work. But teaming up with a trainer can help iron out things massively and give you a pup that is a joy to be around, plus make training more complicated behaviors a breeze!
