You’re excited about bringing your new puppy home and you’re reading everything you can because you want to get your puppy’s training right from the start. But you’re so confused about how you’re supposed to toilet train your puppy because all the advice assumes you have access to a garden. But you live in a flat…

Don’t stress - you don’t have to choose between teaching your puppy to toilet inside and risking them getting ill by taking your puppy outside to toilet before they’re fully vaccinated. Toilet training a puppy in a flat isn’t massively different to toilet training in a house with a garden. You just need to make a few small changes to your toilet training plan.

Picture this: you’re sitting with your friends in your favourite dog friendly-café drinking a flat white with your dog snoozing at your feet. Sounds like the perfect Saturday afternoon, right? But you’re probably thinking ‘there’s no way I could ever take my dog to a café, they’d just cause chaos’. If you are, then don’t worry. With a little bit of training and some pre-planning before your coffee trip you’ll have the café-friendly dog of your dreams.

No dog is perfect. We all have things we wish our dogs would stop doing. Your dog might be pulling on-lead, not coming back when you call or jumping up at visitors. Or maybe they’re stealing and destroying your stuff, digging at your carpet or eating things they shouldn’t. You could just punish your dog to try and stop the problem behaviour. But that’s going to affect your dog’s welfare and damage your relationship with them. And it’s not going to deal with the root cause of the behaviour so it’s unlikely to work long term.

Bringing your new puppy home is one of the most exciting days of your life. But it can also be one of the most stressful. Puppies need to learn so much to grow into amazing adult dogs. You’ve got this overwhelming list of things you need to teach your puppy. But you have no idea what you should teach them first and whether you should start training them now or wait until they’re a bit older.

A lot of people wait until they go to puppy classes to train their puppy. But this isn’t a great idea. Your puppy is constantly learning all about the world and how they’re expected to behave. If you wait weeks to teach your puppy anything then they’ll probably have learnt a lot of things you would rather they didn’t…

Our dogs live in a human world and the rules and expectations are often very different to the dog world. Your dog doesn’t automatically know why they can’t jump up at people, why they need to walk on a lead and why they shouldn’t steal food from your kitchen counters. They don’t understand that not everyone likes muddy paw prints on their clothes, that they could be injured or killed if they get hit by a car and that some human food is poisonous to dogs. Life skills training teaches your dog everything they need to know to live in our confusing human world safely.

You worked so hard training your puppy all the skills they need to be your perfect dog. And now they’re not a puppy, you’re ready to enjoy your awesome adult dog. But as they’ve got older, their training has gone backwards. Some days it even feels like you’ve done no training at all… The problem is they’re not an awesome adult dog yet, they’re a tearaway teen.

We all dream of those lovely, relaxing walks with our dogs where they walk calmly next to us. But if you’ve tried training your dog to walk calmly on a lead you’ll have found it’s harder than it looks. That’s because those exciting walks come with lots of distractions for your dog. There’s so many things to see, hear and smell and it’s really hard for them to focus on walking with you when there's so much other stuff happening.

Choosing a dog trainer is confusing. Especially when every single trainer seems to use different training methods. It’s hard to trust any professional when you can easily find another who’s saying the exact opposite. Unfortunately dog training is an unregulated profession so anyone can say they’re a dog trainer, even if they’ve got no qualifications, experience or skill. That’s why you’ll see so many different opinions, a lot of them come from trainers who are quite literally making it up as they go along. Other trainers are relying on myths that were debunked over 20 years ago or are using methods that are proven to harm your dog and your relationship with them.

Socialisation is how puppies learn about the world they will be living in and how they’re supposed to behave. Puppies need to learn what is safe and what isn’t. During their ‘socialisation period’ they’re more likely to assume new species, objects and situations are safe. This period ends at around 16 weeks and after this dogs are more likely to approach these things with caution. But that doesn’t mean that your puppy can’t learn about the world after they’re 16 weeks - it’ll just be a little harder for them and you.

Christmas is an exciting time. We decorate the house, eat all the exciting Christmas food, have lots of visitors to the house and, of course, open presents. But all those fun traditions can suddenly become stressful with a puppy in the house. If you’ve never done Christmas with a dog before then there are a lot of extra things to consider to make sure everyone stays safe and has a wonderful festive season.