Havanese Puppy - What Pet Owners Should Know

If you just got your own Havanese puppy, then you should be making preparations to house train it. But first, congratulations on getting this small dog breed - isn't it playful? It's small size, playful character, strong sense of self, and the fact that it doesn't shed all contribute to why many pet owners love this dog. This breed will not consume hours on end per day in grooming, unlike other toy breeds. But we should really be discussing house training. This breed, by nature, is quite sociable, outgoing, intelligent, cheerful, and loves to learn new stuff - because of these traits it is also easy to house train.

There's really not much of a waiting period for you to start training your pups. The several months you will pout into house training is going to be worth it. It's hard to stay patient when your heart is not really into this. But rest assured this breed will not give you a heart attack trying to potty train. Also, housebreaking happens around four months of age.

Exposing your Havanese to training also lets you see the problem behavior early on, such as nuisance barking. It's only natural for Havanese to bark, but when it becomes a constant annoyance, you have to do something. It's annoying, when you take them out for walks, to have to keep yanking at their leash to restraint them from furiously barking at other pets nearby or kids running on the street. And you don't want to have to keep getting up at odd ours after midnight because your dog senses a presence - curtains shifted by the wind, a truck pulling close to the house, birds perched on a branch outside the house but visible through the kitchen window. A Havanese puppy, trained well, flows into adulthood without much incident.

Many kinds of dogs respond well with stimulus-response by way of punishment after a particular behavior; the Havanese is not like that. Instead, using positive reinforcement on this intelligent breed What you do is to maintain a routine of rewarding the pup every time it does what you say, or does something you approve of - such as holding on to its pee until it gets to the potty station. The goal is to have the pup think that certain behavior is rewarded, and to keep doing those. The rewards also tend to redirect the pup's bad behavior rather than punishing it.

When training your Havanese, there's a behavioral problem you want to avoid - small dog syndrome. You may have noticed that some small dog's grow to become aggressive, unfriendly to people, and bad with kids. The cause of this behavior has to do with what their owners let them get away with over the years. You want to avoid letting your small dog grow into an annoying bratty dog, and to do this you need habituate it to rules and boundaries, limits to behavior, so that it won't be doing whatever it likes.