Idaho Springs, Colorado
They live in our house with our dogs. They sleep properly, they get the day broken up the way a young dog needs, and they spend all of it around grown dogs who are already easy to live with.
Most people get their puppy back easier than they left.
Taking puppies for November.
If this sounds like your week
Somewhere after lunch the teeth come out and nothing works. You are following them room to room, picking up the same shoe, and you have not finished a hot drink in weeks.
Everything you read says more exercise. So you do more exercise. And it gets worse.
Almost every puppy problem we see comes down to the same three things, and none of them are about the dog.
They are not sleeping enough.
A puppy under four months needs eighteen to twenty hours a day. Most get about thirteen, because somebody walks past and they pop up to check. A tired puppy does not look tired. They look wild.
They have too much house.
A puppy loose in nine rooms has nine rooms to patrol and nine places to wee. One or two rooms with the doors shut, opened up slowly over weeks, fixes more than it sounds like it should.
They have never been left alone.
Ten minutes behind a door while you are still in the house. It feels mean for about a week. Three weeks of never being alone, then you go back to work, is the version that actually hurts.
Fix those three at home and you will see a different dog inside a fortnight. It costs nothing and you can start today.
What ten days here looks like
Your puppy sleeps where a dog sleeps. Underfoot while dinner gets made, while the door goes, while somebody runs the vacuum.
There are grown dogs here who have done all of this for years and do not get up for any of it. A young dog spends all day watching them, and that is the fastest learning there is.
Nobody sits anyone down. The day just has a shape, and after ten days of it a puppy knows the shape.
It is a house, so there is only so much of it.
Eight weeks to five months
This is the stretch that decides most of the next few years, and it is over before most people feel ready.
Ten days here covers the ordinary things a puppy needs to get right early. Sleeping through the night. Being calm indoors. Being handled all over without a fuss. Being on their own without panicking. Coming back to a person because people are worth coming back to.
None of it gets drilled. They live here and it happens.
Five months and up
Around seven months a lot of dogs stop listening. The recall goes first, then the lead gets worse, and at some point you stop taking them places.
Nothing is broken. They got old enough to weigh you against everything else on offer, and for a few months everything else wins.
Ten days here puts them back in a calm house with steady dogs and a routine that does not bend. That is usually most of it.
Why here
It sounds like a detail. It is not.
They can switch off. A sport dog goes flat out and then lies down and does nothing, several times a day, obviously. Most puppies have never once seen a dog calm down. They only ever see them wind up.
They try things. These dogs have spent their lives being asked to work things out, so having a go is normal here. A puppy copies that in about a week.
They come back. They turn back to a person at full speed, past things, because that is what the sport is. A puppy watching that a few hundred times reaches the obvious conclusion on their own.
Nothing bothers them. Competition dogs travel. Crowds, noise, strange floors, weather. When the grown dogs treat something as nothing, the puppy watching them does too.
While your dog is here, and after
Ten days is ten days. The rest of the year is yours, and it is the bit that actually decides how your dog turns out.
So you get somewhere to learn what we are looking at. What your dog is getting out of a moment, and why they keep doing it. What their face and their body are telling you before something happens. How to set a room up so the easy thing is the right thing.
Send us a video any time and we will tell you what we see. That is the part people use most.
Ninety nine a month, and the month your dog is here is free. Stop whenever you want.
Questions we get
Almost none of them have, and this is worth getting right, because waiting has its own cost.
The American Veterinary Society of Animal Behavior says puppies can start meeting the world at seven to eight weeks old, as long as they have had one set of shots at least a week before and a first worming. Their reason is blunt. More young dogs are lost to behaviour problems than to illness.
That is the standard we work to. One set of shots a week before they come, and a first worming.
That is the most common reason people wait, and it is the one that costs the most.
The weeks you would spend waiting are the ones that only happen once. What gets sorted now gets sorted easily. What does not has to be fixed later, on a bigger dog who has had months of practice.
Free to read
Long pieces on how puppies actually work. No email needed.
Week three is when you will want to quit
Somewhere around day twenty it falls apart. It happens to almost everyone and nobody warns you.
PuppiesSleep is the cheapest fix there is
It works in days, and nobody sells it because there is nothing to sell.
How dogs workYour dog is not being stubborn
The most common misread there is, and the word you pick changes what you do next.
Who we are
Fourteen years with dogs. Most of it spent undoing things that did not have to happen in the first place.
Mostly working breeds, which are the dogs that catch people out around seven months and the ones we like best.
Nearly everything that shows up at seven months was set months earlier. That is the good news.
Taking puppies for November
Fifteen minutes. Tell us how old they are, what your afternoons are like, and what you have tried.
You will get a straight answer about whether ten days here would help, whether it is worth waiting, or whether you do not need us at all.
Not ready? Get the free puppy guide.