Problem 05 · Puppy

I’ve just got a puppy — and I don’t want any of this.

The pulling, the ignoring, the barking at the window — you’ve read the other four pages and you’d rather none of them happened. Good. These are the weeks that decide the next ten years, and starting now is the cheapest thing you will ever do for this dog.

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Free · In person in Norfolk or online · Nothing sold on the day

01 — Sound familiar?

What every new puppy owner is juggling.

None of this means anything is wrong. It means you have a puppy.

01Your hands and ankles are pin cushions

02Toilet training is going well — except when it isn’t

03The first nights were louder than you expected

04Everyone keeps saying “socialisation window” like a deadline

05The internet gives you six answers to every question

06You’ve met the dogs that pull, and you don’t want one

07You want a recall before you need a recall

08You’d rather do it right once than fix it at two

02 — Why the first weeks matter

You don’t get these weeks back.

Three reasons the early work is worth more than any amount of fixing later.

Reason 01

The window is real

What a puppy meets calmly in the first months becomes normal for life. It isn’t about meeting everything — it’s about meeting the right things, well.

Reason 02

Prevention is cheap

Teaching a puppy that coming back pays takes weeks. Fixing a two-year-old who’s learned it doesn’t takes months. Same lesson, very different bill.

Reason 03

Most advice is noise

Everyone has an opinion about your puppy. What you actually need is an order of operations — what matters now, what can wait, and what to ignore entirely.

03 — What we actually do

Foundations, in the right order.

Not tricks. The handful of things that decide what living with this dog is like for the next decade.

Start before the problems do

We meet the puppy, look at your setup, and build the plan around your actual life — the job, the kids, the garden you have.

Assessment

The foundations

A name that means something, the seed of a recall, calm handling, and a settle. Small, paid, daily — boring and priceless.

Weeks 1–2

Socialisation done properly

Quality, not quantity. Watching the world calmly from a distance beats being mobbed at a puppy party — one builds confidence, the other builds the reactive dog on page one.

Weeks 2–6

The boring bits, nailed

Toilet, crate, alone-time, the lead going on and nothing exciting happening. The unglamorous work that prevents the expensive problems.

Weeks 2–8

Adolescent-proofing

The storm is coming around eight months — we set the structure now so that when the teenage brain arrives, the habits hold.

Ongoing

04 — Straight about this one

What we will and won’t promise you.

What usually changes

Most of the other four pages never happen.

✓A dog you can take anywhere, because the world is normal to him
✓A recall seeded before it’s ever needed
✓A settle installed before adolescence tests it
✓One plan instead of six opinions

What we won’t say

That nothing will ever go wrong.

✕That a well-raised puppy never has a bad week — adolescence comes for everyone
✕That this is a puppy class in a village hall — it isn’t
✕That it works without you doing the daily five minutes
✕That we can guarantee it — dogs aren’t machines and outcomes vary

05 — Where this usually goes

Start light. Stay in.

The rhythm

The Membership

Group coaching on a fixed rhythm — a pack walk, a paddock session, or a video call. The puppy grows up inside the group, and adolescence arrives with backup already in place.

If something specific comes up

The Fix

One named problem, caught early, worked in six to eight weeks with the outcome written down first. Early problems are the cheapest ones to fix.

Both run in person or online · Neither is sold on the day you meet us

Let’s see the dog before anyone talks about money.

There’s no price on this page on purpose. What it costs depends on what we find, and we can’t find it from a form.