As published in the May ’24 NAVHDA magazine.
While there’s really no ‘right way to raise a litter of versatile hunting dogs, there are plenty of things that a breeder can do during the first 8-9 weeks of a puppy’s life that will help it develop into a well-trained family dog and an excellent hunting companion. The goal of our program is to help puppies develop a solid foundation they can build on once they get to their forever homes. Depending on their age and developmental stage we spend between 2 – 6 hours a day with our puppies.
“Ric, Ellen, I must say that Evie is the most advanced puppy I’ve ever had and I’ve owned 8 hunting dogs over the past 27 years. Your early work program makes a phenomenal difference.”
Harry S. E-Litter Puppy Owner
Recordkeeping: Our foundational work starts with the overall health of each puppy, and at first that means paying close attention to weight gain. We’ve developed a spreadsheet that is being used by breeders in the US and Europe that makes it easy to monitor puppy weights as a percentage of birthweight. (available free of charge under the Other Resources tab) This way we can minimize the impact of ‘milk bar bullies’ on the rest of the litter by moving puppies not gaining enough weight gain to the rear teats, which typically have the most milk. We weigh 2x/day until the pups double their birthweight, usually ~Day 10. After that we transition to 1x/day, then to every other day and eventually we transition to weekly weigh-ins until the pups leave for their forever homes.
Whelpbox Surface: While a vinyl remnant covered with an old sheet or blanket is cheaper, we’ve transitioned to a thick ‘vet fleece’ floor covering. It’s one of many things we implemented after visiting some of our European counterparts. There’s some interesting research that suggests that puppies having more traction in the whelp box is better for their hips. Though this research is in its infancy, it makes sense qualitatively in that not many breeders think it’s a good idea for a 10-week old puppy to be scrabbling for traction or sliding out on a wood floor. So, why wouldn’t the same hold true for a 10-day old puppy just learning to walk? Since using vet fleece in the whelp box we’ve noticed that our puppies are more mobile at a younger age.
SuperDog+: On Day 4 we begin an early neurological stimulation program commonly referred to as SuperDog. Depending on which research you read, this program has important and lasting effects on puppies, including improved cardio, more stress tolerance, a stronger immune system, better problem-solving skills, and greater confidence and resiliency. We’ve modified SuperDog to include exposure to a bird wing as the last stimuli in the protocol. Puppies at this age can’t see nor hear, but they can smell. And the nose knows! In addition to exposing the pups to various gamebird scents they’ll come in contact with later in life, we’re trying to assess their instinct and nose as it relates to game. We do this by watching their nose and feeling how much their heartbeat increases when the wing is presented. The level of excitement in the puppies can range from ‘meh, not that interested,’ to ‘holy hell, I want that!’ And while the assessment is qualitative, the higher the level of excitement at a young age the birdier the pups seem to be as they get older. By Day 16, the last day of the SuperDog+ program most every puppy gets quite excited when the wing is placed in front of their nose.
Building Trust: Everyone loves to spend time and play with puppies, and we’re no different. Once their eyes and ears are open, ~Day 14, we typically spend an hour every evening sitting in the whelp box, playing with and handling the pups. This quality time is important because pups need to be handled in a manner different than they are when we’re cleaning, weighing, feeding, trimming toe nails, worming, etc. This is about socialization and building trust. We build trust by first cradling pups on their backs…something dogs don’t like very much…while we are sitting. We do this with each puppy every night for short periods. Eventually we are able to hold them in that position longer and longer, and when that happens we transition to kneeling and then standing. By the time our puppies leave for their forever homes we can cradle any of them on their back while standing and for a relatively long period of time. They’ve learned to trust their human companions.
Noise Conditioning: No hunter wants a gun-sensitive or gun-shy dog. To help prevent this we start noise conditioning at ~4 Weeks, the same time our puppies are introduced to gruel. Introducing various noises while a puppy is doing something enjoyable helps the pup associate noise with something good. While it’s a bit ‘old school,’ we use a CD as we simply haven’t found anything as good as the one we use (Sound Therapy for Gundogs). Once the pups are busy lapping up the gruel we start the CD playing softly at first, and then as the pups get older, incrementally increasing the volume to the point where it’s pretty loud. We continue noise conditioning 3x/day during meals until our puppies leave for their forever homes.
“Fenix got fussy on the flight home so I took him into the bathroom, put some paper down, and he pooped on the newspaper like the champ he is. Early puppy training for the win!”
Dave L. F-Litter Puppy Owner
Potty Conditioning: Keeping any whelp box clean is a continual battle. Potty conditioning started as a self-serving exercise to try to reduce cleaning time, and it’s worked great. It also begins ~Week 4 as a dam will rarely continue her cleaning regimen once the pups transition to gruel. Our whelp box is a carryover from the days of breeding Swiss Mountain Dogs, so there’s a good bit of room. We layer one corner of the whelpbox with newspaper, the top piece of which we blot with some puppy urine. It isn’t long before the puppies start to gravitate to the paper to take care of their business. They’re not consistent, and sometimes they don’t make it all the way to the paper, but they do tend to urinate and defecate more on the paper than elsewhere. As the puppies become more and more mobile we open up the front of the whelp box so they can venture out to the ‘front patio,’ and we move the paper out there. We continue with a paper potty area when we move the pups to the puppy playground. And even though most puppies can’t truly control their bladders until they’re quite a bit older, our pups tend to get better and better at using the paper as the weeks go on. By Week 6 they’re ~90% in terms of using the paper. Most of our puppy families have commented that potty training our puppies has been fast and easy compared to other dogs they’ve owned.
Puppy Playground: A few days after our puppies are introduced to gruel we move them from the whelp box to a 10’ by 13’ puppy playground. The transition begins with short, supervised periods and eventually becomes the pups primary living area. The configuration of the playground components changes daily. Our goal is to help our puppies learn to adapt to different environments, build confidence and to work on problem-solving skills. There are 2 doorless crates with bedding so pups can begin to get used to being inside a crate. We use 1-3” log rounds to help familiarize puppies with the idea of going up and down stairs. There is also a culvert tunnel system that can be configured in a myriad of ways. We start with a short, straight piece and when the pups get used to going through that we transition to 90°angles, 3- and 4-way sections and then various combinations. When the puppies become confident playing in the culverts having 2 or more exits we add dead-ends. That way the pups have to learn to turn around to get out, much like hunting dogs have to do when they encounter thick, impassable cover. The only playground components that stay static are the primary sleeping crate, the potty area and the waterer. Lastly, there are toys. What playground doesn’t have toys?!? But even the toy selection changes daily.
Minimizing Food Aggression: In order to help prevent food aggression we never feed all of our puppies at once. From the time our pups get their first taste of gruel they eat in small, manageable groups. Again, regular record keeping of weights is important so we know both the current weight and the percentage of birthweight of every puppy relative to the others in the litter. This helps us know who needs more and who’s overeating…or trying to. Depending on their age and how many puppies we have, we feed 2 to 3 pups at a time out of a single pan of gruel. Once the pups transition to soaked- and then dry kibble we feed only 2 pups at a time and out of separate bowls. This way we can continue to prevent bullying by larger pups or faster eaters thereby minimizing the likelihood of any pup developing food aggression.
Bird Introduction: ~Week 5 we introduce our puppies to gamebirds. In addition to exposing them to the prey they will be hunting when they are older, we are assessing their level of excitement when they smell a bird and how they use their nose. The introduction is done in the whelp box, so it’s in a place the puppies are already very comfortable with. We dispatch a bird, put it in a NAVHDA game bag, which already has a great deal of scent impregnated in it, and then do a short, straight drag. The bird is left in the bag at the end of the drag. One-by-one we bring in a puppy, place it where we started the drag and then we hide and watch what happens on a GoPro. Some puppies immediately put their nose to the ground and start to track. Others put their nose up in the air like they’re scenting a field. Occasionally we get a puppy that points the first time they get to the bird bag. We do this 3 to 4 times with each puppy with multiple species of birds. As the pups get more experience we make the track a bit more difficult by adding one 90 degree turn. If we have a summer litter we will add an outdoor exercise with a shackled quail…wings and feet…and placing it out in our yard. One-by-one we bring a pup out, play with them a bit and then walk away toward the scent cone. The pups typically follow us until they hit the scent cone, and then we stand still and watch what their reaction is. Because of their exposure to birds in the whelp box most every puppy makes a beeline for the bird, with some of them even picking it up!
Duck Call Conditioning: Another important introduction for our puppies is to a duck call as many of our puppies are placed in homes with waterfowlers. This is a conditioning exercise that we initiate at ~Week 5 when the puppies are awake and playing in the playground. We start with a relatively soft feeding chuckle. The typical response is quizzical looks and tilted heads at first and after a few calls the pups typically ignore the noise as if it’s nothing special. Playing is more important. After a few sessions with a chuckle we move to a soft hi-ball call, which is not the easiest thing to pull off. Truthfully it sounds like a really sick duck. Like the chuckle, we gradually increase the volume until it is a full on hi-ball. The pups are again quite curious at first, but after a few sessions they rarely pay any attention to the caller nor the noise.
Multiple Surface Exposure: Getting puppies used to walking on a variety of surfaces is an important part of many breeding programs, and we’re no different. The method we found to work best is placing small sections of different surfaces with good traction…indoor/outdoor carpet, dense pile carpet, astroturf, etc. on the floor of a short corridor between the puppy playground and a wall. The panels of the playground are covered with a sheet, creating a hallway of sorts so the pups only have 2 options when we release them. They can either move forward to where one of us stationed and clapping to encouraging them, or backwards to the person that released them. We release only one puppy at a time and it doesn’t take long for them to go from tentatively tiptoeing over the various surfaces to trundling along to running.
Command Conditioning: After our puppies get used to the various surfaces in the ‘conditioning corridor’ we transition to working with them on their first command: “Come!” As with much of the other foundational work we do this is more about conditioning than compliance as these are just puppies. We simply add “Come!” to the hand clapping the pups have been accustomed to. But, we do this just prior to feeding time, and we provide a reward…one piece of kibble or a belly rub when the puppy arrives at the caller. A reward is a reward. Again, we release only one puppy at a time, and it doesn’t take long before the pups associate the “Come, Come, Come!” of the caller with something good. We eventually stop clapping unless we have a pup that gets distracted along the way.
“Dutch comes to the whistle every time. He doesn’t know why. He just does.”
Don S. D-Litter Puppy Owner
Whistle Conditioning: Our corridor conditioning sequence continues to evolve as we add 2 soft peeps from a whistle shortly after the pups are complying fairly regularly to “Come, Come, Come!” Our puppies have heard such a variety of noises by now that the noise is nothing more than a curiosity, and they know that responding to “Come, Come, Come!” will result in a reward. Eventually we transition to a single “Come!” and 2 peeps on the whistle. The last evolution in our sequence is to use only “Come!” OR 2 peeps on the whistle and to interchange the conditioning stimulus randomly. Our pups get ~100 reps of whistle/command conditioning before they leave for their forever homes.
Crate Conditioning: Exposing the puppies to crates begins in the puppy playground where they can go in and out of both a large wire crate and a fiberglass crate at will. Both crates have bedding in them to encourage the use of the crates for sleeping so the pups become accustomed to spending the night in a crate. When the puppies are ~6 Weeks we start getting them accustomed to crates with doors. We set up 2 crates with bedding and a few toys so that they each other in fairly close proximity. For the first week we put 2 puppies in each crate. That way they are not alone and because the crates face each other they can see their littermates as well. The time the pups spend in the crates increases gradually from 2 to 10 minutes. During the second week of crate conditioning we only put one puppy in each crate. They still have company in that they can see a littermate, but they are transitioning to being alone in a crate, as they likely will be when they get to their forever home. If we have puppies flying home in the cabin we will also do a bit of conditioning with those puppies in an airline carrier. Finally, our puppies get at least one truck ride before leaving for their forever homes, and they travel 2- or 3 to a crate on that adventure.
Socialization – Other Dogs: We are fortunate in that we have 3 adult females, all of which are friendly with puppies and other adult dogs. We introduce our puppies to our adult dogs, and vice versa, once the puppies have graduated to the playground. Typically our adult dogs have been wanting to head down to the basement for weeks to see ‘what’s going on down there,’ so it doesn’t take much encouragement to have them help socialize the puppies. When we socialize, the dam is either outside or crated upstairs as we don’t want the pups to get any mixed signals about other dogs in the case where a dam might become possessive about her pups and growl at one of our other dogs. We begin socialization by allowing the adult dog to walk up to the wire playground fence at her leisure. Puppies being puppies are curious and typically run to the fence to check out the ‘new dog.’ Over the course of several days we repeat this process with both of our other dogs. Once we feel that all is going well one of us goes into the playground and opens the doggie door which is configured such that adults can get in and out whenever they want, but puppies can’t get out. Until the puppies leave for their forever homes we continue to allow an adult dog to enter the playground for short periods, but only one at a time and while supervised.
Socialization – Other People: Both COVID and the new canine respiratory virus have made it a bit challenging for us to properly socialize our puppies with other people, but we make it work. We err on the side of caution, though, whether it requires masking, additional hygiene measures, etc. Family and friends are always anxious see the pups and they understand our concerns. The ‘socialization crew’ is pretty balanced from a gender perspective, and there is a wide range of ages, so our puppies are exposed to different handling, voices, smells, body shapes, dress, etc. Even though they’re all experienced ‘puppy socializers,’ we have everyone sit down when holding the pups. It’s just safer that way.
Outside Confirmation Evaluation: Even though we have a pretty good idea what ‘good confirmation’ looks like, it’s always best to get an outside evaluation. We are quite fortunate as one of our B-litter puppy owners is an expert in canine confirmation. So much so that Craig Koshyk, author of Pointing Dogs: The Continentals, asked her to pick his second Picardy Spaniel puppy for him. The outside evaluation occurs ~Week 7 and is structured such that we first stack the pups, then we let them walk/run around in the playground, and then we stack them again. One of us takes notes as Ann watches and evaluates each puppy. Once the entire litter has been scrutinized we discuss our thoughts on each pup. This information is used in two ways. First, in our ‘puppy draft,’ the process by which we help our families pick their puppy. Second, to help determine which pup(s) will be genetically tested as we Embark test at least 1 puppy from each litter.
Outdoor Play: We live in Wisconsin, but regardless the season we do get our puppies outside as long as the weather is conducive to an outing. It’s as much fun for us as it is for them. Even though they’ve been exposed to multiple surfaces nothing takes the place of real grass and/or snow. As we indicated earlier, we tend to be overly cautious with our puppies so their outdoor adventures start post-vaccination.
Waterproofing: On the rare occasion that we have a pup longer than 8 weeks we will ‘waterproof’ them. Waterproofing is a simple, yet effective process for acclimating puppies to water, especially in Wisconsin where the water is too cold for young puppies most of the year. For the first session we place a puppy in the bathtub with a few submergible toys, start some lukewarm water running and play with the pup for ~5 minutes. The pups are usually a bit uncertain at first, but they get over it pretty quickly. The next session starts the same way, but we also have some kibble nearby. Once the pup is playing in the water we flip the stopper on the tub so it starts filling up. If the pup starts to get bored we will let him/her smell a piece of kibble and then drop it into the water. This usually becomes a bit of a game the pup enjoys. The key to this session is to keep the pup distracted until the water is at least up to their stomach, farther if possible. If you can keep the pup distracted long enough, and the tub is deep enough the pup will start swimming and not even realize it. Shortly after the water is as high as it will get in your tub the second session is over. The next 2 sessions, and that’s usually all we need to do, are exactly the same. While the tub is filling we float a piece of kibble, and then another. The pups are all about chasing them down. The 3rd piece we let the pup smell and then hold it just below the water’s surface. The pups will typically grab it without hesitation. We then let the pup smell another treat, but this one we hold a little farther under the water. Some pups will dunk their nose immediately to get the treat, while others require a little coaxing. In most cases the pup starts to understand the game and you can continue to submerge the treat farther. The goal is to get the pup to fully submerge his/her head to get the treat. A couple successful reps and the ‘waterproofing’ session is over. This is conditioning, not training. The goal is simply to get the pup comfortable in water, and submerging their head at a very young age.
Puppy Readiness Education: Lastly, our foundational work includes puppy readiness education for our puppy people…whether they’ve had versatile hunting dogs in the past or not. The Picardy Spaniel is a relatively new breed in North America, and owning/training one has some breed-specific nuances. The educational information we provide started off being more verbal than written, but recently that has flip-flopped. Our puppy readiness packet features information from other breeders/other breeds as well as our own. It takes a village. In addition to emailing our puppy packet we’ve posted much of the information on picardy.org so they can access it anytime and anywhere they have bandwidth. (available free of charge under the Puppy Readiness tab)
Ric, Ellen and their 4 Picardy Spaniels live in New Glarus, WI just 25 minutes southwest of Madison. A lifelong hunter, Ric has trained and hunted Small Munsterlanders, Gordon Setters, and for the past 6 years Picardy Spaniels. Ellen has an extensive background in animal genetics and a PhD in Reproductive Physiology. She bred and trained Greater Swiss Mountain Dogs prior to Picardy Spaniels.
US Picardy Spaniel Alliance 