Forget party tricks for now. The five skills that change life with a puppy are: name recognition, sit, down, touch (nose to palm), and settle on a mat. Everything else — polite greetings, café manners, vet visits — is built from these five.
Train in sixty-second sessions, five times a day, and always quit while you are winning. Puppies learn in their sleep — literally. A short session followed by a nap cements learning far better than a twenty-minute drill that ends in frustration.
Pay like it matters. Use pea-sized, smelly rewards (cheese, chicken, freeze-dried liver) for hard things like recall, and save dry biscuits for easy wins your puppy already knows.
