How To Train Toy Dog Breeds

I'm going to talk to you about training your toy breed. These are the tiny boys of the world. These are the chihuahuas, the pugs, the terriers, and they are mostly big dogs in little packages.

What most owners do is they tend to treat them a little bit like dolls. There's too much carrying, too much dressing them up, and too much forgetting that these are, in fact, simply dogs. I see customers carrying around these little tiny toy breeds as if they were, in fact, disabled.

It's not appropriate. If you had a Rottweiler, you would not pick it up, even if you could, and tuck it under your arm and expect it to be sociable. When you're working with toy breeds, height is a status symbol.

As an owner, previously, of a mad little Jack Russell, I know that one of the things that she did to make herself feel better when strangers came into the house is she would run up the sofa, stand on the back of it, and bark at people from there. She was much, much braver from that height of three or four feet off the floor than ever she was if she was actually on the floor. So, she was very quickly taught not to get on the back of the sofa and bark at people.

I see too many people who simply think that small means not a dog. It's still a dog. It has a full set of teeth and I've seen plenty of toy breeds using them very, very effectively.

So, you should have the same manners as you would if it was a Rottweiler. The other thing to be careful of with these toy breeds is that the trend for designer cross breeds of various things, poodles, pugs, Chihuahuas, Yorkshire terriers, all sorts of things with fancy names does not stop it being a dog. There are significant health problems in these breeds that should be tested for, even if somebody's crossing to create something else that they're charging a lot of money for.

Never lose sight of the fact that your toy breed thinks it's at least five feet tall with a full set of teeth and these are easily able to fight all the dogs it meets. So, training your toy breed is exactly the same as training a bigger breed. Please take it seriously. .