Lessons

Comparison is the thief of joy, and that is not a new idea. We have all heard by now that measuring yourself against other people does you no good. Social media just speeds it up. Once the algorithm works out that you have a puppy, it feeds you dog trainers and dog owners all day, and it becomes very easy to look at them and think you are behind. I am not where they are, so I must do more. That thinking takes the enjoyment out of the part you are supposed to be enjoying.

Don't get me wrong, you can absolutely teach them tricks and all the rest of it. But this early on, where I am now, the job is to take a breath and remember you have a plan. The important things are simple:

• Making her feel safe
• Making her trust you
• Making sure she actually is safe
• Giving her the confidence to go out into the world and find that it is not a big dark scary place, and that the people in it love her

That is the whole list, and everything else comes down from there. It does not mean you skip the preparation, or stop thinking about the skills she needs to be a good member of the family. It means you deal with the thing in front of you.

Her second vaccinations are still four weeks off. I could spend that time deep in lead training, and there is genuinely good material out there on how a dog should walk on a lead and how to teach it properly. But that battle is not here yet. If the problem today is the sofa, then the sofa is the thing to work on. You can prepare for the lead walking without making it a priority before it is one, and it is certainly not a fair thing to measure yourself against.

All dogs are different and so are all people. If you have children, you want her safe around children. If you live somewhere built up, you want her comfortable around traffic. The priorities are not the same for everyone, because it is your journey with your dog, and she is learning to trust you.

The content online is brilliant and you can learn a lot from it, especially watching people who really know what they are doing. There is also an infinite amount of it. How to do this, how to do that, what you should never do, the top five things to do. It gets overwhelming. So take a breath, give yourself a second, and remember that you are meant to be having fun. Have a plan, do your research, stick to the plan, and enjoy the rest of it along the way.