The Weekly High Five 🐾

Hey Reader,
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A few weeks back, I sat down with the Dempsey family for our Foundations session. Their 4-month Great Pyrenees mix, Henry, was bouncing around the living room. Three kids in motion.
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The kind of household where calm sounds like a hopeful idea instead of a real thing.

Brendan mentioned, almost in passing, that they'd hosted Easter the weekend before.

Three or four new visitors. A puppy. Three kids. Easter dinner.

He never jumped on anyone. Stayed calm through the whole afternoon. The only sign anything was hard for him was two pee accidents from excitement.

Let's be real. That's not what most families expect from a 4-month puppy on a holiday with strangers walking through the front door.

Memorial Day weekend is four weeks out. If last year's holiday was rough, you already know what's coming. You've tried tiring the dog out before guests arrived. You've tried the bedroom and felt guilty about it. You've tried just hoping for the best. None of it landed.

Here's what the Dempsey family didn't do before Easter. They didn't drill "off." They didn't run extra training sessions to teach Henry not to jump. They definitely didn't try to wear him out beforehand.

They built a setup he could succeed inside.

That's the part most families have backwards. You can't train your dog out of cookout chaos in the four weeks before the cookout.
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You can't train your dog out of cookout chaos during the cookout. What you can do is design the day so the dog has a clear job that beats the chaos.

Management first. Training second. That order matters.

First and foremost, here's the move that carried Henry through Easter dinner.

A frozen lick pad. Plain Greek yogurt, a smear of peanut butter, half a smashed banana. Frozen flat. Set it up ten or fifteen feet from the food, somewhere your dog can lie down and lick.

The lick pad goes down at the highest-stimulation 20 minutes of the day. When guests sit down to eat. When the kids are running in and out of the screen door.

While your dog is licking, they're not jumping, not stealing, not bolting. The calm you wanted is a side effect of the setup, not the result of correcting them in the moment.

Henry didn't jump on a single guest because nobody asked him to "be good" while three new humans walked through the door. They gave him a better job.

You're not failing because last year was hard. You're learning what the setup needs to look like for your specific dog.

Here's what I held back. Where exactly to place the dog during food service. How to manage the doorbell sequence. What to do when the screen door is opening every 30 seconds.
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How to reset if the dog goes over the threshold mid-event without writing off the rest of their day. Whether your specific dog should be at the cookout at all, or whether a quiet room with a Kong is the better plan. (That's not failure. That's the plan.)

Henry's family had me in their living room, watching their actual dog. That's what Private Training is. Real life, in the room where it has to work. Memorial Day weekend is four weeks out. There's still time to build the plan.

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Four weeks is plenty.

Happy training,

Pam,
CPDT-KA
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P.S. Hit reply with your cookout setup. Size of yard. Kids running through. Indoor and outdoor flow. Tell me what you're working with and I'll tell you the one move that makes the biggest difference for your situation.