Air puff collars?

[Riverlee]

Someone was telling me about these? Ie. Collars that emit a puff of air (remotely controlled) to help combat unwanted behaviour. You train the dog by saying ‘no’, trigger the air puff and eventually the dog learns that No means stop the action. After a while, you can stop using the collar. It works in a similar way to the pet corrector sprays.

That's absolutely nowhere near enough of a walk for a Labrador pup.

I would also add a lot more mental stimulation and enrichment, likimats, natural chews, find it type games, lots of games with toys, he’s a retriever so teach him to retrieve?

He is only 8 month so I think 2 hours exercise is a bit excessive?

Likimats for a labrador puppy now I know you have either had a very calm lab puppy or not at all

In my experience licki mats and snuffle mats + lab puppies = visit to the vet to remove eaten licki mat and material or very colourful poo waiting for the sections to be pooed out.

Although chewing toys are fab

No! Labs are very good orientated and very keen to please! Positive reinforcement only for our lab and a firm “no” is enough to have him giving apology licks 🥰.

Thanks for all the advice and comments.

Must admit, was surprised when a trainer suggested the air puff collar to me as previous experience of them suggested they’d be adverse to this method (using treats, training etc instead).

We have now started to up his walks to one thirty minute walk, plus a second shorter walk. We were going by the guidance that you walk for five minutes per month of age.

“Likimats for a labrador puppy now I know you have either had a very calm lab puppy or not at all” - so true!

I thought our pup was being entertained by one for ages, until I noticed he had had ate all the peanut butter, and was in the process of destroying the mat itself!

The five minutes per month of age guidance is about how much they should walk in one go, not how much per day. So for 8 months old, 2 X 40 minute walks per day would be fine.

You can tire a dog out mentally a lot easier than you can physically, so I like to make one of our walks sniff based, rather than distance covered.

When we are going for a distance based longer walk, I tend to walk a bit quicker and get to the main part of our walk (park, field, off lead area etc)
When we are on our sniff based walk we don't go massively far from the house, or cover much area because I let him spend his time sniffing. We get a lot of dogs walking in our immediate area - so I call this his 'catching up on his correspondance' walk.

My dog is a working terrier. She’s 7 months now. She gets one good walk of 30-40 minutes in the mornings and then several short training sessions and enrichment games during the day. That is more than enough for her. We experimented with two walks for a while but found she was more hyper and struggled to settle. So one good walk with running, sniffing and meeting other dogs, then brain games is better for her than two walks. We do lots of choice based training which uses her brain more, alongside the more traditional sit/down/wait type stuff. We also carry treats at all times and reward her for we like. She’s learnt laying down when I am preparing food gets her treats and screaming like a banshee and biting me doesn’t. Capturing has been the best way for her, to encourage more human acceptable behaviour.