The first week with a Labrador puppy

Everyone prepares for the puppy and nobody prepares for the first week. It is the hardest part of the whole thing, it is short, and almost all of what makes it hard is predictable.

This is what to expect, in order.

Day one: do less than you planned

The temptation is to show the puppy everything and introduce it to everybody. Resist it for a few days. A puppy that has just left its mother and littermates has had the single biggest upheaval of its life that morning, and the kind thing is a small, boring world: one room, one or two people, a bed, water, and somewhere to relieve itself.

Let it sleep. A puppy this age needs somewhere between sixteen and twenty hours a day, and a great deal of first-week bad behaviour is simply a puppy that has been kept awake by visitors.

The first few nights

It will cry. This is not a sign that anything is wrong, and it is not the beginning of a habit you have to break — it is a social animal that has never once slept alone.

The approach that costs the least sleep overall is to have the puppy near you at night, in a crate or a box beside the bed, so it can hear and smell you. Most settle within two or three nights and can then be moved gradually to wherever it is going to sleep. Shutting it in a distant room on night one tends to produce a week of screaming instead of three nights of grumbling.

Take it out for a wee once in the night for the first week or so. A puppy of eight weeks cannot last through.

Toilet training is a timetable, not a lesson

Puppies do not learn to "hold it" by being told off. They learn where to go by being in the right place at the right moment, repeatedly.

So the work is yours: outside after waking, after eating, after playing, and every hour or so in between. Go out with it, wait, and make a quiet fuss when it performs. Accidents indoors get cleaned up without comment — a puppy that is told off for weeing in front of you learns to wee behind the sofa instead.

Expect three weeks of this and you will be pleasantly surprised. Expect three days and you will be miserable.

The biting

At around eight to twelve weeks a Labrador puppy will put its mouth on everything it meets, including you, and this surprises people far more than it should. It is normal, it is not aggression, and it is how the breed explores the world.

What stops it is not punishment but consequence: the moment teeth meet skin, the game ends — you stand up, fold your arms, and become boring for thirty seconds. Puppies are extremely motivated to keep a game going and will work out the rule faster than you expect. Giving them something they are allowed to chew, within reach, at all times, does most of the rest.

The three mistakes

The first is too much exercise. A Labrador is a big dog whose joints are not finished until well past its first birthday, and long walks or stairs taken repeatedly in the first months are a cost paid later. Short and frequent beats long and tiring.

The second is too many people. Socialisation does not mean meeting fifty strangers in a fortnight; it means a modest number of good experiences that the puppy comes away from feeling fine. One calm visit beats a party.

The third is inconsistency between the humans. If one person allows the sofa and another does not, the puppy is not confused — it simply learns that the rule depends on who is in the room, which is a far harder habit to undo than the sofa itself.

What we send with the puppy

Ours leave with the food they are already eating, so you can change it slowly rather than deal with an upset stomach in week one, and with the paperwork and the routine they are used to. What travels with them and what happens on the day is set out on the going home page.

They also arrive having already met a crate, a car and a set of stairs, because the first week is easier when none of those things is new. That part is on the early training page.

And if something worries you in that first week, ring us. We would far rather be asked something obvious at nine in the evening than find out a month later that it went wrong.