Training & Behavior

A puppy of eight or ten weeks needs somewhere in the region of sixteen to twenty hours of sleep out of every twenty-four, and almost every new puppy I meet is getting nowhere near it. That one number explains more first-month misery than anything else you will read. Not the biting, not the wildness, not the sudden inability to remember his own name. Those are all symptoms. The sleep is the thing underneath.

Puppies do not sleep the way adult dogs do, in long convenient blocks. They cycle, dropping off hard and surfacing again, and they take a good chunk of that total in short daytime naps. If the household is busy, if there are children, if someone new keeps arriving, if the puppy lives in an open-plan kitchen where something is always happening, those naps get shorter and fewer without anybody deciding to make it so.

The five o'clock meltdown is a sleep problem

Ask any group of new owners about the early evening and you will get the same story. Somewhere between five and eight the puppy comes apart. He tears round the room, grabs trouser legs, bites harder than he has all day, growls at the sofa, ignores every cue he knew perfectly at lunchtime and looks slightly glazed while he does it. People film it and post it and ask whether their puppy is aggressive.

He is not. He is the toddler having a meltdown in the supermarket at the end of a long day out. Impulse control is the first thing to go when a young mammal is exhausted, and a puppy has very little of it in reserve to begin with. Handling tolerance drops too, so the same cuddle that was fine this morning now produces teeth. The training does not disappear because it was badly taught. It disappears because there is nobody home to run it.

Wired is not the same as under-exercised

The instinct at that point is to burn it off. Another walk, another game in the garden, throw the ball until he flags. It occasionally buys twenty minutes and it almost always makes the evening worse, because arousal accumulates rather than draining. A puppy who has been stimulated all day and then stimulated some more does not have a tired body and a settled brain. He has both systems running hot.

The old rule of thumb about five minutes of formal walking per month of age is not gospel and was never really research, but the direction of it is sound: young puppies need much less structured exercise than people assume, and a slow sniffy potter around one hedge does more good than a brisk mile. Sniffing settles dogs. Distance does not.

And the puppy who supposedly never settles usually has not been given the conditions in which settling is possible. He has not learned that switching off is even an option, because in his experience something is always about to happen, and he would hate to miss it.

Naps you actually enforce

The fix is deliberate and slightly unromantic. You decide when he sleeps, not him. That means a pen or a crate or a quiet room, somewhere dim and boring, and it means putting him in there before the crash rather than after it. Crate work is its own subject and worth doing properly, but for now the point is simply that he needs somewhere he can be genuinely off duty.

A rough guide: puppies of eight to ten weeks manage around an hour awake before they need to go down again, sometimes less. Set a timer if you have to, because the tell-tale signs are easy to miss and the puppy will not volunteer. Nap after every meal, after every play session, after every trip into the garden, and always after visitors. Give him something to lick or chew as he goes in, because licking and chewing help a brain downshift.

Expect a couple of minutes of complaint for the first few days. That fades fast if the routine is genuinely consistent, and it does not fade at all if the door opens whenever he shouts. Do distinguish between grumbling that tails off and distress that escalates, though. The first is a puppy settling. The second needs looking at.

Nights, the toilet, and where he should be sleeping

Night waking splits into two things that look identical at three in the morning. A puppy who stirs, grizzles for a minute and resettles was just surfacing between sleep cycles, and going to him teaches him that surfacing is worth broadcasting. A puppy who wakes and stays awake, shifting about, circling, scratching, whining with real intent, needs to go out. You learn the difference within about a week.

When you do take him out, make it as boring as humanly possible. No talking beyond the quietest praise, as little light as you can manage, no play, straight back to bed. Most puppies need one or two night trips at first and drop them within a few weeks as their bladder catches up. Do not keep setting an alarm out of habit once he has stopped asking.

As for where he sleeps in those first weeks, near you. A crate or pen beside your bed is ideal. A puppy who has just left his mother and every sibling he has ever known should not spend night one alone behind a closed door, and the ones who do tend to take longer to relax about being alone later. If you want him downstairs eventually, move him gradually once he is sleeping soundly, a few feet at a time.

Mouthing has its own reputation and its own solutions, and so does crate anxiety. But before you tackle either, count the hours your puppy actually slept yesterday. Get that number up towards sixteen and a surprising number of your other problems get quieter on their own.