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I don’t think the idea is to not deal with if in the moment, it’s to be ready before the moment happens. I’m sure with your kids you were sometimes surprised, but you still knew ahead of time what behavior was acceptable and what wasn’t and there were probably clear expectations about the consequence. You didn’t have to spell out what would happen if they missed curfew, but you probably told them what time to be home. It wouldn’t be fair to ground them for being late without first establishing the rules.
I think it’s the same way with dogs, but the question then becomes, how do you spell it out for them when you don’t speak the same language? I do know from my career working with children and teenagers that having them practice a behavior at a neutral time increased the chances of them generalizing that behavior to different circumstances enormously, and there are many studies proving this. So I’m inclined to believe that anything that can be done ahead of time to teach a skill and set up an expectation is going to be helpful in the moment for dogs, too. Now, I’ve only trained one dog in my whole life and he’s only a year old, so I’m not pretending to know even a sliver of what you know about training! But I think you’re underestimating how much preventative teaching you probably did very naturally as a skilled trainer.
Yes. This.
Of course, if your puppy has something dangerous, you need to get it away from them. If you HAVE to catch your puppy, and he has not yet been TAUGHT to come to you to be picked up, you need to do what you need to do. But when everyone is excited is NOT the best time for learning an (obviously) not internalized skill. Those should be taught separately.
I know ALL the ways to get a young, untrained, horse into a trailer in an emergency. And when you have a foal who has put his foot through a fence and needs emergency medical attention, you do whatever you need to do to get that foal into the trailer and to the hospital. But it is STILL much better, for the horse and the human, if trailer skills are TAUGHT in a systematic, calm manner BEFORE you need to trailer the horse.
As far as trainers are concerned... I don’t need a trainer to help me with household puppy skills either. But many of the people who come to the forum are not only dealing with a young puppy, but are first-time puppy raisers... often first time DOG owners. For those people, they MAY be able to get through it without any professional help, especially with a biddable companion breed like a Havanese. But both they and the puppy will have a smoother, happier, less frustrating time together with a bit of judicial professional help. Especially if the REASON they are posting is help with normal puppy raising issues. If they don’t already know how to handle these issues, a small amount of professional help to teach them good training techniques can help a lot.