Episode 5 - Yes, You CAN Get it all Done with Large Litters! Time Efficiency Tips for Breeders

Today’s question comes to us from a breeder who’s having a large litter and wondering how she’s going to get everything done:

“Help, I am actually freaking out…just confirmed 11 via x-ray…have got a really bad feeling that I am going to be short on time for individual work. How do those of you who have big litters work?”

In this episode, I talk about:

• My five key tips to save time when working with litters
• Great time savings suggestions submitted by our followers
• Prioritizing what’s most important for you and your puppies

​​Listen wherever you get your podcasts, and subscribe so you never miss an episode!

To read the transcript for this episode, click the link below.

EPISODE 5 - TRANSCRIPT

I'm Jane Messineo Lindquist and this is the Puppy Culture Potluck podcast. You bring the topics, we bring the conversation.

Today's topic is a perennial favorite, which is time management, especially with big litters. So here's here's how the question goes. Here's the post:

Help. I am actually freaking out. We usually have litters of six or seven, but I just confirmed 11 via X-ray today. I am usually very particular about following protocols, but have got a really bad feeling that I'm going to be short on time for individual work. How do those of you who have big litters work it? Do you try and do more group sessions?

Okay, now this is me talking again and I just want to say I am uniquely qualified to answer this question because I am not a naturally organized person.

So this is something that's a real struggle for me. And I've put a lot of thought into where the pain points are and how to eliminate them.

So first, before we get started, let me say saving some truly catastrophic personal circumstances. You easily have time to do everything in the Puppy Culture film, even if you have a big litter. Even if you have a job or other commitments, the feeling of running out of time or even actually running out of time is real and legitimate.

But I'm going to help you get past that in two ways. Number one, I'm going to give you some concrete time management advice. And number two, I'm going to help you position your expectations and goals. So let's roll right into the concrete time management suggestions. I have a video up on the show page. If you go to madcapradio.com, under this episode there is a link to it and it's a video of me doing leash training, walking with a litter of five puppies.

The entire training session took 8 minutes. This was the third session I did with these puppies. So do the math. That was I'd put 24 minutes of training into these puppies. And if you watch this video, you're going to see that all the puppies walk by my side for a few steps and accept a leash and collar without reacting to it.

Now, my puppy owners have a puppy that won't buck and fight on the leash and can go out for a short sniff and strolls. So I just eliminated a huge friction point for my puppy owners and they can take off running and get the ball rolling with socialization as soon as they bring their puppies home.

Even if you had 15 puppies, we're still only talking about an hour to an hour and 15 over the course of a week to achieve the same result. Now, this is a little disingenuous of me to say it, because that's the actual training time. And that video only includes the actual time I spent training those puppies. What you don't see in that video took way longer than the training; switching the puppies out, finding and chopping up treats, locating my clicker, which I can never find. Getting dressed for the weather, finding an appropriate pair of shoes, putting all the big dogs away and clearing a space to train.

So now that 20 to 25 minutes balloons up to 4 hours in an already stretched to the seams schedule. And that's where you run into trouble. So, yes, you do have time to do all of the Puppy Culture protocols. It's the rest of the stuff that's killing you.

So let's break it down. I have five tips for you. We're going to look at these five areas where you can make a big dent in the amount of time that you waste and really streamline the process. Number one tip, have treats ready. Listen. A lot of things have to come together for the time to be right to train your puppies.

The puppies have to be awake, but not over tired, hungry, but not hangry. You have to have a free time slot. And if you get to that confluence of events when it's time to train the puppies and you don't have treats on hand, you've just blown your opportunity. In my last litter, I ran into situations twice with that litter where I had no treats and wound up driving to the store instead of training puppies.

Now I am going to sidebar here and say that was a very real example of a personal crisis that caused a time management issue. My dad had open heart surgery completely unexpectedly when the puppies were a couple of weeks old, and that was taking up a lot of my time. And yeah, I found myself getting caught with my pants down a couple of times about things.

So now what I learned from that is that part of my pregnancy preparedness now is going to be making, cutting up, bagging and freezing treats. So I never get caught in that situation again. This is a great project for a spouse or child who can do the chopping and bagging up while they're watching TV. But you know, you do have to set them up for success, okay?

Don't just give them the project and then get cross when it doesn't happen. You got to be really granular about this, okay? You have to have your cutting board, your knife, your baggies ready, you have your treats ready. Cut up a sample baggie, show them how much you want in each bag and how small you want the treats cut.

Put it in front of them on a table while they're watching TV. And that is the best way to get buy in and get what you want. Before I move on to the next tip, I want to circle back for a minute to my dad's open heart surgeon and how that threw me for a loop. And I say it was completely unexpected.

And it was. But in reality, most of us are at the age where we do have a parent who very well could have a catastrophic illness at the drop of a hat, or we ourselves may be at that age. And if we're not at that age, then we're at the age where we have a bunch of kids with various trajectories that can explode at any given moment.

So good time management includes foreseeing things that we could reasonably expect to happen and making allowances for that. And it's really best to assume that some kind of bomb could go off in your life when you have puppies. And the best way that you can prepare for that all boils down to if there's anything you can do now, rather than wait, do it now.

Inventory all of your toys and equipment before the litter comes. Prepare mother's pudding and freeze it now. I mean, the list is long and that could be a whole course in itself. But in general, you get the idea. Think of as much of the things that you can that you could possibly freeze, put up, store, inventory, prepare now and be well provisioned against the chance that you won't have time to do it later.

So my second tip is have a gear bowl, put your clicker in it, put your harness leash, collars, make it a truly grab and go experience, have it on your counter. If you are doing extensive grooming protocols, have your clippers in there. Your toenail clippers, your face clippers, what, your scissors, whatever your whatever you're working with, have it in that bowl on the counter so that the minute that you come to that crossroads where you have an assistant and you have time, you can just put your hand on what you need.

Third tip plan the day. I'm going to give you an example of how we plan out our day. And this is a day with 6 to 10 week old puppies and it assumes that it's fair weather. Okay, so the puppies go outside first in the morning. They're the first ones to go out in the yard. They come in and then the big dogs go out and then the puppies will play inside for 30 minutes or so.

And then they get a meal and then they're ready for a nap for a couple of hours. Then the big dogs can come in the house. And as the puppies naps and any big dogs that are still outside are ready to come in and take a nap. And any dogs loose in the house can, in all fairness, go in crates for a while.

And this is the time that I pinpoint for training puppies. I've set it up so that the puppies and the adults are on opposite schedules of naps and awake time. And I plan training at the crossroads. Just another sort of side note on planning. It really helps to have a nice big whiteboard that you can bullet point what you want to accomplish during that day and also keeps the entire family team on the same page of what has to happen and what you'd like to happen that day.

Fourth tip. Be dressed for training. Have a set of ready play clothes and stout boots for any weather that you can slip in and out of easily. So this goes back to that pre-planning. My go to dog uniform is leggings and thin layering turtlenecks from Amazon. I order a bunch of them every time I have a litter. I also have some long sort of baggy pajama bottoms that could double as pants in a pinch.

And over that I wear a polar fleece jacket. Amazon Basics makes a great one with pockets for treats, and the pockets zip up. None of these items cost more than 15 or $20. And that is my around the house dog uniform. And I hate to say it because I know it's a little bit of a hot point right now, but these are basically disposable clothes so I can move freely and not worry about if they get dirty or stained or if I leave the jacket on the back of a chair and a dog chews the pocket out, I won't lose my mind.

My fifth and final tip is to have someone to switch out the puppies for you when you're training. This is probably the biggest single thing you can do to condense training sessions into an impressively small amount of time. So be set up in your training area with the first puppy. Set your timer or count out your treats. However, you're limiting your session with the puppies.

Start training and have someone go to the weaning pen to get the next puppy. You'll find that it takes as long or longer for your assistant to replace and retrieve the puppies than it does for you to train them. It's a huge time savings and the beauty of it is it takes zero skill. Anyone, even a non dog person can help you do this.

Any friend, spouse or child old enough to carry a puppy safely can do this. So that's my top five tips. But I also want to read you some of the member responses on the thread because they had some other great tips and insights. So let's look at this.

Number one, break them into groups for things like resource guarding and crate training.

And a number of people mentioned this and what they said they do is they set up two areas; a weaning pen, the regular weaning pen, and then a second pen, which is a crate training play training space. And the consensus was they break them into groups of about three puppies, and those puppies spend half days in that training crate training area.

You keep a notebook or you use the worksheets in the Puppy Culture Workbook to keep track of which ones you'd work, what you've worked with, and you cycle through the entire litter. So even a huge one you can get through in a couple of days. Some things like resource guarding, it is easier to break them into small groups so you can keep track of who, who's gotten exchanges.

When you do your formal first resource guarding in the big group, it's fine, right? Because you're definitely giving them all bones and checking and making sure that you have done an exchange with that puppy. But when you're, you know, moving on and just doing your drive by resource guarding exchanges, just going in, taking, exchanging quickly, whenever you happen to see a puppy, you know, into something, it you know, in a litter of 15, it's really hard to know which you've done in which you haven't.

So when you break them out into that smaller group for these sort of drive by protocols, it's easier to know that each puppy has gotten some work. And, you know, another protocol that works much better with only a few puppies in a pen are things like the, what we call the advanced manding in Puppy Culture. But really it's teaching an alternate behavior in the face of arousal.

And, you know, you have to catch the puppies in the act of doing the alternate behavior and reinforce them on the spot. And it's just easier to do with three than it is with 15. It's not really even feasible to do it with 15 because you just can't get in there fast enough to reinforce them all. So in fact, several people commented that they initially did this dual set up deal as a management thing with a huge litter, but found it so productive that they continued doing it with subsequent litters that weren't particularly large.

And you know, the final thing I'll say about this as an advantage is that you don't have to spend a fortune on individual crates for everybody. And you also don't have to have to have like an enormous bank of crates against a wall. I mean, think about it. Some of these people, they had multiple litters where they had 20 or more puppies.

You know, you'd have to have a garage full of crates. So it's just it's an easier and more economical way of breaking this all down. Then, you know, we got some really good responses on high grooming breeds. And this one woman wrote in Poodle Breeder, and I'm going to read this response to you because it's such a good recitation of correctly balancing priorities. So here's here's what she says.

Part of the training for our breed, standard poodles, is accepting clipping. We start them off at four weeks with the squeeze pack of baby food. And as they get older, we cut up treats. By six weeks of age. It's basically a touch up every week. So we have it down to 6 to 8 minutes for most puppies and up to 10 minutes for a few.

But that translated into at least 2 hours, up to three or more hours of just clipping time. Then there is the gather of the grooming table, clippers, two different clippers. Make sure there are two of us. Get in the weaning pen, put one puppy down, gather another, etc. So it's more like at least a 3 to 5 hour ordeal.

And I'm just, this is me again, but, so what she just said, that all goes back to some of our tips that we got in the early part of this podcast. Okay. So you can cut down on that. But it's the reality. There's other stuff other than just the clipping. Okay, back to her post.

And of course, there are always interruptions for puppy that needs cleaning or cleaning a fresh poo out of the box. On these spa days, no other training gets done, but I feel this training is much more important than almost anything else. So it has to get done and it does. Then you have the weekly spa days bathing and blow drying. Yes, We also do a C.E.R. with the blow dryer. That day is even longer. So now you have two days of the week spoken for.

Then there may be a day we have to take someone to the vet. This litter we had a puppy with intussusception which was secondary to diarrhea and straining, requiring surgery. So she had numerous vet visits. And our vet is almost 30 minutes away, so an hour round trip and the visit time, etc.. So that's another day gone out of the week.

With large litters we find we prioritize what training gets done and which doesn't. Plain and simple. We can't do it all.

And this is me again. Absolutely perfectly stated. This is why Puppy Culture is customizable and we encourage you to evaluate your circumstances and set your own priorities. Training is training. Conditioning is conditioning. Anything you do with your puppies makes them better.

So when she says no other training gets done on those days, I mean, she is training and she's doing a lot. She's teaching those puppies to be handled. She's teaching them to accept grooming and restraint. She's creating C.E.Rs to all of this. And that will generalize and benefit the puppies just like any other Puppy Culture protocol. So absolutely, she is training those puppies on those spa days time is always a finite resource and learning to allocate that resource is part of what makes a masterful breeder.

Again, in the workbook, we asked you to reflect on the challenges your puppy owners typically have and allocate extra resources toward that. For most breeds and for sure for bull terriers learning to walk on leash and not assault people by jumping on them is a top priority. But learning to accept a clipper on their face is not a priority for us because we don't clip their faces.

For a non-coated breed they'll probably never need to have a blow dryer on them. But for a poodle, these are top priorities, so that can cause huge problems for the average pet owner. And maybe poodles aren't as ramey as a bull terrier and may be a little easier to manage on leash. So if she shifts a little bit more of her time toward grooming and a little less of her time toward leash training, that's a good judgment call for her.

So this is a great example of balancing priorities and time resources. I'm not saying that leash walking is not important for poodle puppies to be exposed to. And I'm not saying that the bull terriers don't need to learn to be bathed and groomed. I'm just saying that the relative amount of energy that you put into those things is going to be very different depending on your priorities. And that's good time management.

So, okay, to the point, here's another great response where the member has similar time constraints but a very different set of priorities. And here's what she says.

I have a litter of eight puppies that are now nine weeks old, and I really had to think hard on what protocols I focused on as I had a week away for a child's event and then a couple of medical emergencies with my father that had me in and out of the hospital for a few weeks.

When thinking about which protocols to focus on, I thought about what would be the most impactful for the puppy in the new home. So I focused on powering up the clicker, box game, resource guarding, house training, introduction to the crate and handling for nails and vet appointments. We didn't get to do as many trips out as I hoped we would, but we were able to do some.

Writing this out, seems like I did do a large amount of work, but I would have loved to have spent more time one on one with the puppies to work on healing and leash training. I did gift the new owners the With Open Arms program to help with the continuation of training.

And now this is me again. Yes, you did do a lot. And that brings us to the next things that I want to talk about, which are addressing expectations and goals. And I'm going to start specifically with what your goals are as a breeder. You're not handing over fully trained puppies. You're handing over just a little bit more than a blank slate. You want the puppy primed so the puppy owner can move forward without getting stuck in behavior modification boot camp.

You're not handing over fully crate trained puppies. You're not handing over fully socialized puppies. You are not handing over competition, obedience, trained puppies. You want to have worked with these puppies just enough so that the puppy doesn't freak out the first time he's in the crate, in the car, meeting dogs, the first time he has a leash and collar on, etc. When you boil it all down, the core Puppy Culture protocols are really not a lot of work.

There's anti separation anxiety protocols, which is essentially individual attention. There's take a treat, powering up the clicker, box game, manding, anti resource guarding, leash walking, recall, so really eight core protocols where you're going to be spending a lot of individual time with the puppies but still no more than two maybe three sessions of each protocol and no more than 2 minutes per puppy.

So that 16 individual sessions per puppy, somewhere around 30 to 35 minutes of actual hands on one on one per puppy. So let's call it 40 minutes spread out over approximately seven weeks. If you have 15 puppies, that's 10 hours over seven weeks, just a little more than an hour a week or 12 minutes per day. Not a lot of time.

And then you add to that a day for the puppy party, an hour for a big dog visit and let's say for excursions. Again, all of this becomes much easier if you plan ahead as soon as you have an ovulation date, you can start penciling things in lining people up. People love to help with puppies, but people are also scheduled out for weeks or months in advance.

They will say yes and give you the time if you ask now. Circling back to my earlier comment, get your puppy party equipment lined up inventory and lay up any supplies and food that you can both for you and the puppies. If you do all these things, you're going to find this is very doable. But still, I understand you have a big litter and you have anxiety.

So I'm going to talk a little bit now about the sources of that anxiety and see if we can't deconstruct it a little bit for you and make you feel better. First of all, a lot of people think that they have to do a lot more than they have to do. In the workbook, for instance, you know, we folded in all the things, all the Puppy Culture programs that we have.

And a lot of this is specialized work that either you don't have to do or you don't have to do initially to raise behaviorally sound puppies up things like scent work, show training, attention is the mother of all behaviors, shaping emotional responses. Those are all add on modules. Okay, so, you know, you may get on again, social media, you may get on the discussion group, the Puppy Culture discussion group on Puppy Culture on Facebook.

And you may see people doing all kinds of stuff and it can give you sort of anxiety like, oh, I'm not FOMO, you know, I'm not doing enough. You are doing enough. Okay? It's not as much as you think it is, okay. It can be as you as you get more proficient, it's fun. You can add on stuff.

There's the sky's the limit. But just take a deep breath and focus on the fundamentals. You know, the fundies, let's let's do that. Also different breeds, okay? Like if you are working with bull mastiffs, I mean, you're not probably going to get as far as somebody who's breeding border collies again, you know what people tend to post are photos of, you know, ten puppies lined up sitting perfectly.

And we regularly get people writing in saying, Oh, something's wrong with my puppies. They won't all sit together, as like come on, do you know that that's not a reasonable goal? I mean, of course if it happens, people are going to post, they're proud and I celebrate that with them. But you don't that's not that's not a goal for you.

Okay? You know, you don't need to have 14 puppies sitting in a row. You just want to prime the pump. You just want to smooth the way for the puppy owner. And, and a lot of the stuff that you see people doing is fun. I encourage you as you become more proficient, try it out. But it's not part of the core curriculum.

I also want to say that ultimately most of Puppy Culture is not as much about doing specific things or protocols as it is about interacting with your puppies in an observant and responsive way. Most of that is really done in your daily interactions with the puppy. It's more about a way of interacting with the puppies than specific protocols.

So the reality is that it doesn't take significantly more time to raise a litter with Puppy Culture than any other way. What's probably bothering you, especially if you're newer to Puppy Culture, is that you have to think about things a lot at first, and you'll also find yourself needing to consult with others a lot because you don't yet have a huge frame of reference for what's normal and what's not normal.

What your expectation should be or shouldn't be in any given situation and so forth. It's just not automatic for you yet. And then if you have a huge litter, those feelings are increased exponentially. You feel like, you know, you could sort of punt if you only have a couple of puppies, but you really need to be on top of your game and have everything sewn down with a big litter and that's a big brain suck.

But experience is the only way to get over those feelings. So if you're having a big litter and you're feeling panicked, unpack that feeling. Look it in the eye and say, I see you. You have a right to be here, but you are not going to stand in my way.

Speaking of feelings, I'd like to close this conversation with a chat about the emotions surrounding this topic, those feelings of not getting it all done, of thinking we could have done more.

That underlying sense of dread that something has not quite been finished. We all, myself included, regardless of the size of the litter, clutch up a little bit when those puppies get to be 8 to 9 weeks old because things are going so fast and the puppies are growing so fast and you want to button things down totally, but the puppies are almost literally popping through your fingers and moving on.

You will always have that feeling, but with experience you'll know that feeling is just a feeling. It's not that you didn't do enough or could have done more, it's just that it really does go by so fast and human nature wants us to produce perfection rather than accepting that there are limitations on what we can accomplish. Multiple people on the thread commented something to the effect that perfection is the enemy of progress.

And that's my ultimate message to you. Don't be daunted. Don't let your fear of not getting it done spoil your joy with your puppies. Break it down into little pieces, plan as best you can and put one foot in front of the other. Keep reminding yourself of everything that you have done with your puppies, not what you might have missed.

I guarantee you, when those puppies go to their new homes, if you shared that list of things that you did with the puppies, people would be super impressed with you and you should be super impressed with you to.

Well, that's it for this time. If you have any questions or something you'd like me to talk about on the air, join us on the Puppy Culture discussion group on Facebook or visit the show page at madcapradio.com and drop your question there.

Thanks for listening. Bye bye.

---

​​​Referenced Courses and Titles

Buy Now

Buy Now

ENROLL TODAY

Buy Now