Puppy stage: teething, growth, food and training

Meals usually drop from four a day to three, and then toward two as they get older. Puppy food is formulated for growth, and when a dog moves off it depends on when that dog finishes growing — which is months earlier for a terrier than for a mastiff. Do not guess this from a bag; ask your vet at a weigh-in. When the switch does come, do it over seven to ten days by mixing an increasing proportion of the new food. Treats are still food: if training is going well, they can be a real share of the day's calories, so take them off the meal.

Sleep needs are still high but the naps consolidate. The crate can move out of the bedroom if you want it to, gradually rather than overnight. The bed bought at eight weeks is probably now too small, and teething makes anything with stuffing a genuine risk — a dog who swallows bed filling is a dog having an unpleasant scan. Washable and hard to disembowel beats plush at this stage. Keep enforcing naps: an overtired six-month-old looks exactly like a badly behaved one.

Walks become real, but growth plates are still open and the joints of a large-breed puppy in particular are not built for repetitive impact. Short, frequent and varied beats long and hard: sniffing walks, different surfaces, gentle play with suitable dogs. Avoid long forced jogs, repeated jumping in and out of a car boot, and endless stair work — ask your vet what is sensible for your dog's size and build. The harness will need replacing at least once. Growth is not a straight line, so check the fit monthly rather than at the point it is obviously wrong.

This is the peak chewing stage of a dog's life and the single biggest driver of household damage. Aim it rather than fight it: several chews of different hardness, available where the dog actually is, plus a frozen stuffed toy for the periods when you cannot supervise. Enrichment also gets harder now — a puzzle that was right at twelve weeks is boring at six months, and a bored, clever puppy invents work. Rotate toys out of sight for a fortnight and they come back new. A stretch of sniffing or problem-solving usually settles a puppy better than the same time spent running, which is why a chase game rarely produces the quiet evening it promises.

The most valuable months you will ever have. Recall, a settle on a mat, loose-leash walking and a reliable leave-it are all much easier to build now than to repair at fourteen months, because your puppy still wants to be near you and has not yet discovered that the rest of the world is interesting. Keep sessions short and frequent, reward generously, and practise in more than one room and more than one park — dogs do not generalise well, and a sit that only works in the kitchen is a kitchen trick. A positive-reinforcement class is worth the money at this stage more than at any other.

The vaccine series finishes somewhere in here and the world opens up, which means parasite exposure goes up too — different regions, different seasons, different products, all of it a prescription conversation rather than a shelf decision. This is also when spay and neuter timing gets discussed, and it is genuinely not a one-size question: it interacts with breed, adult size and joint development, and the evidence differs across those. Meanwhile the dog is now big enough and fast enough to get out of a gap that used to hold them, so recheck the fence and the gate latch.