​These days there really are some amazing resources available to prospective and active breeders to enrich their breeding programs and puppies. However, we haven’t seen much coverage of: Early Potty Training. So, this is where we would like to start. Hopefully, future columns will be produced based on your request(s).

​​Over the years Jenna and I have used a range of systems; some have worked better than others… over the past several litters, we have homed in on one system, and made refinements in both the equipment, method, and management which have delivered better, and better results for our puppy clients. To spare you the history of this evolution, we’ll delve right into where we are, and how we do it.

Whelping Box: Part 1
Initially, one might think there isn’t much to do with days-old pups, as their mother does most, if not all, of the heavy lifting. We still have an important role to play! As a point of reference, the whelping box we use for our Drents is approximately 4’x4’. We have found the use of thick synthetic fleece (also known as VetFleece), with super absorbent Lennypads underneath to be highly effective. The fleece sets the stage from day one by wicking liquids down and away from the puppies, keeping them clean, dry and warm. While the bedding area the puppies contact will almost always feel dry to touch, their bedding will still need to be changed every 24 hours or so. Don’t let the fleece fool you, the pad underneath will be soaked! Our mantra for the whole time we have the pups, “When in doubt, change it out”.

​Whelping Box: Part 2
The exact timing varies from litter to litter, however, once the pups are getting mobile and doing their business more and more on their own, this is your sign it’s time to change things up. This is when we introduce disposable potty pads and cover at least a third of the whelping box with them. You can usually get about this much covered while still leaving mom space to maneuver around. Initially, we simply cover their normal bedding and tuck the edges of the pads under the frame of the whelping box to help deter the pups from pulling at the pads. The expectations here are pretty low, but when you approach the box and the pups get woke up and excited, prompting the need to potty. Simply lift them onto the pads and praise them when they go. For the record, they will be pretty indiscriminate where they go, and that’s okay. It is important to note that the disposable pads are slick to the pups, and this lack of traction can be a hinderance. Also, these young pups have no control over their bladder. They go when they need to go. But in time they will start choosing to not do their business in the non-potty pad area more and more. Some pups will adapt quicker, some slower. We still strip out and clean their normal bedding every 24 hours, and we change out the potty pads as needed, ideally leaving a lightly soiled pad in play as that tends to attract them to potty in the “dirty” area.

​Whelping Box: Part 3
At a certain point, your puppies will be getting bigger and need more space to play and sleep, and the potty area will begin to seem too big for them for the size of their area. If they are using it pretty well, you may begin experimenting with making the potty area slightly smaller by a few inches. Our pups tend to stay in this configuration until they are about 4-weeks of age. While you want to guard against having your puppies confined in an area too small, giving them an area too big runs contrary to their potty training. This “in-between” time is short, generally less than a week and is more or less dependent on the size of the litter. When in doubt an extra day in the tight quarters is probably right.

​1st expansion: Phase 1
This is when our pups get their first big change in physical living quarters and their area is doubled. From 4’x4’ to 4’x8’. The new added area is 100% potty zone and this is when our potty trays with artificial turf are introduced. The trays are available via Amazon and are amazing! The trays consist of a simple ‘rabbit tray’ you put potty pads in, with made to size grates that fit over the pads, then covered by thick artificial turf with drainage holes.

The added area not covered by the tray/turf systems needs to be covered with disposable potty pads, all the way up to (and under) their normal bedding, which would now be in the original whelping box space. You will find that the puppies readily take to the grass mats – it’s pretty amazing. Still it will take time for full adoption, and many will get a paw on the pad, and the rear end will not be on… it still counts, as we have been informed by their Union Representative, Ila.

Initially, do not create a gap between potty pads and living area. This gap is made of lava and will not likely be crossed and cause the pups to begin soiling their living area. Make no mistake, there will still be liquid mistakes made in the living area, in particular along the edge of the potty area. As you might have expected, the 24 hour strip out/clean out rule still applies to their bedding and potty trays.
Grass mat & potty tray maintenance: poops can be picked up as needed using toilet paper and flushed away. After 24 hours, the grass mats will need to be hauled out, potty pads inspected and replaced as needed. We use Rescue Veterinary Disinfectant to clean the trays, grates, and flooring areas as needed. Fresh grass mats are installed, and you’re off to the races. The soiled grass mats are cleaned using a little bit of dish soap, and high-pressure water, top and bottom. Then doused with a generous application of Nature’s Miricle Urine Destroyer, given a light scrub in, then hung in a sunny area to drain and dry. Our current mats have seen four litters and they do not stink, still!

​1st expansion: Phase 2
By now you have a well-established routine for your pups, and their natural cycles. If you are really clever, you can add in shuttling them outside prior to their morning or afternoon potty time: this is pro-level stuff here and can be a lot to juggle.
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What is easy, is to create the potty zone gap. At first, try only an inch and see how it goes. If suddenly the puppies bulk at crossing the lava zone, shrink it up to just a sliver. Regardless of where your litter starts, every other day, you will make the gap slightly larger. If the pups begin using the “lava zone”, but not the grass mats, the gap became too big too fast for them. Remember the pups are the ones who decide the pace of this action. Simply reverse course and hold the old gap for another day or two before resuming enlarging it again.
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During this time, you will need a second temporary area to hold your pups during tear out and clean up. We either build a side pen or close them off in our kitchen. Ideally, you can put them on an extra-large whelping mat with a waterproof backing, with an extra, clean, ready-to-use potty tray.
The pups will have days that are better than others, but generally speaking they will be drawn to use the grass mats because of the traction they offer. Very quickly all of their poops will be on the grass mats, and their pees will soon follow.

​2nd expansion and beyond:
Whelping box expansions are always needed. Giving the growing pups adequate space helps to reduce stress within the litter. Additionally, there are a myriad of things to offer and do within the whelping box to help in the development of the puppies. However those are outside the scope of this article, and great fodder for another! Since we are focused on early potty training here, rapid expansion tends to run contrary to developing the habit of moving away from their living space to an area that is not just accessible but inviting to go potty.
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Much like before, the space will become more and more cramped with the growth of the pups and you will be tempted to expand again. Again, we will delay the expansion based on the puppies use of the potty trays. Their living area will become slightly congested, but not so much that one or more pups start lounging on the grass mats. Remember, at this point they really just need room to sleep and maybe do a bit of play. That being said, you may find that your litter will use one tray almost exclusively and leave the other alone. If a pup is lounging on the “clean” tray, don’t fret.

Once they are ready for more space, we have a wide range of solutions available to us. But typically, we add two half-panels enlarging their space to approximately 6’x8’. This is when their living and play area really gets a boost, and there is room to add a small kennel, etc. Still, it is very important to delineate the living area from the potty area. Do NOT put a kennel box, bedding, or play area immediately adjacent to the potty area. If they can step out of a kennel or get out of a bed onto the potty area within a step or two, it's too close. The association we want to continue to build on is for the puppy to move away from living areas, to appropriate potty areas.
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During this phase we tend to see, if we have forgotten to put the extra tray in the temporary pen, it isn’t uncommon to have a puppy get fussy. We can open the pen, and allow the puppy to either go outside, or have access to their main pen and they go to the newly installed potty tray and immediately go or go outside and use the potty tray we forgot to bring in that is stored adjacent to our back door.

​With weather permitting, you can even design a chute of sorts from pen to your yard and call them through to the great outdoors to further build the association of going out to potty.
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Most litters will need a third and possibly a fourth expansion. Again, we follow the same parameters on expanding their living space. Once it becomes a little bit congested and starts getting tight, but tension within the litter hasn’t escalated, it is time to add space. It's important to note here that by the end of their time with you, the overall space needed for a litter is not small. With our most recent litter, the puppies took up the entirety of our office, which is easily a 12'x14' room. You must provide a large enough potty area that the entire litter is able to use it without it becoming "full" instantly. For us this means using 2-3 grass trays at a time, lined up along the far side of the pen.
Ideally the potty area is against a back wall, away from where you would approach their area. Even the cleanest of pups will gleefully trample a well-used potty tray. It doesn’t take a lot of imagination of the mess this would create…

Final thoughts:
Yes, this is labor intensive, and your laundry will be busy. However your puppies will be clean, and they will want to be clean. Your whelping box will also be clean, and not smell bad (except for certain special times)

Hello everyone! The idea for this new section has been in our minds for quite a while, and was originally written the ADPA Newsletter. We hope to add more installments under this "banner" both for the newsletter, and here within the TGK Blog. We do hope that you find these articles informative and helpful as they are intended to be. If you have questions about articles in this section, or ideas for new ones, please by all means, reach out to us! We would love to hear from you.

First and foremost, Jenna and I do not consider ourselves to be “expert” breeders! We are, without question, mega dog nerds! We have been fortunate to have some amazing mentors and friends within the breed, and just as important and is some ways more so, some amazingly knowledgeable mentors and friends in the communities of our two other breeds, the Spinone Italiano, and German Wirehaired Pointer.

​Even with this 17th Mearns season of mine being the 2nd most challenging I’ve had to date; it doesn’t change my love for the area or chasing these special birds. If anything, it only motivates me to learn even more about them.

​Here is a little breakdown, with what may possibly be a few handy tips and tricks to get yourself, and your pup ready to test.

​In Summary:
The NA Test is about having fun with your dog and to have the most fun, your team should be prepared. If you are having to force anything during your preparation, simply put, you are doing it wrong. For the NA you should be focused on creating a lasting bond and partnership with your dog, some good memories, and ultimately a nice hunting dog that you can live with. 

In Part 1, Sam and I brought half-sisters, Ila & Sage to Montana with their trusty sidekick, (GWP) Rye. We had a good time despite having to battle with high winds and storm surges on the daily. For Part 2, we returned to Eastern Montana to meet up with Josh, and his lovely boy Dio. Dio is from the  Tule x Fen Litter of ’21. Tule being a Dutch Import, and Fen a boy produced from Powder’s first litter with Munson back in 2017. So, with that, we had Grandmother, Mother, Son, and Ila as an Aunt/Cousin depending on how you looked at the family tree. We also had Fizzy and Rye along for good measure.

Man, it was amazing to see the change 3-weeks had brought to the region. Once green and lush, everything was crunchy, dry and brown. On the way into town Jenna and I stopped in an area to air the dogs out and get a quick hunt in before checking into the hotel. The area held plenty of ditch parrots mid-September,  so what would we find? Well, it isn’t so much of what we found, but what did Fizzy find? She found the only pit filled with gloppy black mud, that’s what she found. Her bright and vibrate orange and white coat was rendered black with stringy ropes of muck dripping black, scummy water rife with the stench of rotting organic material. A simple bath wasn’t going to fix that, we needed a priest. Now this is how you end a twelve hour drive a short way out from the hotel! Yeah, in case you wondered, no birds, hell the girls didn’t even get birdy. We covered every square inch of the property. Frickin’ sweet man.

​We met Josh and Dio in the morning, as he had succumbed the afternoon before to the siren’s call of good-looking habitat and had to pull several Sharpies from the sky – poor guy…but the detour made an evening arrival out of the question.  We decided to hunt a pheasant rich area that wasn’t much of a secret. Just a few days into Montana’s pheasant season and Holy Moly were the birds thinned out and wise to human activity. We spent some time on the struggle bus hunting other areas with very limited success. This trip was going to be hard. Later that afternoon we hunted an area we like, because it takes some walking to get into, and because of this, it usually is pretty good. We were not entirely disappointed! All of the dogs did some really nice work on the ditch chickens and our game pouches began to collect birds. Fizzy, normally very “sticky”, showed marked improvement with her tracking and relocating and became an effective pheasant dog on this trip. Dio, managed a few points. Ila and Tule, a great team on phez, did what they do – one tracking and pointing, the other getting the bird boxed in, which translates to some fairly easy shots.

After such a frustrating day, we decided we needed to change the script, and so we began afresh in an area I had only briefly hunted a few years ago. This did in fact change the game for pheasant for our hunting. We saw generous numbers of birds, and many were still very huntable using pointing dogs. In short, we had a blast! We spent the last days of the trip trying our new to us parcels of land, rotating dogs, and hunting to our limits, which were filled with fat birds and colorful feathers despite their being an alarming amount of hunting pressure.
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On the last day, Josh managed to bang out his limit in short order, and I had one last bird to get. A decision was made to get that bird elsewhere. To be honest, I wasn’t really on board with this, as I wanted my last phez and to head back out and work on mix bag hunting! We toured around the area, and each property we looked over really didn’t hold much if any magic for my sensibilities. Wasting time, and feeling pressured, we selected a parcel we wanted to hunt the day before, but trucks were already there. I said, “that’s it, I’ll hunt it or pass – and after that we’ll switch gears”.

Arriving at the property and getting a good view for the first time, I wasn’t exactly excited. A small square of cut wheat stubble surrounding a dished out, dried swamp pit the shape of a pear. It was filled with tule grass, cattail, and dense tall grasses that grow in these areas. Just great, this was gonna be tough with one gun. I made the decision to throw it all at the wall, with one critical handicap – no GPS collars! So, we ran Powder, Tule, Ila, and Fizzy, hoping the chaos would encourage at least a bird or two to make a mistake.  Josh and Jenna off my left flank, we walked counterclockwise starting from the 6 o’clock position. We reached 12 o’clock, and nothing had stirred, also I was having some regrets on running the dogs without collars. They spent most of the time burrowing sight unseen in the deep thick vegetation. At 1 o’clock, hens were starting to pop, hey that’s a gooder sign. By 2 o’clock, Josh motioned me to punch out to the tree, I nodded in agreement and stepped up and out of the deep channel I had been in to see Fizzy on point to my right 15 yards away. Then I saw the white fur of Tule, and Powder on the right and left flank of Fizz. I made my approach, and walked to Fizzy’s left, there was Ila, deeper in and to Powder’s left. I began stomping and smashing the dried crispy vegetation aggressively. Whoop! The rooster lost his nerve and down he went. What a way to finish it out, all the dogs on point together, doing it all without any influence. Just fantastic!

Hello gang! Well, that is likely an ambitious statement theses days since I have not been regularly making blog posts for a while now. I do hope to correct that moving forward, and possibly win your hearts and minds back.

We recently returned from a bit of a whirlwind tour of Montana for some "early season" birds. This trip we were accompanied by Sam and Sage, with the intent to show them the ropes of hunting Montana. I think we did our jobs right. We got Sam and Sage on Sage Grouse, Huns, Sharptail, and mass of pre-season Pheasant, and contact with Blue Grouse. It is hard to shake a stick at that!

We dealt with some extreme weather, high winds, and poor shooting - yeah. It seems our shooting mojo got left in the garage... Seriously, never omit that from your packing list. Ever. Additionally, and rather regrettably, I failed to pack my good camera. Temperatures were surprisingly cool for this trip. So much so my phone case hardened up, which made the "quick camera launch" feature impossible to use.

Fortunately for me, Ila and Rye can and will hold a point. I'm standing there like a fool trying to capture images, gloved hands, camera not activating... at a certain point a guy has to come to terms with losing the photos for the attempt to bag a bird. Hence the dearth of photos from what was otherwise a good trip.

Rye and Ila worked well together, and backed one another with very little or no intervention - that work is starting to pay its dividends! Sage hunted very well, and for what was essentially her first "big girl" hunt, she did fantastic! She was field trained entirely in-house as well. She hunted her own hunts, she made solid points and backed/co-hunted like a much more experienced dog - this was exciting to see as her breeder and trainer.

We'll be getting back out there with the whole horde soon - maybe we'll see you?

​Jenna and I would like to take a quick moment to tell you a little bit about the American Drentsche Patrijshond Association. 

Despite our previous relationship with the other domestic Drent organization, we stopped being heard, or valued some time ago. Now we no longer feel represented by their mission, vision, or conduct. 

We aren't alone. The ADPA was envisioned by some Drent enthusiasts who thought things could be better and in short order all active Drent breeders, and those seeking to breed in the near future, came together and left the other organization to found the ADPA.

The ADPA is about building a supportive community of Drentsche Patrijshond fanciers who wish to celebrate, promote, preserve, and advance the breed through education and mentorship, continuous improvement of thoughtful breeding practices, and enjoyable community events and exhibitions. The ADPA is recognized by the American Kennel Club, and is a legal non-profit entity. 

If you are interested in joining a breed Association that is interested in working together to create synergy and community, or even if you just want a place to share your silly Drent photos and stories, then look no further than the APDA!

Friends of the ADPA (FaceBook)
AmericanDrentAssociation (Instagram)
AmericanDrentAssociation (FaceBook Official)

The ADPA is currently accepting applications for charter memberships (help us ensure the organization is set up for success and get a super cool limited edition t-shirt) as well as regular annual single and family memberships!

As always, if you have questions, comments, feedback, or would like to chat - we are here, please just reach out.