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Permalink Reply by Beth Walker on November 7, 2012 at 12:31am

It will take her time to learn to go down the stairs, but I personally would not encourage her to go down a set of stairs at her young age due to the possibility of injuring her back.

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Permalink Reply by Ami and Boo on November 7, 2012 at 4:53am

Thank you :) I would never want to hurt her and I'm willing to go at her pace.

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Permalink Reply by Jane on November 7, 2012 at 8:45am

Don't worry, she'll figure it out eventually. We didn't let our pups go down stairs too often until they were about 6 months old just to be safe though. I don't think it's their back you really have to worry about at that age, but more so their shoulders. It's a lot of impact on a growing puppy's joints and such.

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Permalink Reply by Beca and Mishka on November 7, 2012 at 11:00am

We carried Mishka up and down stairs for almost a year - and then down the stairs until he was 18 months.  But we have a lot of stairs in our townhouse, so it would have been easy to let him overdo it if we didn't make a rule about it.  And we have baby gates to keep him from going up or down without our knowledge.

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Permalink Reply by Lemmy Winks on November 7, 2012 at 2:00pm

Lemmy didn't start going down stairs until about 5 months old. We carried him down for a while, the encouraged him to get at least one paw down, then 2 paws, then we'd place him on the stairs near the bottom and call him excitedly so he's leap from them and be all proud of himself.

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