After You Get Your Puppy

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Genius - Rated
In my opinion this book is written by a doggie genius!

A must have for all puppy owners. This book not only outlines steps to get you and your puppy on teh road to a happy life long relationship but provides the information in an easy to understand formant. It highlights the most important points so that most owners will hopefully pick them up during the first read and start to apply them ASAP.

There a number of concepts and Ideas that Dr Ian Dunbar puts forwards such as "your puppy needs to meet at least one hundred people before it is three months old." For me an idea like this is fantastic, it just means that lots of problems seen in older dogs could be prevented. I also think 100 people is not a high number, when I take puppies on the train and into London Liverpool Street I hit the 10+ people mark quite easily, and a trip to the vets gets another 6 odd people ticked off my list . Also if he was to write 50 people then I can see owners been satisfied with just 25 people.

Concepts like error-less house training makes so much sense and in theory and its practical application. If you go look around a re-homing shelter how many adolescent dogs are there because they are still chewing and are not toilet trained? So nipping it in the bud very quickly gives the puppy a better chance of staying in its home for the rest of its life!

If people use their common sense then ideas like (eg. placing your pup in a long term confinement area when your have visitors around who may interact with your puppy to make your puppy worse in some way or asking the visitor to leave) make perfect sense. I wouldn't want a person who was going to be all rough with my puppy and possibly ruin work that I have been doing to interact with my puppy!

Over all I believe that if more owners were educated by reading books like this and by other means then we would see a decline in dogs up for re-homing in shelters or even the number of dogs euthanized every year!

At the end of the day as owners and trainers we are the people who will both put in enough and appropriate work with our puppies to offer then the best chance in life, living in a human society.

As a trainer I have to say that there are a few really top notch books out there that I would recommend to every puppy or dogs owner and 3 of those books are written by Dr Dunbar.

Chirag Patel


Chirag Patel, DipCABT.
Certificate in Dog Psychology
SF/SPCA Certs. Training & Behaviour and Dog Aggression
Member of the APDT #00923

cpatel@domesticatedmanners.com
www.domesticatedmanners.com
(DipCABT = Advanced Diploma in Practical Aspects of Companion Animal Behaviour & Training)

Counsels of Perfection - Rated
This book is clearly written by a man immensely fond of dogs and with a very clear idea of how they can be conditioned to be well-socialised and impeccably behaved. However it reminded me of an American diet book, as there was a large amount of background, waffle, and repetition, and actual concrete advice and instructions for training your dog have to be dug out of the text like nuggets.

He also sets some pretty daunting standards: For the purposes of socialisation, he insists, your puppy should meet 100 people by the time it is three months old. We got our dog, like many people, at 10 weeks of age... that gives us about three weeks to invite 100 people over to our house ( until a puppy has had its shots it's tricky to take it anywhere else). Who does he think I am, Tara Palmer Tomkinson, with a contacts book like the OED? Offer them beer and pizza and sports TV, he says. Yeah right. I live in London. Half of the blokes will think I'm trying to pick them up.

And anyway it's not just any hundred people. These people have to be shown (he actually uses the term trained) to train your dog - ie you cannot allow them to interact with it until they can make it sit, lie down and roll over. Which I haven't managed myself yet. If you don't do this, he warns, they will 'ruin' your puppy. He uses the word 'ruin' over and over. Make no errors in housetraining! One mistake will lead to many more! If guests won't conform, you must ask them to leave! Time is running out! You may already be too late!

He comes across like the Ayatollah of dog training. You feel that if your dog can't be told to turn cartwheels and happily let a thousand people feel up its dangly parts by the time it's three months old you may as well give up - and shoot yourself, not the dog, because clearly it's your fault. He implies there is no such thing as an intrinsically mean or naughty dog, but that all behaviour is purely conditioning. Hmm...

The cover of the book shows a series of misbehaved dogs, snarling, chewing clothes, and peeing in the wrong places. It's appropriate, because the whole book seems to be rather short on joy and encouragement and long on doom and gloom. But for all that I do approve of his strict no-cruelty approach, hence the four stars. He's just that he seems rather more forgiving and tolerant of his dogs than his readers.