Puppy's first steps the whole-dog approach to raising a happy, healthy, well-behaved puppy Trade cloth - 2007

Details

• Title Puppy's first steps the whole-dog approach to raising a happy, healthy, well-behaved puppy
• Author Lindner, Lawrence; Nicholas Dodman; Faculty of the Cummings School of Veterinary Medicine at Tufts Univer
• Binding Trade Cloth
• Edition [ Edition: First
• Pages 304
• Language EN
• Publisher Houghton Mifflin, Boston
• Date 2007
• ISBN 9780618663040
• Library of Congress Catalog Number 2006029513

Preface Each year, 13 million households in the United States adopt a dog, often a puppy. They love dogs and, like you, finally make the decision to raise one and enjoy the special kind of companionship only a dog can bring.
The next year, half of those households surrender their young canine charges to shelters and pounds, where most of them are put to sleep. Clearly, there’s a gap between the wanting and the doing, a hole that needs to be filled.
That’s why we wrote this book—to get you and your puppy off to the best start so that you’ll enjoy many happy years together, developing the kind of bond you always hoped for and that your puppy deserves. Our experience has shown us that the first twelve months of a dog’s life is the time her owner(s) most need recommendations and guidance on health and deportment.
We’re in a good position to know—and to know what new dog owners need to hear. Each year, nearly twenty thousand people bring their dogs to see us at our hospital for small animals, providing us with one of the largest canine caseloads in the country, which in turn affords us an incredible opportunity to learn exactly the kind of advice puppy owners need and how best to communicate it.
We have among us some of the world’s most celebrated veterinarians doing the communicating. Housed in various facilities on our 585-acre campus in Grafton, Massachusetts, is a team of patent-winning, premier veterinary practitioners and investigators who combine practical clinical programs with cutting-edge research to bring together the best in health care and behavior.
Consider, for instance, that our nutrition faculty is often consulted by the pet industry in designing new diets for dogs—in health, in the face of disease, during growth, and during maintenance. Our emergency critical care program is the largest residency training program in the country. And we use some of the most refined equipment anywhere for diagnostic imaging of puppies, including an MRI, a spiral CT scanner, quantitative EEG, ultrasound, and nuclear imaging technology. All of these advances allow us to understand as much as possible about the conditions we treat. We also practice preventive medicine so that painful, debilitating, and costly diseases can be avoided, or at least attenuated, down the line.
But Tufts doesn’t specialize only in expensive medical diagnostics and preventive medicine techniques. We have also identified the best choices for general health care maintenance—everything from spaying and neutering to vaccinations, grooming, and flea and tick prevention.
Then, too, humane care of small domestic animals is our priority. Tufts is one of the few institutions in the country that study human-animal relations (we even run a bereavement hot line for pet owners), so we know what works for the best people-dog relationships. And we have a behavior clinic that’s second to none. Its approach is not hard-line or punishment- based. Rather, it is holistic, based on understanding, canine lifestyle enrichment, and positive reinforcement of desired deportment. Our experience has demonstrated that dogs behave better—and more consistently—when they are rewarded for their good actions rather than punished for their bad ones.
It’s a paradigm shift from the approach still put forth by a number of popular schools of dog training and espoused in numerous dog care books—even though that shift should have taken place throughout the training community a hundred years ago. At the beginning of the 1900s, psychologist Edward Thorndike showed that you could teach a dog (and a number of other species) a lot more by rewarding the right response than by punishing the wrong one. Positive reinforcement works more quickly and more effectively over the long term. Nonetheless, nine out of ten dogs whose owners bring them to us to help correct behavior problems have been through hard-knocks training in their puppy classes—punishment-based tactics using choke or prong collars, or worse, methods that were first employed to get military dogs to perform essential maneuvers during World War II and then, unfortunately, brought into the civilian dog-training arena. A lot of people bring their dogs to our offices in those very instruments of torture, meaning to do the right thing yet feeling bad about the pain they have been inflicting.
Owners don’t have to feel bad any longer. Punishment, aside from making a puppy anxious and miserable, teaches a dog nothing other than how to avoid punishment. There’s nothing learned about what goes into positive interactions between a person and a pup and how the two can get a mutually beneficial relationship going. In fact, once you begin with punishment tactics, youu have to keep punishing to keep getting the desired response, which only breaks down the human-canine bond even more.
The bottom line heeeeere: you can get a lot more out of a puppy with a carrot than with a stick. Thus, if hitting a dog with a newspaper, pinning him on his back, or bopping him under the chin as methods of training all feel wrong to you, your instincts are right, and you’ve come to the right place.
We’re not saying your pup doesn’t need firmness. But inflictions of physical pain are not simply “corrections,” as they are sometimes euphemistically called. They are abuse. We’ll tell you, instead, what you need to do to keep your dog happy as you teach him to be well behaved.
Follow our recommendations and your canine companion will go through life not only healthy and content but also easy to get along with— the kind of pet you like having around and that others will be well disposed toward, too. Good feelings from others will only enrich the relationship between you and your dog that much more. Your role will not be insignificant; proper puppy rearing takes commitment. But the return on what you put into the process during that first year will be immeasurable—for years and years to come.

Copyright © 2007 by Tufts University. Reprinted by permission of Houghton Mifflin Company.

"This book is essential if you are getting a new puppy."

-- Temple Grandin, author of Animals in Translation

"Fascinating...Puppy's First Steps is a must-read."

-- Elizabeth Marshall Thomas, author of The Hidden Life of Dogs

"Excellent and very readable...should be as essential as a leash."

-- Andrew N. Rowan, Executive VP, Humane Society of the United States

"If you can have only one book about raising a pup, this is the one to get."

-- Stanley Coren, author of How Dogs Think