A word about puppy training, why it’s never too early to begin!
“I would have never realized what a great little fellow he was, or that starting a puppy in positive training at a very early age is the best way to mold him into the kind of dog that you want him to be.”
Pfaffenberger wrote this after telling his story of Skookie, a singleton puppy, they first called “surplus” from an unplanned mating. Skookie won first place in several field trials entered on the same day. This amazing feat included a trial over water Skookie had never been trained to retrieve in/over water before that day! I was in tears reading this account! He then wrote:
“To allow a puppy to grow up his own way, learn what he wants to learn, sow his wild oats before the owner starts to train him to do the things the way he wants them done, can result in just as back-breaking a job as I had extricating the weeds from my lily bulbs. What is worse, having frittered away this valuable time when he should have been started in training not only allows the puppy to pick up undesirable habits which will be hard, if not impossible, to correct, but the time lost is the most valuable in a puppy’s life for his socialization. It will never come again. To waste it is like letting gold flow through your fingers down into the ocean. It is forever lost.”
The New Knowledge of Dog Behavior, Clarence Pfaffenberger! This book was written in 1963! One can still find gold in the right book on dogs, training and behavior, even those published 50 years ago!
I’ve had this book for a while, and decided to start reading. It’s an easy read, but still packed with science familiar to many of us, running underneath the story line!
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