The SIRIUS Puppy Raising Initiative for Dog Professionals: Breeders, Veterinarians, Pet Stores, Trainers, and Shelters

Dog Star Daily® | Fri, 01/13/2012 - 15:12

Breeders, Veterinarians and Pet Stores are the first point of contact with puppies and any successful puppy raising program depends on you. Please do your best to ensure that puppy owners contact trainers as early as possible to prevent them from going to shelters.
Puppies must be safely socialized to people and taught to enjoy being hugged and handled (restrained and examined) before they are three months old, otherwise, during adolescence they will likely become wary and fearful and maybe aggressive towards people. Socialization is an ongoing process and must start very early and is on ongoing process.
Puppies need to be raised with housetraining, chewtoy-training and alone-time-training programs up and running from the outset in order to prevent housesoiling, destructive chewing, excessive barking and separation anxiety.
Puppies benefit from early manners training — lure/reward training is as quick and easy as it is enjoyable. A simple sit prevents or interrupts most undesirable behavior.

The purpose of this initiative is to attempt to coordinate dog professionals to promote a preventive educational program, so that it becomes commonplace for prospective puppy owners to learn how to select and raise a puppy before they select and raise a puppy.

So much of the necessary educational information for puppy owners is readily available as free downloads of two of my eBooks — AFTER You Get Your Puppy and BEFORE You Get Your Puppy. The challenge though, is to make sure that prospective and new puppy owners are aware of the necessary information at the appropriate time, i.e., when they are searching for or have just acquired a new puppy. New puppy owners require an educational “vaccination” before or immediately after they get their puppy.

Please, download (and customize the first page of the two free eBooks with your company name and contact information) and then email them to all of your colleagues and clients, urging them to forward the books to every puppy/dog owner that they know. Alternatively, you have my permission to burn the free eBooks to a CD for duplication and distribution in puppy packets.

Breeders, veterinary practitioners and pet store retailers have direct access to prospective and new puppy owners at this crucial time, offering an ideal opportunity to accentuate the extreme urgency and dire importance of continuing errorless housetraining, chewtoy-training, alone-time training and safe socialization programs during the first few weeks and months after the new puppy comes home. Additionally, veterinarians and pet stores have large client databases to email the books.

Most trainers and shelters are extremely web-savvy with large client databases to email the books plus regular permission-based eNewsletters to promote the program.

In order to catalyze a long-overdue paradigm shift in puppy raising we need to reach a lot of people in the shortest time possible. Present day technology makes this very doable. If these two eBooks are emailed to a sufficient number of dog owners, not only will they have copies prior to acquiring another puppy but also, they will have copies on hand to email to family members, friends and neighbors should they decide to search for a new puppy. I very much hope that you will support this Puppy Raising Initiative so that it rapidly spreads nationwide and worldwide.