Dog Star Daily declared last January to be “Shelter Dog Prevention Month.” This year, the Association of Pet Dog Trainers made it formal by naming January “National Train Your Dog Month.” The message is the same under either name: Please train your puppy, so your puppy doesn’t become yet another shelter dog.
All shelter dogs were once bright little puppies, eager to learn how to live with people. Yet far too many dogs are surrendered to shelters because their owners were unaware of how to prevent predictable puppy/adolescent behavior, temperament, and training problems.
Without appropriate education, unlucky pups are likely to be surrendered to shelters before their first birthdays. Today’s science-based dog trainers have all the answers, yet, sadly, few people seek their advice until problems develop.
We can only decrease euthanasia in public and private shelters by decreasing shelter populations. This can only occur when we Increase Shelter Output (adoptions) by refining behavior rehabilitation programs in shelters AND Decrease Shelter Input by teaching prospective and new puppy owners how to raise their pups to be charming and cherished companions. The latter option is quicker, easier, and cheaper.
To minimize the unnecessary deaths of countless dogs, all Bay Area doggy professionals must unite to proactively educate prospective puppy owners before they bring their puppies home. Breeders and owners must implement the training and husbandry advice offered by trainers. Breeders, veterinarians, trainers, and shelter personnel must all actively promote the importance of preventing predictable problems by teaching puppies good habits from the outset – because good habits are just as hard to break as bad habits. These efforts will reduce the size of shelter populations and make the job of re-homing the dogs who do wind up at shelters much easier.
Breeders are in the best position to effect meaningful change, because they produce and sell the majority of puppies. They must raise puppies according to Open Paw’s Minimal Mental Health Guidelines, so that the pups people purchase are well socialized, housetrained, and chew toy-trained, and have a rudimentary understanding of basic manners. Read these guidelines at: http://openpaw.org/about/minimum_health.html.
Veterinarians are in the enviable position of seeing every puppy on numerous occasions during his/her first few weeks at home. (Dog trainers and shelter workers would give their canine teeth for that opportunity.) Veterinarians must convince new puppy owners of the urgency of errorless housetraining, chew toy training, and teaching puppies to quietly and calmly enjoy spending time at home alone. Most importantly, veterinarians must urgently recommend the safe socialization and handling of puppies at home while they are under three months of age, and later in puppy classes.
Instead of having to rehabilitate existing behavior and temperament problems in young puppies, Trainers would have an easier time continuing socialization and handling exercises in class, ensuring that puppies develop reliable bite inhibition, troubleshooting incipient behavior problems, and teaching owners how to teach their pups off-leash manners.
Shelters should implement an Open Paw rehabilitative training program to make their shelter animals more adoptable.
Sheltering and re-homing dogs is a very expensive and time-consuming business. By my calculations, if you divide the annual budgets of the major municipal shelters, SPCAs, and Humane Societies in the Bay Area by the number of dogs re-homed, the cost comes to between $7K to $20K per dog ($2K to $5K per animal if you include cats). Certainly these organizations spend money performing many other functions within the community, but they exist primarily to shelter and re-home animals. Obviously, if shelter-input were reduced, shelters would have a larger budget to educate prospective and new puppy owners, the source of most future shelter dogs. This pro-active approach is logical, economical, and humane. Let’s hope our local dog community takes up this common cause in 2010.
The DogStarDaily.com multi-media puppy-raising guide provides owners with all they need to know, including free downloads of two of my books – BEFORE You Get Your Puppy and AFTER You Get Your Puppy. Please email these free books to anyone you know who is searching for a new puppy or has recently acquired one. The advice in the Dog Star Daily blog comes from 39 dog trainers and veterinarians from around the world.
Ian Dunbar is a veterinarian, canine behaviorist, and puppy-training pio-neer. He is the founder of SIRIUS® Puppy Training and Scientific Director for www.dogstardaily.com.
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