Raising a Puppy in a One-Dog Household
October 16, 2009 by Paris and John
Filed under Puppies, Tips
In his new book, How to Raise the Perfect Dog, as well as on the companion episode on National Geographic Channel’s “Dog Whisperer,” Cesar Millan talks about the many ways in which his longtime pit bull, Daddy, helped instruct his new puppies. But what if you only have one puppy–and no adult dog–in your household? What can you do to help your puppy grow into a well-adjusted dog? We’ve got some great tips here from Cesar Millan from last week’s phone interview:
It’s very important that you get to know your neighbors, you know, and get to see which dogs are in your neighborhood are balanced. A puppy who goes into a puppy training or puppy class around other puppies, they are not going to learn anything that is going to be beneficial for the future, except to chew on each other and peeing and doing cute stuff. It’s an older dog who teaches the puppy the manners of a dog.
So it’s very important that, even though you have only one dog, that you go and ask neighbors and related with neighbors. Again, the dog is a social species. It actually triggers that side of the human. My dog relates with the older dog. Of course, you have to supervise and observe that the dog is well behaved, but I think …once we use imagination and creativity and work with what we have–our environment, our neighbors–we can actually help our dog to become well-balanced with what is in his environment.
It’s very important that we join that person with the dog–with our puppy–in the walks. Puppy class, most of the time, is just in one place and they don’t go anywhere.
Puppies, they walk, they explore, and then they stop and they say, “How do I react to this?” but when they are in front of an older dog, the older dog says, “This is how we respond to this.” The older dog is not going to say, “Don’t worry about it, it’s just a tree.” A human is going to go, “Oh my gosh, he’s afraid of the fire hydrant” and is going to give affection.
There are a lot of things we can use in our environment and that’s my goal–for humans to go back and work with what he has and connect himself to the instinctual side of it, and for us not to nurture instability.
or via
