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Combining two popular titles in one value-priced edition, Before and After Getting Your Puppy is a simple, practical guide for anyone bringing a new puppy into the home. In clear steps, with helpful photos and easy-to-follow training deadlines, Dr. Ian Dunbar, who pioneered puppy classes and a loving style of dog training in the 1970s, presents a structured yet playful and humorous plan for raising a wonderful dog. The guide is based on six developmental deadlines: completing owner education and preparation, assessing a puppy's prior socialization and education, teaching errorless house-training and chewtoy-training, completing a socialization program of meeting strange dogs and people, learning bite inhibition, and continuing a program of ongoing training. In the first half of the book, Dr. Dunbar focuses on what the owner needs to know to select a great puppy. In the second half, he presents the crucial lessons the puppy must be taught during its impressionable early development - using a kind, positive approach that, over time, has been proven the most effective.
Customer Review: Well worth the effort to Read
One of the better books I've read on training. Most of the ideas presented are very good, although the average person will have a difficult time fully adhering to some of his suggestions. There's a little too much "My approach will work every time." My experience is that dogs are a little like people in that they have their own personality, and what works with one will not necessarily work with another. These are really small "complaints" and most of the book provides very practical and good approaches to training your dog.
Customer Review: Worth reading but there's a but.
I'm usually not that motivated to write a review but in this case I am. I'm glad I read the book however it's about 200 pages and organized and indexed very poorly. It is also extremely wordy and repetitive and found at least one spelling error. It can be condsensed into a 46 page bullet chart! The advice is good but a lot of it way over the top and it gives you the sense that if you don't follow the advice completely your puppy will be unmanageable inevitably wind up in a shelter where no one will want to adopt it. And frankly some of the advice is really overdoing it. For example, having the puppy parties and making all your guests wash their hands and take off their shoes prior to working with the puppy. While you really decrease your chances of the dog becoming ill that way, it really harps on the need to do it when it could spend more pages addressing the issue of what to do when the puppy doesn't want the chewtoys. It also tells you to avoid breeders who don't teach the puppy basic commands and sorry to say that most breeders don't do this. Its just not a realistic expectation especially if its a rare breed or there was a waiting list which was the case for my dog. It doesn't tell you what to do in many common scenarios such as the puppy not eating right and it doesn't discuss whining and crying through the night and that was the information that I found myself needing the most and it wasn't in the book. I also found that it takes time to get the puppy to want to play with chew toys. Mine was not immediately drawn to them and still doesn't have much interest in them apparently. And again, it does not say what to do in that instance. When I read that the goal is to have zero accidents I was excited and thought I could do it. But it's really really difficult to get through with zero accidents. Heck my puppy has even gone in his crate twice and came back to find him laying in his mess. Again no backup plan. I take the puppy out 12-15 times a day but that is unrealistic for most people. And experienced trainers I have talked to advise against the long term confinement potty area because you really dont want the pup going in the house at all and it prolongs the houstraining big time. Not to mention the smell takes hours to get aired out!!! The book also says to stuff kibble into the chewtoys thus giving the puppy access to food all day. This is a really bad idea in my opinion and everyone else I have talked to because it makes housetraining more difficult and sets the puppy up for not eating at appropriate times.


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