Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #48412 in Books
• Published on: 1995-03-13
• Original language: English
• Binding: Paperback
• 192 pages

Synopsis
Aims to teach owners to bring up a puppy to be well-behaved, friendly and happy. The book deals exclusively with raising a puppy and promotes good, responsible ownership aiming to prevent problems in adult dogs.

From the Back Cover
The Perfect Puppy is for puppy owners, or would-be owners, who want to know how to bring their puppy up to be a happy, well-behaved and friendly adult dog. Anti-social behaviour in dogs is often blamed on owners, but many are not irresponsible or uncaring, they simply have insufficient knowledge. This book provides that knowledge.

Containing the most up-to-date bahavioural information, the emphasis of this fascinating book is on prevention rather than cure. Follow Gwen Bailey's advice and you should have no trouble with problems such as chewed shoes, pulling on the lead and aggression when your dog is fully grown.

Full-colour photographs illustrate subjects such as socialisation, house-training, preventing biting and aggression, training and many more.

About the Author
Gwen Bailey is the Blue Cross Animal Welfare Society's Animal Behaviourist and a member of the Association of Pet Behaviour Counsellors.

Customer Reviews

Great book for a first time dog owner
I bought this book a few weeks before we picked up our springer puppy because I had never owned a dog before and wanted to make sure I did everything right from the start.

This book was a great help, and helped me to understand some simple, yet effective, dog psychology (such as who walks through a door first, when you should feed them etc).

The book is easy to read and helped to give me some confidence when we first got our puppy. I've since passed it on to friends who have also found it useful.

Our dog is now 3 years old, and he's pretty well behaved (particularly for a Springer!), and I would put some of this down to this book as it was a great place to start.

This book has helped to keep me sane!
We got our puppy 4 weeks ago. Without this book, I would probably have gone crazy. With this book, we have managed to housetrain our puppy in around 3 weeks.
Some really good advice from the book:
1) get a puppy playpen for your puppy. This means that you can keep the puppy somewhere safe so that you don't need to watch it 100% of the time for 16 hours of the day. Otherwise, your puppy will wander all over your house and wee and poo everywhere. Having a puppy pen (NOT a crate) allows you to have a bit more control but still allow your puppy a safe area to play and sleep.
2) the book has a suggested routine for your dog. As this is our first puppy, we literally would not have known when to feed it and when to take it out to meet people and when to let it rest. So the routine was really useful in the first week. After the first week, we established our own routine - but in that first week, it gave us a valuable structure for how to look after our puppy and keep it safe and happy.
There's loads of great advice in this book and we've started teaching our puppy how to sit on command. And we have taught our puppy how to wee and poo in the garden and outside when it goes for walks now - all in just a few weeks thanks to this brilliant book!

The only puppy guide you'll ever need
We've owned four dogs over the last 25 years but it's nearly 11 years since we last had a puppy and we'd forgotten just how much work they need. Our old guides had been passed out to friends and family but the breeder of our new pup recommended Gwen Bailey's book as a refresher and it really does have everything you need to know in one book, from early socialisation to the first steps in obedience training.
Whether you are getting your first puppy or like us are out of practice, reading this book before you take your new puppy home will prepare you for what you need to do and give a great source of reference throughout the all important first year of its development.