The founder of No Dog Left Behind Training and Behaviour Consulting in Moose Jaw, Snow works with dogs of all ages, helping them become more compatible with their humans regardless of whatever their situation may be.
A lot of those issues that need solving have a common theme — with just a bit more focus and training in the critter’s earliest formative years, many, many future problems could be prevented.
That’s where Snow’s new book A Human's Guide to Surviving Puppyhood -— currently available for sale on Amazon — comes into play.
“Basically, I consistently saw clients coming to me with dogs who were anywhere from seven months to a year or older with problem behaviours and a lot of those things could have been addressed, remedied or entirely prevented if these clients knew how to focus on certain things in puppyhood.,” Snow explained.
“So what I wanted to do was provide a resource to ultimately prevent a lot of problem behaviours and issues for clients and their dogs by providing a resource they could follow step by step through their puppy raising journey to ensure they were focussing on the right things at the right time.”
Snow points out that a major issue with training dogs, and especially puppies, is simply communication. Or, more specifically, miscommunication when the puppy is trying figure out what the giant biped he or she loves so much wants them to do.
“So I really try to instill some mindsets and worldviews to help people be clearer to their animals, and by default the dogs listen better,” Snow said. “Because they don’t speak English, sometimes it’s confusing to them what we actually want as people. So a big part of the focus was to increase the human’s ability to communicate more clearly.”
A Human’s Guide rolls through a host of issues that might crop up when raising their new ball of fluff. Nipping, house-soiling, chewing everything, crate training are some of the main focusses, but a major emphasis is placed on adequate socialization with both people and other dogs.
“Most people will miss some steps, and they don’t know the intricacies of what to do when,” Snow explained. “I’ve known people who have raised dogs their entire life, and they aren’t aware of critical periods of socialization… If you don’t know your dog needs to meet 100 people between ages eight to 12 weeks, you aren’t going to focus on that. You’re going to do what you think is adequate, which might be five people a week. Then all of a sudden you don’t realize it, but you’ve only socialized your dog 20 per cent of what it should have been.”
That can lead to issues down the road that can be cured through training at a place like No Dog Left Behind, but as Snow says, “it’s a lot heavier lifting, for sure. You don’t know how good of a job you did until it’s too difficult to remedy.”
A Human's Guide to Surviving Puppyhood already has a few hundred copies in circulation around Moose Jaw, and was posted to Amazon last week with both digital and paper copies. Plans are also in the works to add an Audible copy in the next couple weeks.
For more information on Snow and No Dog Left Behind, you can click right here.
