K9 Puppy Preschool and Dog Training - Whanganui

Very experienced teacher and I have had 3 dogs that have been very good dogs from the early training from Margarette.
Feb 8th, 2021

Sep 27th, 2019

After just one session of puppy preschool, my puppy is worse behaved. I wish we hadn't taken him. The instructor allowed him to mouth her hand, despite my obviously not wanting him to do that, and to snatch for food, which we had never previously seen him done. (She made the excuse that the treats she uses are just so tempting. A good instructor [I later looked this up on McCann Dogs] would tell you that you need to use lower value treats that still appeal to your puppy and build up to polite treat taking with higher value treats.) We had even been training him (with Pippa Mattinson's exercises) to sit patiently while we held a hand full of treats open in front of him. He's really struggled to do that today. I went in with a relatively polite puppy and came out with a crocodile. It is NOT okay for dogs to mouth humans. It is NOT okay for dogs to snatch food. She also ignored other problem behaviors in the other puppy attending, offering no advice to her owners. She was jumping up at people - no advice given on correcting that. She was whimpering when she first arrived and the owners were trying to comfort the puppy - the instructor did not take the time to explain that "comforting" your puppy with stroking and talking actually reinforces fear; you need to ignore the behaviour and show the puppy by your own confidence that there is nothing to fear. To say nothing of the brusque, discouraging manner in which instruction was given. I felt so sorry for the other family who were trying to do their best but kept being told that they were doing it wrong, to do this, to hurry up. Parents or children, the same disrespect was shown to all the human attendees. I highly recommend you look elsewhere for puppy instruction.
Apr 10th, 2022