LIFE SKILLS

Having a well-behaved dog has two requirements: a happy dog, and a dog who knows what to do. Our life skills programming focuses on the latter. While other parts of our program focus mainly on your dog’s emotional state, as we know that emotions drive behaviour, we also want to make sure that our puppies know how to be polite and sociable in every context.

When it comes to training skills, we think that doing a couple things really well everywhere they go is better than doing many, many things less well. That’s why we make recall, settle training, and leash manners our main priority. We choose to focus on recall as a foundational skill because we think that puppies who are reliable off-leash not only make better companions, but also have better and more fulfilling lives. We focus on settle training because we know that sometimes the best thing for our dogs to do is not much at all. And we focus on leash manners because leash walks will be a part of daily life for most dogs for their whole lives- it’s worth putting the effort in now!

Because our puppies are so impressionable, we can get a lot more done than just those three! Once a puppy has a solid start on our trinity of polite behaviour, we will work on other things like: name recognition, sit to request attention, crate training, drop it, and of course we’re always working on house training. As our puppies grow older, we are able to do more and more of this additional training and many leave the program with a repertoire of cute tricks as well as a robust set of manners.