With Red River North Dog Obedience Club
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ed River North Dog Obedience Club has been working with animals in the community for over 20 years. This club is volunteer-led and licensed by the AKC (American Kennel Club) with a goal to help dogs of any breed be good fits for the community and good companions at home. With a progressive class system, dogs of all ages and types are always welcome no matter what level of training they’re at. Trainer Lavonne Marubbio has spent much of her lifetime working with dogs, and has heaps of advice when it comes to the importance of getting your pup enrolled in proper training. How early can I start my puppy in training classes?
“They can come in at 8 weeks old and we can take them up to 4 to 6 months. We find that with the toy breeds and other dogs that are extremely shy, you have to let them into Puppy Kindergarten up until about a year. We’ve got a progressive system where Puppy Kindergarten feeds into a class called Jump Start, which is a transitional class for the pups that are too
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young for the basic obedience class but they’re done with the puppy class. “Most of the time, 8 to 9 weeks is a good time to adopt a puppy. It’s also a good time to bond and change their allegiance from their littermates and their mother to a family. Eight weeks to 3 months old is a good time period. Even though they’re young and you know that you might not be able to train them with everything in the beginning, it’s important to get them used to being in different situations. You need to get them used to meeting different people and socializing with different dogs early on.”
What’s the most important training method for pet owners to take away from the classes? “You’ll find that what you do with a puppy may be very different than the way you’d start training with an adult dog.
The puppy class is very gentle–no prong collars, no harsh corrections and we use positive training methods. The positive methods are when you see the dog doing something you don’t want it to do, you try to distract it or redirect it to something that it should be doing. “Instead of saying ‘no’ to your dog all the time you say something different. If they’re biting you, let them know that it hurts and give them something else they can chew. Recognize that with puppies, biting and chewing drives us crazy the first six months but stops when they get their adult teeth. All of these problems are geared toward their developmental stage and we recognize those in each level of classes. “The more positive you are with reinforcement and introducing those things to the puppy, they’re less likely to become