Bringing home a new puppy is exciting, but it’s also incredibly overwhelming and exhausting, and bringing home a high-energy Gundog breed puppy is even harder!  

 

The biting can be more intense, everything is 100mph, and anything not bolted down is in their mouth.  

 

As a pro-active new puppy parent, you’re probably already drowning in conflicting advice from your own research and the free advice shared by friends, family, and Facebook groups!

​

You probably feel like you need to get the obedience training started and nailed ASAP, but when we focus our time and energy on obedience training, we are missing out the really important, life-changing stuff. 

 

A well-trained "sit" won’t help when your dog is guarding items, panicking when left alone, biting when you brush their ears, or reacting to every dog and person they see. 

 

When we focus on obedience over building life skills and emotional resilience, or we wait until they are fully vaccinated before starting to exposing them to the world, we risk raising a dog who struggles to navigate daily life. 

The most common training and behaviour struggles I work with later in a dog’s life typically come from missed or mishandled early learning and as the puppy gets older, it starts to become a problem.

Obedience skills can be taught at any age.  Building emotional resilience and real-life coping skills for the future happens now. 

Your puppy isn’t a blank slate, and they need a personalised and thoughtful approach to teach them how to navigate the world with confidence and composure.