Feeling Outnumbered? How to Manage and Enjoy Your Multi-dog Householdby Patrica McConnel and Karen London
This 50-page booklet is a quick how-to guide for anybody having difficulties with their multi-dog household. It explains how to train group commands so you can get control over the situation: when eating, playing, greeting, waiting and walking.
The social skills of all the members are also put under the loop, and how you can help your dogs to ensure that interaction is done on a polite manner. The booklet also provides a good checklist with signs that would indicate looming conclifts between your dogs. Preventing them is better then curing them.
It provides enough depth to tackle the basics and gives tips on further reading if you would need that. Some basic knowledge on how to train an individual dog is more or less required. The booklet mainly adds the group dimension to your existing toolbox.
I jump back and forth between a four-dog household and an outside-never-to-be-inside dog household.
ReplyDeleteMy trainer/behaviorist always insists to us that we are extremely lucky, having four dogs who get along well together - and they range from 7 pounds to more than 90, which means one wrong step WILL (not can, but will) mean a dead dog.
In fact, ours also play nicely with the bunnies.
We did have to do a lot of training to get to that point - such as teaching the big doggies that they had to play extra gently with the teeny guy. They do well, but as I said, we're just lucky. Most people in a situation like this always have to resort to management.
I also now have to order this book. Ah! LoL.
You find so many good ones! I can't possibly buy them all. (That's a total lie; I can, and I will....)