Become a Puppy Parent!
One the best ways you can get involved is by joining our ever growing network of Puppy Parents who nurture and raise our soon to be service dogs during the early stages of their lives.
Puppy Parents provide a safe and loving home, take them to weekend training classes, maintain their diet and medical needs and provide them with an array of socialization experiences.
Dog Training and What It Entails
Becoming a puppy parent is no easy task, but it is without a doubt a rewarding one. Under your care, these puppies will grow to be extremely comforting and helpful service dogs to a veteran in need. Over the course of six months, you will teach the puppy a variety of skills, including obedience and socialization. Dogs are empathetic, loyal, and social creatures. They will take after your lead, so
How Do Dogs Learn?
Through association and reward! Humans also learn by association; when we meet people, we denote a feeling to the meeting—positive, negative, or neutral. It’s the same for dogs. If the puppy feels happy when performing a task, then he/she will perform it again!
They also learn by consequence, but negative consequences could lead to fear, so puppy parents should focus on using treats and other forms of positive reinforcement, like kind words and head pets.
What Will Be Taught
As a puppy parent, your job will be to teach the pup beginning skills that will serve as building blocks to more advanced activities! This will include: sit, stand, come, lay down, heel, how to stay level, speak, fetch, on leash, and off leash training. A more informative manual will be given to you to assist in properly teaching these tasks.
Proper socialization with other dogs and various environments will also be pertinent to the dogs development. Taking your puppy out to stimulating environments and allowing them to experience many different situations will allow the puppy to get more and more comfortable with anything that comes their way.
It may sound daunting and overwhelming, but the rewards outweigh the work. You are single-handedly training a dog who will be above and beyond a buddy to someone who really needs them. It’s worth it.
Things to Remember
Mistakes will happen. And that’s okay. If you ask your dog to sit, but the leash is too short, then he/she won’t be able to. Anticipate everything! The best teachers don’t measure their success by the rewards, but by the excitement the dog gets out of learning, their personal improvement, and their passion for learning.
Your dog daughter or son will learn a lot from you, as canines learn a lot from mirroring. Keeping your energy positive and firm will
And most of all, have fun! This puppy will go on to do great things, all because of your dedication and nurturing.