Puppy Pre-School
Puppy Pre-School at Dunsborough Vets!
We are very strong proponents of the benefits of your puppy attending puppy classes.
Puppies need to start these classes between 8 and 14 weeks of age.
Puppy classes are designed to provide you and your pup with a safe environment for controlled socialisation with novel situations and with other puppies of the same age. It is critical that this occurs in the narrow window of your pup’s development when they are biologically prepared to learn certain things.A small amount of experience at this time, can have far reaching effects on the pup’s adult behaviour.
Our puppy classes are run by a fully accredited and experienced behavioural dog trainer and are limited to a maximum of 6 pups, which ensures that your puppy is not overwhelmed and that the class can be properly monitored.
Whilst not a formal obedience class, attendance at puppy classes often serves to teach your pup basic obedience and serves as the perfect forum to discuss common problems that are being encountered by many pups and households such as toilet training, play- biting and jumping up.
We consider our puppy classes to be a “controlled environment” accepting only pups that have been recently examined by our veterinarians and well through their vaccine series: thus it is highly unlikely that your pup will encounter infectious disease from attending.
Puppy classes run for 5 consecutive weeks and are held outside normal hospital hours at a time that is convenient to the attendees.
Unfortunately due to the COVID pandemic we have had to limit the classes to 1 person per puppy.
Behavioural Advice & Training
Behavioural problems can be very common and through the advice of our veterinarians and the work of Tessa Gaskell we can often make a big difference to the quality of life of these pets. Tessa is a Delta Society qualified behavioural trainer and a CASI certified non-veterinary behavioural consultant.
Behavioural problems such as separation distress, storm phobia’s, barking and destructive behaviour are all too common and by assisting owners in re-training and enriching their pets lives we often make both owners and their animals daily lives happier.