Welcoming Your Puppy from Planet Dog: How to Bridge the Culture Gap, Go Beyond Training, and Raise Your Best Friend

Written in a fresh, warm voice loaded with empathy, Welcoming Your Puppy from Planet Dog lights the path to a relaxed, happy interspecies household

＂I truly LOVE this book. If I were fostering, breeding, or getting a new puppy, I’d read it twice, and still keep it within reach every day.＂
-- Dr. Patricia McConnell, applied animal behaviorist, speaker, and author of The Other End of the Leash and The Puppy Primer

After a decade of guiding people who’ve just added a puppy to the family, dog trainer Kathy Callahan has learned a fundamental truth: at some point every one of them feels overwhelmed. When they seek out expertise, they’re flooded with impossibly detailed advice, conflicting opinions, and a surprising number of techniques that seem unkind.

In contrast, Callahan reassures owners that success flows not from nailing an intimidating list of disciplinary tactics, but from adopting a mindset of ＂trusted guide＂ rather than ＂master.＂ The key to great training is recognizing that we have essentially kidnapped these puppies from their own vastly different culture. Using an easy-to-grasp ＂Planet Dog / Planet Human＂ concept, Callahan dives into the puppy essentials, including:

- how to prepare your house (and yourself) for puppyhood
- potty training, chewing, jumping, and other challenges
- how to train with fun, not fear
- why it might seem your puppy ＂just doesn’t listen＂
- navigating puppyhood with young kids, cats, and/or other dogs
- what to do if there’s household disagreement on things like whether dogs belong on furniture

In fun-to-read chapters filled with empathy for both the beleaguered humans and their confused puppies, Welcoming Your Puppy from Planet Dog paves the way for a rewarding friendship between a relaxed, well-prepared human and a canine family member who’s happily at ease in our world.

Kathy Callahan (cpdt-ka, fdm) is an experienced certified professional dog trainer. Her family has fostered more than 200 at-risk puppies, and her first book with New World Library, 101 Rescue Puppies, features those heartwarming stories. Callahan writes monthly on training and behavior for Whole Dog Journal, cohosts the training podcast Pick of the Litter, and occasionally writes on dogs for her local newspaper, the Zebra. With an early background in PR and publishing, she later pursued her love for dogs, first delving into therapy teamwork with her own dogs in schools and then finding her sweet spot fostering pregnant rescue dogs. Eventually she founded PupStart, a puppyhood coaching, socialization, and training business. She resides in Alexandria, Virginia, with her husband, three amazing foster-fail dogs, a fantastic foster-fail cat, and a revolving roster of foster dogs. Their two grown daughters delight them by being back at home quite often, possibly due to the lure of fur.

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