The Happy Puppy Handbook: Your Definitive Guide to Puppy Care and Early Training

This a really good guide to owning your first puppy, and covers the before and after preparations. Although Ian Dunbar's 'Before and After Getting Your Puppy' book has some wonderful ideas and advice, overall I am not a fan of the book. It seems the aim is to stress quite how important socialisation, bite inhibition and training is (and of course these are extremely important), but I feel the book does this through fear. The Happy Puppy Handbook on the other hand is very positive and confidence-boosting. It tells you all the important bits, and gives you pretty clear instructions on how to raise a puppy, yet it also lets you know not to be discouraged if you get a few little things wrong. This book is fantastic in that it recommends positive methods that won't scare your puppy. It clearly spells out why punishments for accidents in the house, poor recall and resource guarding don't help, and can ultimately make problems much worse. One of the few negatives I can really think of with this book is that there isn't a lot of information on introducing a new puppy to other dogs in the household, and this is something I'd really like to learn more about. The book doesn't go into masses of detail about most things, so if you have already read and researched everything about bringing a puppy home you might not learn that much. But for a new puppy owner (or an owner who doesn't need to know *everything* about an issue) it's a fantastic starting point.

I found this book absolutely fantastic and highly recommend it. Unlike so many guides, it is devoid of waffle and gets straight to the point. It's easy to find answers to questions, but also to read from cover to cover - in fact, I couldn't put it down! I wish all guides were so clear. I also found it extremely informative and useful, with clear, objective explanations, and am following everything that Pippa Mattinson says. For example, as soon as my puppy was fully vaccinated, I let her off the lead when out and about (in parks, not near roads) and found she followed me just as Pippa described, and puppy now has very good recall. So I was surprised to find out that none of the other puppies at training class had ever been let off the lead - their owners were all scared their dog would run off. Had they read Happy Puppy, they would have found that off-lead time in the early months leads to better recall and on-lead behaviour later on because you have used their natural instinct to follow you to build the desired behaviour. If you are getting a puppy or know someone else who is getting one, I urge you to buy this book.

Bought this to supplement our 16 year old copy of Gwen Bailey's The Perfect Puppy. Just acquired a Labrador puppy so thought it was time to update and fine tune our puppy training skills and this is a good guide to modern behaviour and positive reward based training. I like that Pippa Mattinson explains why dogs do certain things and why certain ways of training work. She also has a very balanced and unjudgemental way of explaining the pros and cons of various contentious topics such as feeding and neutering. That was quite refereshing to read actually: we part raw feed our dogs and I'm tired of evangelical raw feeders who sneer at my apparently sitting on the fence and vets who almost jump down your throat at the idea that you might feed raw bones to your dog. I have my reasons for going half and half and since dogs (like humans) are very versatile in their tolerance of a wide variety of foods, I can't see how this is harmful and I dislike being pushed totally one way or another. Well done Pippa for allowing me to feel comfortable with my way without judgement. However, I think novices might like a bit more detail on certain commands, for example a step by step guide to shaping the sit, or lie down etc. In this instance we've found these to be very easy with this puppy, but a previous puppy was quite difficult to teach certain things, and to this day at 9 years old still doesn't lie down properly or promptly and he can't walk anywhere without pulling, depsite various harnesses and head collars. He's the only one of our 9 dogs over 35 years that we've had this persistent problem with, so we don't think it's us but we'd always be open to any new ideas, but sadly there were none that we haven't tried in this book. Having said this Pippa Mattinson runs several excellent websites for Labrador, Gundog and all dog owners that provide plenty of additional free advice on all aspects of dog ownership and training. These are mentioned in the book, so I'm afraid I'm going to encourage you to buy the book before going to her websites. In fact my main reason for paying for this book is because we've benefited from some of that information and I wanted to pay some money back this time.

Absolutely brilliant book. I bought this and read it as the first dog book mainly because I have read the website Pippa has about labradors and found her writing and exercises easy to follow , kind to the animal and realistic. This book did not disappoint. I read it before the puppy arrived and we followed most things to the letter and I'm not sure whether we have just been lucky but Hector is an absolute dream pup. Don't get me wrong he doesn't get it all from the first time but in this book give you and idea of how long things might take to become habits and so far so good. Easy and enjoyable to read both myself and my partner read the book and enjoyed it, and was a brilliant staightforward book covering all the basics, we have both had dogs before years ago but things and training have changed and things I hadn't thought of were helpfully included. I liked having this book to refer back to in the first months. I have since gone on to buy two other of pippas books and found the same.

Se lo recomiendo a todos aquellos que quieran estar bien informados y preparados antes de la llegada a casa de su cachorro. Un libro muy completo y que explica con mucho detalle cada paso de la educación del cachorro.

This book is a great source of information for new puppy owners. I have had dogs before so it did cover a lot of info that I was aware of but it did provide a nice and quick refresher on what to expect. There is some stuff that was irrelevant as I live in Australia and it was written in the UK but it has still provided some great things to think about, you will just need to research what is applicable in Australia. It’s easy to read, with no technical jargon.

Being a first time dog owner I wanted to be informed and prepared. This book fulfilled those goals and more. Using modern methods and behavioral science this book gave us the practical advice we needed to prepare for our puppy's arrival. It also helped us understand her development and use her natural behaviors to our advantage. I really liked the section about choosing what was important to you to help prioritize and focus on tangible goals. Mine was to have a well behaved dog I could take anywhere, that pretty much sums it up! We also wanted to give her what she needs for a happy, healthy life. The training advice has been great, we started right in and it has paid off. Overall this was the best of several books we purchased. It's well written, easy to understand and immediately made good sense to us. I highly recommend it.

This is a great book. We just got a new pup, and although we have had a few great dogs, thought we could use a refresher. This book not only served as a refresher, but introduced a few tweaks to improve some of the training methods. Get this book BEFORE you bring your new pup home, as there are great tips about preparing for it.

The book has excellent tips and instructions, and debunks many obsolete theories. We found it very useful.