Puppy School Presented by
Melbourne Dog Clinic is proud to partner with the team at Thrive Canine to bring you Puppy School. Puppy classes will run within our very own Fear Free Clinic where you and your puppy will be taught by the amazing instructors from Thrive Canine Force Free Training.
What is Force Free Training?
In line with our clinic’s Fear Free ethos, Thrive Canine does not use force, pain, discomfort, fear, stress or intimidation when training animals. This training methodology, known as ‘force free’ or ‘positive reinforcement’, is the most humane approach to animal training and prioritises your puppy’s well-being and your relationship with them.
In our classes, puppies will never be verbally reprimanded, growled at, yanked, or physically manipulated. Instead, you will learn to reward behaviour which you want to see more frequently and understand how to teach your puppy to perform alternative behaviours to those which you consider undesirable.
Physical and verbal corrections, as well as other intimidating techniques, are not necessary to train an animal, and often have adverse consequences (such as damaging the animal-human bond, and increasing aggressive responses). As force free methods address the cause of unwanted behaviour and take the animal’s needs into consideration, they also result in longer-lasting behaviour change.
Positive Learned Effects From The Socialisation Period
The puppy ‘socialisation period’ (generally to be considered from 8 to 16 weeks) is an incredibly important time in life for your puppy. This is the time period where they develop confidence and resilience and learn to bond with you so they have healthier coping mechanisms for the rest of their life. Effectively, they learn to ‘bounce back’ quicker with more confidence when they encounter a stressful situation. As dogs have to cope with living in ‘our world’ they value information more than anything so being able to bond and effectively communicate with your dog is of vital importance to their overall longterm wellbeing.
Negative Learned Effects From The Socialisation Period
The ‘socialisation period’ is also a time period when they can develop anxiety and learn fear as a response to a stressful situation. In turn, this can teach your puppy to respond less than ideally to stressful situations in the future. The result of this can be a dog with low confidence and low resilience, which can develop into aggression and other behavioural issues as they attempt to cope with stress. The effects of this are long-lasting and often remain with your dog for the rest of their life. Sadly, this can be very difficult to unteach.
What You Learn In Puppy School
Puppy classes run for five weeks (one online and four in person). Some of the things you and your pup will learn are:
- the importance of force free training
- how to change unwanted behaviours
- preventing common behaviour issues such as reactivity and resource guarding
- basic cues like name recognition, sit, drop, look, come
- conditioning a marker
- loose leash walking
- body language basics
All puppies receive a Puppy Pack valued at over $80.
We also run Senior Puppy School for pups aged between 16 weeks and 6 months of age. Please use the form below to inquire.
To find out more about Thrive Canine you can click their logo above to be taken to their website.
See below for Puppy School pricing.
Upcoming Puppy School Dates
(online class is the week before and takes approximately one hour complete)
Saturday 9th Nov 12.15
Saturday 30th November 1.15pm (please note this time reverts back to 12.15pm after Week One)
Monday 11th Nov 6.15
Saturday 4th Jan 12.15
Monday 6th Jan 6.15pm