Remember, every time you push too far and too fast, you are undoing your previous work. Be the tortoise!
Why did I get this book?
Amazon made me. Plain and simple. Okay, the actual story was that I was looking for another book, which I’ve blissfully forgotten the title of and never got around to buying when Amazon was kind enough to pop this title onto my screen. I really want to say that this is usually not how I pick my books, but truth to be told, I got distracted by this new shiny and popped it in the basket, and headed off to checkout. It happens a lot. But honestly, husbandry is super-important, and by the time I selected my shipping address, I was extremely pumped about finding this book.
What does this book do?
What it says on the can. And a little more. It absolutely takes you through 7 steps to achieve great results, but it also comes with a basket of case studies, from real people, with real dogs, and real struggles. In short, it offers the reader a mirror to reflect themselves in and that is always a good thing. There’s not so much noise around the seven steps, in fact, only 45 pages of the book’s 135 pages are introductory stuff and thoughts, including the case reviews.
Each step comes with a neat little checklist at the end, to help ensure you’re taking the steps in the right order, and it does a wonderful job at stressing how slow and steady win all the races. Both with husbandry and any other kind of training. There are plenty of pictures to help the reader understand the steps and at the end of each chapter, I was pumped to get going, but like the good little wannabe chef that I am, I sat down and finished reading the entire recipe. A decision that was worth it, to be honest. Because when you reach step 5, you’re in for a little chuckle if you took the steps in order. If you didn’t, slightly red ears might ensue, because the chapter starts right out with calling those out who tried to skip steps. This is truly one of the things I came to love about this book. That it stresses the importance of splitting, starting from the bottom and working your you up. There are no shortcuts in dog training. Or husbandry, for that matter. This book should be a household item in dog homes. Especially for the super neat section on muzzle training that’s in it. And it even tastes great, says Nikuya.
What does this book not do?
Well, this is actually a really good question this time. I don’t feel like I’m missing anything much here, considering the subject of the book. If I really had to get nit-picky about it, colour photos would have been super nice. But I’m also fairly aware of how colour print affects the printing price. I also could probably have lived without the short testimonials that dot each chapter, but those are extremely easy to skip, so it’s no big deal.
Where do I get this book?
Well, you can always see if Amazon gets pushy about your searches, and I think it’s one of the main sellers of this book because I did not manage to sniff it out locally anywhere. For what it’s worth, even the author’s own website links back to Amazon so… it will set you back approx $15+ shipping and once you’ve read it, it will likely cost you vast amounts of time in training, but you know what? That’ll be worth it.