Jennifer Tate - How to Train Your Dog: The complete guide to raising a confident and happy dog, from puppy to adult

A HELPFUL AND COMPREHENSIVE GUIDE TO RAISING AND TRAINING DOGS OF ANY AGE, FROM TWO OF AUSTRALIAS LEADING ANIMAL BEHAVIOURISTS.

Jen and Ryan Tate are highly skilled animal trainers with years of experience helping dog owners to raise happy and confident pets.

This informative book distils all their advice so you can feel prepared, stay in control and enjoy a great relationship with your new dog. It includes:

• Choosing the right breed for you and your lifestyle
• Preparing your home and the first 48 hours with your pup
• House training and basic training
• Socialisation and confidence-building
• Play, exercise, tricks and rewards
• Resolving common behavioural issues such as barking, digging and chewing
• Ongoing learning and fun for teenage and adult dogs

Clearly written and well organised, and with evidence-based training techniques, this is the perfect handbook for creating a stress-free and enjoyable bond with your puppy or dog.

Why Train Your Dog?

Dogs are incredible companions: they have a sense of humour; they live in the moment; they show strength, courage, devotion and unconditional love.

Right now, there are more dogs in homes than there have ever been at any point in history. Access to a variety of different breeds and crossbreeds is incredibly easy, with almost any puppy purchase possible at the click of a button.

In 2020, when most of the world became restricted to their homes for a period of time due to the lockdown laws surrounding COVID-19, many people had the same idea: to adopt or welcome a dog into their lives. Pounds and rescue centres for the first time emptied out and breeders closed their books due to the overwhelming demand for puppies. But the fact that more people are living in smaller homes in denser, busier suburbs creates new challenges that can make living with a dog more complex than it once was.

Training your dog is the best way you can give back to these magnificent creatures.

When it comes to understanding and influencing dogs behaviour, its easy to underestimate the fact that most breeds have behind them hundreds of years of genetics driving their desire to perform a specific task, whether thats to herd sheep, fight lions, bait bulls, catch rats, guard land, pull sleds or warm the laps of royalty. We dont believe that any one dog breed is better than another, but the way you choose to raise and live with dogs of different breeds certainly needs to be tailored to them as individuals.

With this book, we hope to impart our knowledge and help you fully understand, appreciate and bond with your dog and ensure that dog lives his best life.

We believe that training your dog is too important to be serious. For your sake, and your dogs, your training journey needs to be fun. Like good schoolteachers, dog trainers need to come up with fresh and exciting ways to communicate the syllabus. As your teachers for the next thirteen chapters, we encourage you, at the very core of everything you do, to have fun with your dog!

Who We Are and What We Do

We are a couple with a long-standing shared passion for animals. Ryan began his career at twelve years old, raising and training parrots for pet shops, and Jens first job at age fourteen was in a vet clinic where, despite her short stature, she found a love for large and powerful dog breeds, bonding closely with an abandoned Rottweiler called Darcy. Between us weve got qualifications in dog training, zookeeping, marine science and more.

We met while working at the famous Taronga Zoo in Sydney. Ryan was the supervisor of the marine mammal department presenting seal shows, training animals, supervising the keepers and overseeing marine science research. Jen worked as a keeper with a variety of different animals including ungulates (hooved animals like giraffes and zebras), carnivores (bears and big cats) and Australian native fauna. Alongside our zoo jobs, we ran our own business, training dogs.

In 2015, the dog training component of our business exploded due to a couple of well-timed television appearances, a new world record with our dog Ari, and some wonderful opportunities and mentorship from our dear friends, trainers Vicki and Steve Austin. So we dialled back our zoo work and invested our focus in the world of dog training.

Today, we run a business called TATE Animal Training Enterprises (you may notice that the letters of our business spell our surname, TATE brilliant, we know). Its become quite a diverse company over time, but in a nutshell, it consists of:

• pet dog classes at a variety of locations in Sydney and the Mid North Coast
• training and handling detection dogs (for conservation and biosecurity)
• an online animal training school, the TATE Online Training Hub
• consulting to a variety of zoos, aquariums and fauna parks around Australia
• training animals for film, television and live presentations
• the Cynophobia Clinic (for humans with a fear of dogs) with psychologist Anthony Berrick, where our dogs help people overcome their phobia.

Our careers have already given us many memorable highlights (and we hope there are many more to come), including:

• working in Antarctica
• training animals as small as zebra finches and as large as leopard seals, and some that people rarely see, such as squirrel gliders and sharks
• working with our dogs in pristine natural environments such as Kosciuszko National Park, Lord Howe Island and the highlands of Tasmania
• training our dogs to help us find some of the rarest animals and plants on earth.

At home in Port Macquarie, our family of humans consists of three children: Lennox (aged six), Evelyn and Wren (one-year-old twins). Since becoming parents, we often discuss the similarities between raising both kids and dogs. Our goal as parents is to help our kids grow into independent individuals who feel confident and comfortable in social situations, teach them real life skills and resilience towards the unexpected twists and turns in life, and provide them with plenty of outlets and hobbies to allow them to work out what they enjoy. Its much the same with raising dogs.

Of course, when any family with children brings home a new puppy or dog, its exciting and pretty chaotic, and our house is no different. Over the past six years, weve integrated many dogs into our family life. There is nothing more beautiful than watching our son play fetch with Spaniel puppies or our girls babble and coo at the presence of one of our mature dogs. We have some of the most energetic dogs in the country, yet they bring a sense of warmth and entertainment into our household that wouldnt otherwise exist.

So, on to our dogs. They are not only family but the backbone of the business and the best brand ambassadors we could hope for: diverse in personality and skill set, happy and impeccably trained.

• Taylor : A working line English Springer Spaniel who gained worldwide attention after her work during the 201920 Australian bushfires, searching for injured or displaced wildlife. She works full-time as a conservation detection dog predominantly in search of Australias most iconic species, the koala. Still, to this day, she was without a doubt the naughtiest puppy we have ever raised. Now she is our hardest working dog wild, fearless and driven.