Puppy Golden Retriever Training Groups & Rings

Although you feel capable of training and educating your puppy by yourself, I recommend you visit a well-known puppy training group. If the breeder who sold you your puppy offers puppy care, surely your dog will meet his litter brothers and sisters. They already know each other, they're all the same age and the same size; this way they play harmoniously. But in mixed groups it is different: there are puppies of all sizes and breeds. When putting these groups together it is important that the dogs don't distinguish themselves as far as their ages and sizes. The group leader has to evaluate each breed's distinctive way of playing, stepping in when necessary.
A good puppy play group is based on four columns:

• Playing together as a team has to be the main issue. When you pick up your puppy, you take him out of his family environment, and you deprive him of the opportunity to play with his brothers and sisters. Hard as you try, no human being can replace the games they play and the social interaction they have within their own species. Don't frighten if the games get a little violent. Puppies tend to shriek and scream in an alarming way without anything ever happening. During the games, the puppy practices everything he will need when he grows up: physical skill, strength, reflexes, and the training of the sensory organs.

• Confrontation with strangers is the second column of the training. For this, you need a place that offers a lot of distractions, with the possibility of playing with water, cloths or unknown objects that have been "casually" placed in the middle of the garden/park. Puppies that still haven't completed their vaccines plan should do these exercises in a closed area.

• In this puppy group you will, under direct supervision of experts, learn how to teach your puppy the basic orders, without pressure or stress, playing, with a lot of praises, but correctly. The relation between puppy and owner will also be stimulated by special exercises. Your puppy can learn to let you take a prey out of his snout, and to let you check his teeth, ears, paws, without losing his patience. All these are things that will help you in your daily interaction with your dog.

• Many first-time dog owners come to the courses looking dreary-eyed and very insecure because their home life with the puppy is very distant to what they had imagined. When they realize that the same things happen to other people, many problems dissipate by themselves; besides, if the group leader is competent, he will be able to evaluate your home problems easier.