Customer Reviews

There's A Baby in the House: Preparing your Dog for the Arrival of your Child

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I bought this book hoping that I would love it and get lots of practical advice, but honestly I was disappointed. My husband and I have two beautiful beagles, who have been our children for about 18 months now. We are working on conceiving and thought that we should get our dogs prepared for the baby. To begin with my dogs don't really have any major behavior problems. They have no separation anxiety, sleep the whole night through, play well with my nephews, and are completely housebroken. Some of the advice in this book just seems plain mean.

The author recommends that you show your dog control by fixing up his bowl of dog food and making a big production of it. Then place the bowl on the counter top just out of the reach of your dog while you sit at the table and eat your dinner. I don't understand the point of this, other than to confuse my dogs. My dogs know when I'm going to feed them because I always feed them at the same time of day and ask them "Do you want some food?". Why would I want to change this practice when they are already trained to eat at a certain time?

Another bit of advice was to not let the dog out of the front door in front of you. The author suggests slamming the door in front of the dog's face before he can exit. My husband tried this one with our male dog first. Yes, the dog was confused like the author suggested, but did not react the way that the book said that he would. Instead he ran away from the door and hopped up on my lap and looked at me as if to say, "Daddy is being mean to me".

Yes, my dogs have some behaviors that are supposedly bad such as jumping up on people when they get really excited and charging out of the front when they have their leashes on, but somehow I don't think that all of the advice has to be followed in order to have obedient dogs. I don't feel the need to break my dogs in order to make them behave. We already use the water squirt bottle in order to get them to quit "bad" behaviors and reward them with treats for "good" behaviors.

The book presents the retraining of your dog as a 12-step program. I will use the steps that specifically pertain to the issues that I would like to address with my dogs, however, I will not be using all 12 steps. I suggest skimming this book at the bookstore before you buy it to see if it is worth it to you. I wish I knew that I would disagree with some of the methods before I got the book.