Early Puppy Education
One area of Bonnie’s research involved puppies, paralleling her Master’s work in Early Childhood Education. Her staff and students began training pups earlier and earlier peaking at 3-3.5 weeks of age. Her research found that this early learning not only teaches a pup how to learn but that it makes lasting behavioral impressions in the mind of the adult dog. One pup, taught to turn on the light at seven weeks, then given no exposure to this task for six months, upon request immediately turned on the light at eight months. A similar study, a two-year period with no intervening practice, resulted in the same response. Early puppy training is now an integral part of all Institute dog training classes.
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Famous quotes containing the words early, puppy and/or education:
“Many a woman shudders ... at the terrible eclipse of those intellectual powers which in early life seemed prophetic of usefulness and happiness, hence the army of martyrs among our married and unmarried women who, not having cultivated a taste for science, art or literature, form a corps of nervous patients who make fortunes for agreeable physicians ...”
—Sarah M. Grimke (1792–1873)
“Why does not the kitten betray some of the attributes common to the adult puss? A puppy is but a dog, plus high spirits, and minus common sense. We never hear our friends say they love puppies, but cannot bear dogs. A kitten is a thing apart; and many people who lack the discriminating enthusiasm for cats, who regard these beautiful beasts with aversion and mistrust, are won over easily, and cajoled out of their prejudices, by the deceitful wiles of kittenhood.”
—Agnes Repplier (1858–1950)
“There comes a time in every man’s education when he arrives at the conviction that envy is ignorance; that imitation is suicide; that he must take himself for better for worse as his portion; that though the wide universe is full of good, no kernel of nourishing corn can come to him but through his toil bestowed on that plot of ground which is given him to till.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)