Preface Each year, 13 million households in the United States adopt a dog, often a puppy. They love dogs and, like you, finally make the decision to raise one and enjoy the special kind of companionship only a dog can bring. The next year, half of those households surrender their young canine charges to shelters and pounds, where most of them are put to sleep. Clearly, theres a gap between the wanting and the doing, a hole that needs to be filled. Thats why we wrote this bookto get you and your puppy off to the best start so that youll enjoy many happy years together, developing the kind of bond you always hoped for and that your puppy deserves. Our experience has shown us that the first twelve months of a dogs life is the time her owner(s) most need recommendations and guidance on health and deportment. Were in a good position to knowand to know what new dog owners need to hear. Each year, nearly twenty thousand people bring their dogs to see us at our hospital for small animals, providing us with one of the largest canine caseloads in the country, which in turn affords us an incredible opportunity to learn exactly the kind of advice puppy owners need and how best to communicate it. We have among us some of the worlds most celebrated veterinarians doing the communicating. Housed in various facilities on our 585-acre campus in Grafton, Massachusetts, is a team of patent-winning, premier veterinary practitioners and investigators who combine practical clinical programs with cutting-edge research to bring together the best in health care and behavior. Consider, for instance, that our nutrition faculty is often consulted by the pet industry in designing new diets for dogsin health, in the face of disease, during growth, and during maintenance. Our emergency critical care program is the largest residency training program in the country. And we use some of the most refined equipment anywhere for diagnostic imaging of puppies, including an MRI, a spiral CT scanner, quantitative EEG, ultrasound, and nuclear imaging technology. All of these advances allow us to understand as much as possible about the conditions we treat. We also practice preventive medicine so that painful, debilitating, and costly diseases can be avoided, or at least attenuated, down the line. But Tufts doesnt specialize only in expensive medical diagnostics and preventive medicine techniques. We have also identified the best choices for general health care maintenanceeverything from spaying and neutering to vaccinations, grooming, and flea and tick prevention. Then, too, humane care of small domestic animals is our priority. Tufts is one of the few institutions in the country that study human-animal relations (we even run a bereavement hot line for pet owners), so we know what works for the best people-dog relationships. And we have a behavior clinic thats second to none. Its approach is not hard-line or punishment- based. Rather, it is holistic, based on understanding, canine Excerpted from Puppy's First Steps: The Whole-Dog Approach to Raising a Happy, Healthy, Well-Behaved Puppy by Faculty Cummings School of Veterinary Medicine at Tufts All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.
