How to Raise the Perfect Dog by César Millán

relationships. I tend to have a somewhat obsessive personality anyway, and I channeled this into Eliza. After a month or so, Johanna requested we find something else to talk about besides the dog.”
    As the Komiveses learned, puppies require commitment, focus, and energy. If you are not prepared to care for a dog for the rest of its life, then please don’t fall for an adorable face and bring a puppy home on a whim. But the good news is, raising your dog from puppyhood is your best chance at creating the kind of intimate human-dog bond that we all dream about. Puppies are born without issues, and if they are raised by a good canine mother for the first eight weeks of their lives, they usually come to you unscathed by the quirks and neuroses that bother many an adult dog. Puppies come with a built-in leash attached, because they are programmed to follow . They also naturally seek stability and balance, and they are hungry to learn and absorb the rules, boundaries, and limitations of your family pack. Putting the right time and dedication into the first eight months of your puppy’s life offers you an incredible opportunity to nurture and influence the dog of your dreams—your faithful companion for a lifetime.
    WHERE TO FIND A PUPPY
    “How much is that doggie in the window?”
    Actually, the cost of that puppy—to animal welfare and to society—is far higher than simply the dollar amount on the price tag.
    There are three legitimate ways to go about adopting a puppy—from a shelter, from a breeder, or from a rescue organization. But many a softhearted dog lover has been lured by the winsome puppies in the windows and cages of the chain and independent pet stores that dot the streets of American cities and the aisles of our sprawling shopping malls. Most well-meaning animal lovers who purchase a dog from a pet shop or over the Internet or from a classified ad are unaware that those same puppies may be among the hundreds of thousands in America having been raised in horrendous, unsanitary, inhumane conditions in factory-like atmospheres known as puppy mills.
    “I’ve been inside a lot of puppy mills, from one end of the country to the other,” says my friend Chris DeRose, founder of Last Chance for Animals, a nonprofit activist group that works as a kind of “animal FBI,” gathering prosecutable evidence of systemic animal cruelty through detective work, whistle-blower information, and undercover operations. “And the one thing I can tell you is, puppy mills are ugly.” In most puppy mills, dogs live and die in their own excrement. Because they spend their early lives trapped inside wire cages, sometimes their feet get caught, and they lose paws and limbs to injuries and infections that are never treated. There is no regular veterinary care, and the dogs aren’t tested for genetic health problems, so chronic eye, ear, and digestive tract infections are common. Many puppy mills that exist in areas with extreme temperatures have no heating or air-conditioning, so the dogs routinely die from overexposure to heat or cold. The worst sufferers in puppy mills are the breeding pairs, the mothers in particular. They are forced to produce litter after litter, until they are physically used up. Then they are disposed of—often with unimaginable violence and cruelty.
    What’s often ignored in the puppy mill discussion is the significant role that a puppy mill background plays in the growing epidemic of serious behavior problems we see in America’s dogs. I’ve been called in to help dozens of dogs whose troubling behaviors I can pretty accurately trace back to their having been born under these oppressive conditions. That’s because dogs raised in puppy mills don’t have a natural style of life during the first weeks and months that are most crucial to their normal physical and mental development. They can’t learn how to be dogs, because their mothers don’t know how to be dogs. Recently, Chris DeRose took me inside