As we all know, animal behavior has become a very important aspect of pet care throughout the world, but especially here in the U.S. One of the biggest reasons animals are being surrendered every day to humane societies, rescue organizations, or being left alone to fend for themselves out on the streets, is behavioral problems. These problems could range from the puppy who hasn’t been properly house-trained; to the aggressive dog that was never taught how to properly socialize with others; to the cat who uses the rug instead of the litter box because of anxiety issues. Every day we all hear stories in the news about pets who are going through these experiences, or talk to a neighbor or friend who have had to give up their pet because of various reasons. We hope that not one of our clients ever has to experience this heartache. As a result, we have made several strides to try to enhance our capacity to offer behavioral counseling to our clients and their beloved pets!!!!
Animal behavior has become its own huge field of ever expanding knowledge. This has made it very difficult for most veterinarians to stay on top of not just all of the medical information which we have to stay up with, but to also remain up-to-date on all of the new information regarding various animal behavioral problems. We firmly believe that behavioral counseling is an important part of raising any pet beginning from the first days puppyhood or kittenhood. To try and enhance our ability to prevent the problems that can arise from a lack of training and understanding, we have recently added 2 services to give our patients access to more behavior-related information:
Behavior Consultations
Basic behavior questions may be handled by any of our doctors, but occasionally, more help may be needed. In these cases, a more in-depth behavior consultation may have to be scheduled. During this consultation, we will focus more in-depth on your pet’s condition, and collectively, come up with a behavior modification plan that will hopefully allow your pet to become a happier, healthier family member for years to come! It’s important to remember that behaviors take time to change, so there is a real commitment required to address unwanted behavior. To receive more information, please call our office directly!
Socialization & Obedience Training
One of the most important parts of preventing behavioral problems in pets is proper socialization and obedience training in young animals. Through our office in Churchville, we now offer socialization and basic obedience classes for our patients!!! We are very excited to be re-introducing this service for our patients, as we always see a wonderful improvement as a result of these classes. We will be offering these classes in the late afternoon and evening to try and make it as convenient as possible. Most of these classes will be on a group basis, but we will be offering individual training classes as well. Individual classes will be scheduled directly through the trainer based on availability. For more information on both the group and individual classes, please contact the office.
PLEASE NOTE: Training classes have been temporarily discontinued as of August 1, 2011. We hope to have them restarted soon! We will keep you posted!
We hope that both of these services will allow all of us to start off on the right paw in raising a happy, healthy, and problem-free pet!!