What makes a good dog

When a breeder raises puppies their job is nurturing the puppy, feeding adequate diet to the puppy, and meeting various social skills with in the 8 week time period. We give our puppies toys with textures, let them hear noises such as babies crying, gun shot. Meeting the elderly, younger children, cats. The social skills are already starting with us.
But you as the new owner has an important job which starts the day after you have taken the puppy home. That is to train your dog.

The 16 week window of development with the Hungarian Vizsla is one of the most important aspects of its life. Unlike toy breeds which develop later the Vizsla must obtain experiences of life to make it a good sociable dog. Sociable to other dogs, and people. Scientific evidence was found many years ago that people who do not socialise their dogs in this time period if owning an intelligent breed can have a dog which shows aggression later on, and as late as 2 years or as early as months old.
So when considering the breed, be prepared, think ahead. Start to go around training classes and watch what goes on. See if you like the trainer and classes. Do not have the excuse that we couldn't find a training school. If you need us to find a training school for you, we will put feelers out to see if their is anyone closer to you than you realise. Ask your local vets if they can recommend a training school ?

The Kennel club set out a scheme years ago called the Good citizen scheme. This scheme was designed to help owners train their dog, and train their dog in a way to give it good manners. It starts with four sessions of puppy foundation course. The trainer watches you to see if you are meeting all the requirements of the 4 weeks. It can go longer if you need more. Then you start on the Bronze training. Then silver training. Then gold training. If you get to gold your dog is very obedient. It is good fun as you are interacting with your dog and the dog learns what to do. Responds to you and has good manners. So this is one small part of owning the dog. The other part is you backing up at home the training, and giving your dog boundaries.

A dog is not a fur baby. It does need love and understanding but love alone is not enough! Training is everything.

If you can not train a dog, or have a trainer come to you. Do not own a Vizsla. Go and buy a Pug! With a Vizsla the intelligence is there, they can think, they can work things out, they can get frustrated if not enough input is given. Off lead running as well as controlled training is required. By running free in fields their brain is actively working. If your dog is sniffing the ground and smelling it is in theory working. It is a working breed. Good recall is everything, as your dog must not chase other livestock. Their is a country code. So going back to training, the more you do the better behaved your dog is.

Today many people want the active dog, the one that they think fits the family. But once they have the dog they forget about training. Please please train your dogs. Ignore at your own peril!