TENDER PAWS

A guide for compassionately helping puppies, rescue dogs, and older traumatized canines live their best lives, based upon neuroscience and strategies developed for aiding at-risk children.

At the time the highly respected parenting guide The Connected Child: Bring Hope and Healing to Your Adoptive Family (2007), coauthored by Sunshine, was about to be published, the author adopted a fragile puppy. The tiny brown pup, part of a litter born behind a gas station, was but several weeks old; the puppy had been separated from her mother and siblings too early to learn any rules of the jungle and was painfully frightened, dehydrated, and loaded with worms. After dealing with the medical issues, it was time to teach Hazel, as the increasingly wild brown ball of fluff came to be called, how to become a good canine citizen. But, as Sunshine writes, “Puppy training guides failed me. Nothing in their pages explained what to do with a scrambling, out-of-control bundle of teeth and claws.” And then she was struck by a thought that has resulted in this lucid and informative volume: Perhaps the pages of The Connected Child held valuable insights for raising a puppy. (Like pre- and non-verbal children, dogs communicate their needs to anyone who pays close attention.) Taking a calm, nonjudgmental approach to understanding Hazel’s behavior in terms of her underlying neurological and emotional needs—much as she would with at-risk children—the author began rewarding the pup for “good” behavior and giving her “do-overs” for her mistakes. Sunshine’s guide adopts the approach of “therapeutic parenting,” in which the pup is given the benefit of the doubt. Despite copious neurological and biological discussions, the text is easily understandable—it’s an approachable compendium of scientific research and fascinating “reflections from the field” case studies from like-minded experts. A bonus is the inclusion of surprising and intriguing behavioral tidbits, such as the small-scale study conducted in a rescue facility showing that dogs who raised their inner eyebrows were adopted more quickly. The techniques advocated here are designed to offer puppies (and difficult older dogs) patient, compassionate instruction that relieves their anxiety and leads to close bonding between canine and human.

An articulate, highly informative, and enjoyable puppy-parenting primer.