If you ever wanted to ask a professional dog trainer questions like, when should I

spay my puppy and how much exercise should my puppy get?

And how do I combat this overwhelm I'm feeling about owning a puppy?

Then this podcast episode is for you.

Because recently I put out on social media,

asked me a question about puppy training and I got a lot of questions.

Hi, I'm Susan Garrett.

Welcome to Shape by Dog.

Today, I'm going to go through as many questions as I can during this 20-minute

period to answer your questions about your puppy and training your puppy and other things

about your puppy. And the questions I don't get to, well, we'll just save those for another

episode. So, let's get going. First up, we're going to open with a controversial one,

when to spay, my puppy. Ooh, you know, it would be easy for me to sidestep this and just do what I

do. Let me just preface this by saying, in Europe, most dogs are intact. They are not spayed or

neutered. I tend to keep my dogs intact as long as I can.

Now, I'm going to also give you this warning that if you own an intact dog or an intact female,

then you have a huge responsibility to make sure that they are kept under your

supervision or under your control and will not be responsible for accidental litters. We do not,

we've got enough puppies out there and I'm not saying that you shouldn't be breeding your dog,

but if you were going to think of breeding it, then you need to actually talk to your breeder, go through all these health checks, yada,

yada, yada, yada. Trust me, breathing isn't for the faint of heart. As much as I love having

puppies around my house, I would rather really leave it up to the people who do it full time.

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