http://www.bow-tiger.com Video Highlights: 0:15 – Start as quickly as possible 0:57 – Let your dog associate different things with the baby 1:32 – Their schedule with you is going to completely change 2:11 – When the baby arrives at home 3:03 – If you’re not going to allow your dog into the babies room Transcription: Hi everybody. My name is Harper Jones with Bow-Tiger, and you are watching Saturdays with Harper, and today I wanted to talk about introducing and preparing your dog for a new baby. This can be an extremely stressful time for our animals, especially if they have not been around little ones before, they are essentially the baby of the family. We want to make sure that we very readily prepare them, when we got to have our actual baby. The first suggestion that I could make is start as quickly as possible. When you find out you’re pregnant, you want to start preparing your dog just as you start preparing as well. The first thing that you can do is as you start to get baby items in like baby toys, blankets, different things, kind of open them up, let them be around so the dog starts to get used to these different odd items that he or she is not used to seeing around the house. The other thing that you want to do is start to let your dog associate different things with the baby. Bring them around where they can hear babies crying or talking, babies playing, not necessarily in close vicinity to a stranger’s baby. That may be at the park, just different areas so they get used to the laughter and the screams and the crying, and all the things that babies and children do. Us as adults, if we have a dog, they don’t really hear any of that until we get to the situation of having our own children. This is good just to kind of prep them for what’s to come. Another thing that you want to recognize is, yes, the majority of your time is dedicated or a lot of it is dedicated to your animal when you don’t have children. Their schedule with you is going to completely change, once you have that child. Instead of starting after you have a child and making it a shock to the animal, lets take, let our pets know now, that the schedule’s going to change. We can start changing up when they’re walked, how often they’re walked, you do want to make sure they’re walked enough, but maybe we’re a little overzealous with the whole walking we’re doing with them now. We want to get them on a strict schedule so we can manage both pet and baby when that time comes. When the baby arrives at home, one thing you do want to do is you want to have an introduction with your dog and the baby. Make sure that it’s in a safe place and that you do have help available. Most of the time, you’ll find that dogs have a very nurturing attitude towards babies, but just to keep precautions and for safety sake, we do want to make sure we have somebody else available, just so we can have a little help while we’re facilitating that introduction between baby and pet. And then once the baby is here, just make sure that you are still spending time with your dog, giving him or her the attention that she deserves and she desperately wants from you, but also let her know that there are no boundaries. There’s schedule changes, there’s boundaries of where she can go and what she can do because we want to make sure that we keep our baby safe. If you’re not going to allow your dog into the babies room, a lot of the time people don’t want the dogs in that room, make sure prior to that baby being brought home and prior to the baby being born, that we stop that dog from being able to come into the room. We tell them that it’s not allowed and make sure that they also know certain commands. You want a sit, stay, drop it, different types of commands. We want to make sure that our dogs understand these because it’s going to be so much easier for them and so much less stressful for us, when the baby comes, if our dog is already acclimated to how it needs to behave with the baby at home. If you are watching this video on Facebook or YouTube, please be sure to check out our blog on Bow-Tiger.com. Thanks.
