Puppy Brain: How Our Dogs Learn, Think and Love

Author Kerry Nichols joins host Laura Reeves for a review of her new book, “Puppy Brain: How Our Dogs Learn, Think and Love.”

Nichols’ book is written for the dog buying public to help them understand how to find a breeder, what a responsible breeder looks like, how puppies learn, and how breeders and buyers can work together to raise well-adjusted dogs.

“We all know you have to prepare your families,” Nichols said. “Like the more prepared your families are the better your puppies’ lives will be. So from litter number one, I started to joke around ‘hey, you know you’re enrolling in Nicholberry boot camp. If you’re not ready to read and watch and listen I’m not the breeder for you, because I really want you to be ready.

“That actually evolved into requiring that our families take a training course, you know, I really want them to be prepared because we’ve all seen it go badly when they’re not and you send home this lovely puppy who very quickly gets into trouble and that’s heart -wrenching to see.

“I had this whole backlog of a private blog that I was keeping for our families and basically they needed to read a pretty hefty article or watch a video every day for the eight weeks that their puppy was growing.”

As a content creator, Nichols has proven suggestions for breeders also about how to grow their educational social media outreach about their breed and their breeding programs.

• It’s a marathon not a sprint … don’t think that you’re going to post 10, 50, 100 posts and you’re going to get this following. It is consistency, consistency, consistency.
• Authenticity, which is why I think it doesn’t work to hire a social media manager.I’ve had arguments with people on this topic, but there’s no way I could have never hired anybody to do what I do because, it’s all in my DMs. I’m responding, it’s in my comments, I’m interacting. And that’s fantastic because the questions will inform your content.
• I think it’s super important that breeders allow people to see what they’re actually doing on a daily basis.Yesterday, someone asked me to vet a breeder for them of a different breed, and I went on the website and it said that they followed puppy culture protocols. And they have a big following on Instagram, but I couldn’t find a single video that demonstrated puppy culture protocols.So that’s fine to say it, but I don’t just trust that they’re doing it. I want to see them doing a barrier challenge, right? So I’d say that, show what you’re actually doing.