We look forward to welcoming you to your first puppy class with Acer very soon.

Directions 

Meet The Team

Click here to see who we have our training team, so you know who to look out for when you arrive for your first class.

Access To The Acer Gundog Training Online Academy

Immediately after booking, you were sent an email invitation to join our Online Academy hosted on Circle. Simply follow the instructions to create your login details if you have not already done so. Once inside, take a moment to explore and say hello to your fellow gundog owners.

Within this platform, you’ll discover dedicated online community spaces designed for you to connect with other clients, ask training-related questions, share success stories, and even arrange meet-ups with your dogs.

Additionally, the Online Academy houses our comprehensive course materials. You’ll find video demonstrations illustrating each exercise covered in the weekly classes, together with detailed written instructions.

Regarding the videos, we encourage you to review them weekly as a refresher on our class content. Each module concludes with a list of exercises to practice with your puppy before the next session.

How Long Does It Take To Train A Dog?

Puppies go through various development phases throughout the first year or so. The puppy that you end-up with in a year will be quite different from the puppy that you have just brought home from the breeder.

Dog training has to evolve with the puppy as they become an adolescent, before becoming an adult. The adult dog that you then end-up with in a year’s time will largely be a product of what they are taught in their first year of life as a puppy.

Our Gundog Puppy Course is specifically designed for puppies who are under 6 months of age. It includes a series of age-relevant training exercises designed for gundog breeds. These exercises will set them (and you) up for success as more formal training continues afterwards.

What To Expect

We will show you how to develop a more confident, well-rounded puppy, who is more able to relax and listen to you around real-life distractions, such as other dogs. The course will help your dog learn how to manage their excitement, plus all the frustrations that are part of living as a canine in a human world.

We get started on key skills such as walking on the lead and coming back when called. Of course, we also cover all the basic gundog skills, such as hunting and retrieving.

There are 6 further levels of training after puppy training, each designed to provide you with a structured pathway to training your dog to a more advanced level (however far you want to go). Keep an eye out for an email a few weeks into the course, telling you about the next level, which is the Beginner Gundog Course.

Equipment Needed 

To get the most value from your course, the equipment you will need is listed in the Essential Kit section of the linked page above. You will need these items for use in the classes and to also train at home.

Guests Are Welcome 

Guests, such as other family members, are very welcome, but we kindly ask that they stand on the sidelines and spectate. They should not take part in the class.

We deliberately operate with smaller group sizes than a lot of dog trainers. This is to allow the trainer to provide a higher level of interaction with each individual handler in the class. It becomes incredibly disruptive when the class size suddenly doubles if everyone in the family takes a turn at training. Most importantly, the puppies become very confused. 

If other members of the family would like to take part in the training, we recommend that handlers are switched the following week, and not during each class. Puppies get distracted, and often quite anxious, when the human holding the lead one minute, then walks away to stand at the side of the class.

Children under the age of 18 are very welcome, including as handlers if they are of a responsible age. For safety reasons, children should be supervised by an adult at all times whilst on our premises and not allowed to approach other people’s dogs.