Proper Puppy Socialization

What does it REALLY mean to socialize your puppy?

There is a common misconception that socializing a puppy means encouraging them to say hello to every person and dog they meet. This is not the case. You want to expose your puppy to the world that your adult dog will be experiencing. Every person and their lifestyle is different from the next. Dogs are ridiculously adaptable, but they are also very easily influenced as puppies. If you want your adult dog to go on a boat, then take your puppy boating. If you want your adult dog to be friendly with other family pets, then expose them as puppies. But, if you don’t want your adult dog pulling to greet every dog they see on their morning walk, then DON’T introduce them to every dog they see as a puppy.

It is important to remember that exposure is not interaction. So many behavioral problems that adult dogs exhibit are due to the fact that the dog never learned to ignore their environment. It is much more important to teach your puppy to be neutral to stimuli outside of your relationship. You want to be the most important and enticing thing they see, no matter what the environment. You can do this by training for neutrality.

The foundation of your puppies' sociability with other animals and people is already in place due to their genetic makeup. Sociability is a spectrum and training alone cannot take a dog from one end to the other. But, what we can do is be sure that your puppy has the right kind of interactions to steer them in the right direction. The quality of these interactions is so much more important than the number of them. A high quality social interaction with another dog is one where your puppy is not bullied or allowed to bully the other dog. A high quality social interaction with a stranger is one where they are calm before saying hello and rewarded for sitting on the approach. Setting up these opportunities is one of the most important, yet most missed, parts of socializing a puppy.

Happy Training!