SOCIALISATION: Are you doing it correctly?

When you get a puppy you’ll likely have heard or have it on your mind that you need to socialise your puppy. And that’s great. It’s one of the most important things to do with any pup.

Over the last few years we’ve raised a load of foster puppies. I think there have been 11 in total. We’ve had them as young as still needing to be on a bottle and we’ve had some until they are almost a year old. We’ve raised them similarly using the same principles but we’ve had to tweak a few things for each one.

Socialisation is about exposing puppies to different environments, people, places, animals and situations that they are likely going to have to cope with when they get older. It’s not necessarily about teaching them to say hello to lots of different people and other dogs. This will depend on the individual dog.

Puppies will come pre-wired to behave a certain way and they will also come pre-wired in terms of their confidence, tendency to show fear, and how well they recover in situations. This basically means, it’s not all down to how you raise a puppy to determine how well they behave and cope as they get older. This is why there is a high failure rate within the working dog world. Not all dogs that have been bred for a specific job end up being able to do that job for numerous reasons and it doesn’t matter how much training or socialisation that has been done. If the dog is not cut out for it then it just wasn’t meant to be.

This is why good breeding practices are so important, and the breed really does matter. You don’t see any dog trainers going for chow chows, bull dogs, or great danes to compete in a sport with. There’s a reason why so many dog trainers want a malinois nowadays.

Dog training is full of nuances. I’ve read a few dog training books that have a list of all the things we need to expose our pups to by a certain age which is a great idea in theory. However, dog training is full of nuances and we need to learn when we can push our puppies and when we can’t. Socialisation should be about desensitising and habituating them not sensitising them.

If we have a pup that is on the more timid side, and we keep exposing them to things they aren’t coping well with, we may end up making them more sensitive as opposed to getting them used to things. We often see this happen during adolescence. Well meaning owners who really have tried to get it right and socialise their pups end up seeing a ‘relaxed’ or ‘calm’ puppy hit adolescence and then start expressing themselves in all those places they felt overwhelmed in when they were a pup.

We want to create resilient dogs. We want our dogs to be able to recover quickly when they get a sudden fright. But to do this we have to make sure we don’t overwhelm them to the point they can’t cope. We want our pups to experience tolerable stress. We don’t want to over expose them to the point they experience toxic stress. Tolerable stress is something they can tolerate or are able to remove themselves from. Toxic stress is where they cannot tolerate something or have the option to get themselves away from something for a prolonged period of time.

Socialising a puppy isn’t always easy. Especially if you get a rescue pup that hasn’t had the best start. If you go to a good breeder and get a typically social breed like a Labrador it will likely be a much easier and nicer experience. You could get away with making a lot more mistakes usually because a well bred dog is a much more resilient dog because of consideration of genetics with the sire and the dam.

Ask any dog trainer when they would like you to get in touch with them for training and they’ll likely tell you when you think you don’t need it. Meaning, if we can help you train a dog BEFORE the problems arise it will be better for everyone involved. If you wait for a problem to arise then you could be working for a long time to resolve the problem or if you want a quick-fix, you’ll likely get told to do some pretty rough things to your dog in the name of training only for the problem to resurface at a later date.

So if you’ve got this far and have a pup or are thinking of getting one, please get in touch with us now. Don’t wait for things to go wrong. Socialisation is not easy. Having someone to guide you through this stage can be infinitely helpful.