Puppy Socialisation

Puppies have a critical socialisation period that is found to be between 3 weeks and 3 months of age (12 weeks), and what happens in this period can shape them into what type of dog they will grow up to be.

A short description of socialisation is to teach your puppy how to interact politely with other people, dogs and pets that it will be around when an adult. Your puppy will need to learn communication skills and body language to interact appropriately with other dogs, and we need to teach them some general manners so they learn how interact with people and be able to live alongside us harmoniously within our house holds and our lifestyle. It is up to us to teach our puppies these skills so they understand, feel confident and happy in their new home environment and places we want to take them.

Alongside socialisation, habituation is also really important (reduced responsiveness to a stimuli over time). Habituation means getting your puppy used to everyday sights and sounds that they will come into contact with throughout their adult life, and ideally they will learn to have a neutral repose to these stimuli. This is the opposite to socialisation, where we are teaching your puppy to behave appropriately (in our view) to people/dogs they meet and interact with, whereas habituation generally means we want your puppy to learn to ignore environmental stimuli that they don’t need to interacted with.

For habituation, some ideas of stimuli to expose your puppy to include, traffic/noisy/large vehicles, farm animals/horses (depending on location), crowds, car journeys, large/noisy objects such as bins, hoovers, traffic cones etc.

If you would like any more help or advice on this subject please get in contact.