Puppies must have good early social experiences
IN human psychology, it’s well established that childhood events have lifelong consequences. If you go to a counsellor as an adult, you’ ll almost certainly be asked questions about what happened as you were growing up. Who were the important people in your lives? How was your relationship with your mother, your father, your siblings? What are your earliest memories? Do you recall any times that you cried? And often, reviewing these early events in your life can help you to understand why you react in certain ways to events as an adult.
Did you know that dogs are similar to us in this regard? Events that happen to puppies in early life have been proven to have lifelong consequences for dogs. Obviously, it’s impossible to discuss anything like this with a dog: and the type of therapies and counselling that help humans cannot be utilised in dogs that are suffering from emotional damage. Dogs with these issues often remain deeply disturbed, resulting in extreme nervousness, anxiety and fear that’s commonly expressed as aggression to other dogs and sometimes to humans. Tragically for these animals, it’s sometimes impossible to help them, and they end up being euthanased.
Instead, the focus with dogs has to be on preventing this type of emotional damage, by ensuring that puppies have a good start in life. Plenty of research has been carried out that proves that this is an effective way of ensuring calm, well-behaved adult dogs. And equally, research has proven that a poor start in life for puppies can cause lifelong difficulties.
There is nothing new about this: back in 1961, sixty years ago, a study demonstrated that puppies that were not exposed to humans before 14 weeks of age were never able to develop normal bonds with humans later on. However, for some reason, the importance of early socialisation in puppies seems to be taking a long, long time to register in the collective consciousness of human society. To many people, it is still acceptable to treat dogs like “livestock”, using adult breeding pairs to produce puppies in the same way as hens lay eggs or pigs give birth to piglets. The focus is on producing the live animals, growing them until they are old enough to be sold, and then moving them on. Often, minimal attention is paid to socialising the puppies properly, giving rise to serious problems.
It seems unbelievable: we have known for over half a century that poor early socialisation leads to adult dogs with behavioural problems. Yet we still pay only lip service to socialising young puppies, and then we fret about the difficulties in dealing with adult dogs behaving badly.
Much research has been carried out since 1961, and we now know far more about the details of the various developmental phases of puppies.
In essence, young puppies have a natural fear of anything they have not encountered before: this the same natural self-protective instinct that all young creatures possess. Even humans have this natural fear (I still remember my trepidation on my first day of school as a four year old). However young animals have pliable brains which are able to adapt to new experiences.
Socialisation describes the process of gradually and gently getting puppies used to everything they are likely to experience later in life. This means introducing a puppy to new experiences, animals, people and objects, while not overdoing it, and taking care that the puppy finds the encounter pleasant. Typically this process includes exposure to numerous sounds (cars, vacuum
cleaners, doorbells etc) textures (carpets, linos, grass, concrete, tarmac etc), animal species (other dogs, cats, rabbits, hens, or any other animals that the pup may meet later in life), as well as humans of varying ages, sexes, and races
There are three critical periods where this needs to be done. First, the “primary period”, which lasts from birth until the puppy is three weeks of age. Pups depend completely on their mothers during this period, while their senses (touch, taste, smell, hearing, and sight) are gradually developing. It’s important that they have gentle introductions to all sorts of experiences during this period.
The “socialization period” of development is next, occurring from three weeks to fourteen weeks of age. This is the most important phase, when pups learn to get along with their litter mates and any other creatures (including humans) around them, as well as gathering increasing experience of their environments. The puppy’s brain will adapt to these new experiences.
An adult brain is far less adaptable, and will remain fearful. That’s why it’s so important to go through this process at this early stage.
The third period of development is the “enrichment” or “juvenile” period, which lasts until sexual maturity: during this time, young dogs need to continue to engage in safe introductions to the various experiences that make up an adult dog’s life in human society.
Most puppies go to their new homes when they are 8 – 12 weeks of age. If they have not had pleasant exposure to a wide range of experiences by this age, it’s already too late. They may already be destined to end up as badly behaved adult dogs.
Choose your dog breeder very carefully.