The Importance of Socializing Your Puppy Early
- 2 days ago
- 4 min read
I've been getting a lot of calls recently from people with dogs two to eight years old who were never socialized. When they go to public locations like Lowe's, Home Depot, Tractor Supply, or Bass Pro Shops, they can't handle it. They can't cope. They have a lot of fear, stress, and anxiety. This could have been prevented if the dog had been socialized between 8 and 16 weeks old. Socializing your puppy does not mean playing with other dogs or being petted by many people.
The Critical Importance of Early Puppy Socialization
Socialization is desensitizing your puppy to a lot of the stimuli and the triggers that usually cause fear, anxiety, and stress. These things include different floor textures, moving vehicles such as cars, trucks, and bicycles, and different sounds. In a home improvement store, these things would be forklifts, pallet jacks, flatbeds, shopping carts, announcements, and a variety of people. The dog has to be desensitized to all of these things so that they can go places with you and be okay with it.
Just today, I took my dog Dixie to a place called Bridge Street in Huntsville, AL. We walk outside a bit and go into several stores. They include Mountain High Outfitters, Shades, Anthropology, Lululemon, and a couple of jewelry stores. She's fine in all of those places. She is a trained therapy dog, so she sits for pets, and she loves every minute of it because she's working and she's providing a service to the people that she interacts with. She has no stress or anxiety. She's very calm in public situations because I socialized her early, from the first day I got her at 10 weeks old. I introduced her to a lot of different people, and I took her to a lot of different places. At four months old, she started going to daycare, and we started doing a lot of field trips.
You want to prevent your dog from having fear, anxiety, and stress in public locations by socializing them early.
Effective Strategies for Socializing Your Puppy
Step 1:
As soon as you get your puppy, you want to make sure they are introduced to a variety of people, including children and adults. Different sizes, genders, and ages of people, so the puppy learns that this will be part of their life.
Step #2
You want to start taking them for a lot of car rides. Take them for a ride in a car, drive through, or just around the block.
Step #3
Take them for walks on the street or on the sidewalk to places like an outdoor mall, where there's no grass, and they could pick up a disease.
Step #4
When they get a little older, you want to start taking them on many field trips. In my puppy training program, we take dogs on many field trips. We take them to all the stores I've mentioned and more. Most of the training that I do is outside of the home.
All the unwanted behaviors happen in the home. All the training happens when we leave the home.
What about House Manners?
In the home, many dogs usually jump on people when they come in the house, chew things like furniture, and bark at anything that walks by the front window.
Dogs need a lot of enrichment, mental stimulation, and socialization. This is important for their well-being. This is meeting the dog's needs. If the dog's needs aren't being met, they end up exhibiting behavior problems in the house. You want to make sure to socialize your puppy early and often, and take them to as many places as you can. This will also make them a lot happier.
What not to do:
Since they're not fully vaccinated at 10 or 12 weeks old, you want to make sure they are not at dog parks or on grass where there's contaminated feces, and that can make them sick. So you have to be safe about it.
You don't want to take them to a pet store or places where they're going to be unsafe.
Why Socializing an Adult Dog is So Difficult
If a dog is four to eight years old, has never been socialized, and is terrified of going in a store or riding in the car, chances are it probably won't get much better. It's unfortunate, and I know a lot of people don't want to hear this, but I get a lot of calls from people whose dogs were never socialized as puppies. They want to know what they can do about it. There's not a lot you can do about it. You give the dog the best life you can; you can't force them to be social, and you can't force them to like going to Home Depot or Lowe's. You can't push them into it. They have to want to do it on their own voluntarily, and they have to enjoy doing it.
Dogs live through associations. Something's either good for them or it's bad for them. If it's good for them, they're happy to do it. If it's bad for them, they don't want to do it. So your job as the owner and my job as the trainer is to do the best we can to change the bad association into a good one. Easier said than done. The longer a dog has rehearsed an unwanted behavior that includes fear, anxiety, and stress, the harder it is to change.
When a dog doesn't want to be social as an adult, you can't force them. They are going to get the best life they can be at home, but you missed the boat on getting them highly socialized early on, and that's okay. Many dogs stay at home and are completely fine.
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