Start Socializing Your Puppy Early

I'm Dale Buchanan, and this is Puppy Talk, the podcast that offers free advice and tips for raising a happy, healthy, and obedient puppy. For more information on this podcast, visit us online at puppytalkpodcast.com.

Welcome to Puppy Talk episode number 141. I'm your host, Dale Buchanan, and today I want to talk about something very important. Socializing your puppy. I've been getting a lot of calls recently from people who have dogs that are two to eight years old, and the dogs were never socialized, so when they go in public locations such as Lowe's, Home Depot, Tractor Supply, or Bass Pro Shops, they can't deal with it. They can't cope. They have a lot of fear, stress, and anxiety. This could have been prevented if the dog was socialized early on. Socializing your puppy does not mean playing with other dogs or getting pet by a lot of people. I just did a podcast last week on whether you should let people pet your puppy or not. Socialization is desensitizing your puppy to a lot of the stimulus and the triggers that usually cause fear, anxiety, and stress. These things include different floor textures, moving vehicles such as cars, trucks, and bicycles, different sounds. In a home improvement store, these things would be forklifts, pallet jacks, flatbeds, shopping carts, announcements, 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. We walk outside a little bit, we go in about seven different 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, no anxiety. She's very, 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 a lot of different places with me. 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 the fear, anxiety, and stress in public locations by socializing them early. First of all, as soon as you get your puppy, you want to make sure that they are introduced to a variety of people, children, adults, different sizes of people, different genders, different ages of people. So the puppy learns that this is going to be part of their life. You want to start taking them for a lot of car rides. And 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 can walk them on the street or on the sidewalk or take them places like an outdoor mall where there's not grass and a lot of possibility for them to pick up distemper or parvo. You don't want to take them to a pet store and you don't want to take them to places where they're going to be unsafe. When they get a little older, you want to start taking them on a lot of field trips. For my puppy training program, we take dogs on a lot of 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. And I've always said this. All the unwanted behaviors happen in the home. All the training happens when we leave the home. Because the dog's always overexcited, overstimulated. They have sometimes a negative association with the home. When they get outside the home, they do really good. But when they come back home, a lot of times they misbehave often. They jump on people when they come in the house, they chew things up, they bark at anything that walks by. Of course, this is house manners, and these things do need to be addressed. But this podcast is about socialization and taking your dogs out in public and doing a lot of things with them, indoors and outdoors, if the weather is nice, is very important for their health and well-being. 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 down the road. These behaviors are going to show up in the house in normal situations when they didn't show up before. This will include excessive barking, chewing, jumping on furniture, misbehaving, and even aggression. So you want to make sure that socialize your puppy early on, socialize your puppy a lot, take them as many places as you can, do as many things with them as you can, because this is also going to make them a lot happier. I want to finish by saying that if a dog is four, five, six, seven years old and it has never been socialized and it's terrified of going in a store, it's terrified of going for a ride in the car or going anywhere outside of the house or yard, chances are it probably won't get much better. It's unfortunate, and I know a lot of people don't want to hear that, but I get a lot of calls from people whose dogs were never socialized, and believe it or not, they still use the excuse of COVID, which was six years ago, that their dog never got socialized. Now they want to know what they can do about it. And quite honestly, there's not a lot you can do about it now. You give the dog the best life that you can, you can't force them into being social, 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. There's no training that you can do to get the dog to like something. 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 try the best we can to change the bad association to a good association. So something that they didn't like or they were afraid of, now they're liking it and they're not so afraid of it. Easier said than done, the longer a dog has practiced or rehearsed and unwanted behavior that includes fear, anxiety, and stress, the harder it is to change. And remember, when a dog doesn't want to be social as an adult, and I say you can't force them, you really have to think of the dog and work from the inside out and think of the dog's needs at that point. They are going to get the best life they can being at home, but you miss the boat on getting them highly socialized early on, and that's okay. A lot of dogs stay at home and are completely fine. I hope this information was helpful to you. If you have any questions, you can reach out to me through the website, puppytalkpodcast.com. Have a great day.