Puppy socialization and emotional development done right is more than just exposure. It’s about minimizing distractions, maximizing connection, and intentionally creating positive conditioned emotional responses to help puppies grow in confidence.

Transcript Summary:
Ahh, puppy socialization. For every puppy owner that does this right, I bet you there's a thousand puppy owners that either don't do it at all or do it terribly, terribly wrong.

So, my goal is to have a confident, responsive, and emotionally well-adjusted puppy. That is the goal. And that is why, yes, indeed I do value socialization in a puppy. But what does that look like to me?

It's really three parts. So, the first is the distractions in that puppy's life. That my goal is to minimize all distractions, any environmental distractions, so that they all become white noise to the puppy. The same way that, you know, early on in our life together, Prophet and I were walking to the house and there was all these leaves blowing across the field.

Wow. That was so stimulating to him. It was novel. And he went off and had a fun time chasing them, which I let him, but I called him, and he came back. Alright. So, those rehearsals are things that I want to see as that puppy grows up. I would like to neutralize the distractions in his life so that everything no matter if it's a bunny or livestock or other dogs or children or skateboarders or cars, they're all white noise, like leaves that are just blowing across the field.

“Oh, that might be interesting, but it's just not important to me.” So, minimizing, turning distractions into white noise, that's one group of training that's important to me. Growing connection with the things that are important, either the people that my puppy has to listen to, of course myself, or any activities that I would like that puppy to do going forward.

And the final area is growing positive CERs. Now, if you're a regular listener to the Shaped by Dog podcast, you would have heard me talk about positive CERs in context with husbandries that we want our dogs to love having their nails trimmed or any kind of husbandry procedure, looking in their ears or having a veterinary exam. These are super important. So, we need to be intentional about them. Likewise, we need to be intentional about creating positive CERs for everything that's important to us or that we could see being important in our puppy's life.

Because if you don't set out and make these CERs intentionally positive for the puppy, you run the risk of many of them being randomly negative, meaning that the dog is afraid in situations where a hairbrush comes out. Or the dog is afraid or shuts down or gets worried when you ask them to go into their crate or you put on their harness or head halter.

So, we want to intentionally build CERs for those things. And that's where I group my puppy socialization. I want to build positive CERs to things like children and puppies and dogs. But I also want to turn children, puppies, and dogs into environmental white noise so that the puppy can easily function around them. That the puppy can easily be responsive to me in those environments.

So, three critical areas, and I'm going to share with you how I work that socializing element with my puppies while I'm very aware of growing the connections, minimizing the environmental value of the distractions, and intentionally creating positive CERs for my dog. So, for the distractions, it's important that we minimize those.

Number one because some distractions may be things that the dog is afraid of. Now that goes hand in hand with creating positive CERs. We don't want our dog to be afraid of. For example, my young puppy Prophet who had a terrible fear of vacuum cleaners.

And so, I'm very intentional about when the cleaning ladies come that I make sure that he isn't out when they're being vacuumed. Or if he is, he's playing a game with me. So, distractions can be things that the dog or the puppy is afraid of.

Distractions could be things that the puppy is attracted to, meaning another puppy running, another dog running, a bunny running across the grass, leaves blowing across the grass. They're distractions they're attracted to, or they could be distractions they're curious about. “Hey, I'm not sure what that is.” So, we need to help them because curiosities can go into fears or attractions.

So, we want to help that dog. And this is where growing your positive CERs and growing your connection in the face of those distractions are what helps turn those distractions into white noise for our puppies. Alright.

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