As puppies are not born with the social skills required to live with their family, socialisation refers to the learning process that the puppy must go through to ensure that it is happy and confident in its environment. This ensures that they can communicate effectively with their owners and their canine counterparts.
When to start socialising your puppy:
- The younger the puppy, the easier to socialize
- The best period is between 3 and 12 weeks.
How to socialise your puppy:
- Allowing your puppy to interact with other dogs
- Ensure that your puppy gets to meet other humans too. This ensures that your puppy grows to be friendly and is able to adapt to different environments easily in the future.
Tips and Tricks for socialising:
- Training your puppy to understand simple commands. Everyone in the household should agree to a set of rules or basic commands to train your puppy.
- Good manners should be rewarded with small treats or giving them a toy to play with
- If your puppy appears to be anxious or overwhelmed, remove it from the situation or give your puppy more space
- Puppies get into trouble easily, anticipate possible problems to prevent them from occurring eg. Removing any small structures that they may love to chew
Since keeping a puppy isolated until they are fully vaccinated at 16 weeks can result in a fearful and unfriendly puppy, a compromise must be reached between protecting against disease and ensuring good mental health. Most socialisation can be done involving humans rather than dogs. If socialising is done with other dogs ensure that they are fully vaccinated and the socialising is done indoors in a clean environment.