As we laid out in the previous chapter, most dog owners sincerely want to give their dogs good lives, but they often don’t have a full understanding of how their dogs think, why they do what they do, or how our interactions with them influence their behaviors. That disconnect leads to worse outcomes for dogs, stress for owners, and a less rich and fulfilling relationship for them both.

Why does this happen? As we also discussed in the last chapter, a big part of the problem is an awareness issue: culturally, we lack a narrative of “one needs to learn how to handle and care for a dog, it is a skill like any other, and must be taught.” Since many owners aren’t fully aware of their knowledge gaps – or its consequences – they never start or fully commit to their learning journey!

There are tons of great educational resources out there (cf. further reading), but most owners don’t fully appreciate the need to tap into them, take them seriously, and learn.

So how do we change that? How do we change the mentality around dogs and dog ownership? How do we help new owners become more aware of the need to understand, communicate with, handle, train, and care for their dogs?

To help new dog owners overcome that awareness gap – to help them understand how to raise and train a happy, well-adjusted, well-behaved dog – we have compiled two resources:

• This Primer on Responsible Canine Ownership – Where we do our best to survey, in an introductory manner, all the topics a new dog owner should be familiar with, to start them on their learning journey (more on that below), and provide a reference point to jump off from.
• The Responsible Canine Owner Certification (RCOC) exam – Where we use real-world scenarios to help give new dog owners a sense of where to start; to help them realize “oh wow, I didn’t realize you have to be thoughtful about how you expose puppies to new things,” or “oh wow, I didn’t realize giving my dog attention when she barks at visitors could be encouraging the behavior.” Realizing those things – seeing the substance and benefits of learning (and consequences of not learning) – and showing owners where to start, we hope to help and encourage more owners to pursue more education.

In a moment we’ll talk about how these connect to a broader educational journey beyond the RCO Primer and RCOC, but first it’s worth noting a few things about what the RCOC is, how it should be used, and what it is NOT.

The RCO Primer and RCOC exam:

• The RCOC exam is NOT difficult: it tests the very basics, nothing advanced; you can take the exam as many times as you want; and every question is linked to the RCO Primer chapters you need to answer it. The goal is for owners to learn as they go.

  As we’ll emphasize shortly, the goal is not to make you a competent handler – no written resource alone can do that; rather the goal is to make more owners more aware of:

  • What they need to learn
  • How to start learning about it
  • The benefits of learning
• The RCO Primer is NOT enough to teach you how to work with a dog: as we’ll outline below, it is a starting point, meant to, along with the Primer, encourage more owners to read books, take classes, and work with trainers. Remember, today as few as 5% of dog owners ever take a single class! No written resource – the RCO Primer or otherwise – can teach you how to handle a dog; you need practice and you need to work with a professional. Rather, our goal is to get more people into that educational pipeline.
• The Primer and RCOC exam DO start owners off in a better spot: Today, many owners only end up at books, classes, webinars, or private trainer sessions after bad things have happened and they don’t know what to do. The RCOC and RCO Primer are meant to start more owners in a better place, with:
  • Some familiarity and experience with basic concepts, like the need for and key elements in the proper execution of socialization, physical and mental activity, training, husbandry, etc.
  • A better perspective on learning:
    • (a) training and handling are not ‘nice-to-have hobbies;’ they are a requisite part of your life with a dog
    • (b) you need to learn how to handle, raise, interact with, and care for a dog
    • (c) trainers are not there to teach your dog; they are there to teach you how to work with your dog
  • A better mentality around interacting with their dog (see next)

• They ARE meant to change your mentality: the individual facts in the Primer are nice, but not really what matters most. More than anything, we want to help change owners’ mentality, understanding things like:
  • “I need to look at things from my dog’s perspective – how does she feel? What does this situation look like to her?“
  • “My actions influence my dogs behavior – how do my interactions with my dog encourage her behaviors?”
• The RCOC IS meant to be required: everyone is busy. Even though, as we pointed out earlier, owners benefit more than anyone from learning how to be a better handler and carer for their dogs, it’s hard to get ourselves to start that process. The RCOC is meant to be required by stakeholders – e.g., Adoption Centers, Rescues, Breeders, Trainers, Hotels, Airbnbs, Landlords, etc. – to help encourage more owners to start off in the right place.
• They do NOT replace existing resources: as mentioned, there are tons of amazing educational resources out there – books, classes, private trainers, webinars, etc. As we’ll lay out shortly, the RCOC and RCO Primer are meant to lead more people to those resources, not replace them.

There are tons of amazing educational resources out there – from books to classes, private lessons, webinars, and sports. Part of the problem, as we highlighted earlier, is:

Not enough owners are entering that educational pipeline – tapping into books, classes, trainers, seminars, etc.

That forms the inspiration for and goal of the the RCOC and RCO Primer:

1. Encourage more owners to enter the educational pipeline, by showing them (a) dog handling is something that needs to be learned, (b) the many benefits of learning, and (c) the consequences of not doing so

2. Start owners off right, with at least some exposure to and familiarity with basic concepts

With that in mind, below we lay out how the RCOC and RCO Primer fit into a broader educational pipeline

Educational pipeline for new dog owners

Before (ideally) you get your dog:

1. Review this Primer and take the RCOC exam: per the RCOC landing page, we recommend that, rather than reading the whole Primer in one go, you should instead briefly peruse it, then take the RCOC exam. Each scenario on the RCOC has a Primer chapter reference, letting you go to that chapter to learn more – and how to answer correctly. That lets you learn as you go. The RCOC has the added benefit of also checking your own knowledge, and showing others (breeders, trainers, landlords, peers, etc.) that you take dog ownership seriously, and that you’re not going into it blind.

   Our aim is that stakeholders – adoption centers, rescues, breeders, trainers, parents, hotels, Airbnbs, landlords, etc. – will require or incentivize their clients to pass the RCOC, to encourage (and reward) them for doing so!

2. Tap into other introductory books and online resources: dive deeper into introductory books and online resources on important topics, especially on training and puppy rearing. On the Further Resources page we suggest some great resources, and we recommend more on particular topics in the relevant chapters throughout the Primer.

After you get your dog:

3. Take at MINIMUM a 6-12 week basic obedience course: books and media are great, but there’s no replacement for practicing with an experienced trainer who can not only help explain concepts but also watch your technique and give you feedback. Many local adoption centers offer introductory courses; you can ask your rescue or breeder for information. In Chapter 2-23 we offer tips on how to find an appropriate class and trainer. Ideally, we recommend all owners continue taking recurring courses for the first year or two with their dog.

4. Ideally, do a few one-on-one sessions with a trainer: even a few sessions, where they can give you more individualized attention and more targeted feedback on how you’re interacting with your dog, will really speed your learning. While financially it is an added expense, improving your handling skills with even occasional trainer sessions will, for most owners, end up saving them enormous time, money, and stress by helping them avoid or handle problematic behavioral situations.

5. Practice!! All the concepts you learn in books, videos, classes, etc. are worth slightly more than nothing if you don’t apply them. Everything you learn – here and elsewhere, you should be practicing with your dog. Will you make mistakes? Yes, definitely. Is that the end of the world? No! Mistakes are how we get better. Throughout this primer we’ll tell you both what not to do and – when you inevitably accidentally do do it – how to fix it. Don’t stress! If you’re going to all this effort, you will not ‘ruin’ your dog – you are already on the right path!

6. Take the AKC CGC: Once you’ve started working with your dog, the AKC Canine Good Citizen (CGC) test is a great goal to work towards. It covers some basic social skills that most dogs should be able to handle, and working towards it will help you start thinking about the right concepts. Once you pass the CGC, the AKC also offers more advanced titles like the CGC-U (Urban), and TK (Trick) titles. There are AKC-certified administrators for the CGC in most areas – you can search for one on their website (linked above)!

7. Dog Sports: Once you’ve got the basics down, dog sports – like Nose Work, Agility, and Rally/Obedience – are an absolutely fantastic way to meet your dog’s mental, physical, and social needs and to have fun with them while doing it! While it might seem like an added time commitment, you ultimately will need to meet these needs anyway; dog sports are often a more fun way for you to achieve that, and will help you build an even closer bond with your dog. Look for training centers in your area that teach introductory classes on any dog sports that interest you. We talk more about dog sports in the Appendix.

Realizing how much there is to learn, it’s easy to get intimidated. First off, don’t worry: as we’ll talk about shortly, the process will be easier and more natural than it looks. Second, it’s worth remembering: learning how to handle, raise, understand, and communicate with your dog will massively improve your life together!

Investing in learning these concepts will:

1. Foster a deeper, more fulfilling relationship: Culturally, we are taught that our responsibility to dogs is to ‘take care’ of them, by which we generally mean feeding them, taking them to the vet, taking them for walks, etc. In other words, the logistical needs of a dog. While true, that sort of relationship can only go so deep. What we hope to show you throughout this Primer is that you have an opportunity work with your dog, to be partners, members of a team. By learning to communicate with them – to understand what they are trying to tell you, and to communicate back to them – you can develop a much more profound level of trust and connection.

   By actively listening to and teaching your dog, by getting them to see themselves as part of team – “I trust mom to always know what’s going on, to keep my safe, and to tell me what I need to do; and my job is to follow orders, to Sit/Stay/Down/Place/Tuck/etc.” – the two of you will develop an infinitely closer, more intimate bond.

2. SAVE you time, energy, and stress: There are few things more stressful and frustrating than seeing your dog suffering or anxious – e.g., barking or lunging at strangers – or having your dog ‘misbehave’ – e.g., stealing food or tearing up furniture – and not understanding why they are doing it or what to do about it. Generally, when owners go to a professional trainer to address a ‘surface’ problem like those, a good trainer will teach them about what the more fundamental, underlying issue is.

   As an owner, understanding how your dog thinks, why they do what they do, and how you can teach them and guide their behaviors makes life with your dog far easier and less stressful.

3. Create a more fun life for you and your dog: Many dogs today unfortunately are not only under-stimulated mentally and physically, but suffer through regular stress, fear, or anxiety purely because they don’t understand or misunderstand what’s going on. Learning how to (a) think through your dog’s eyes; (b) listen to what they try to communicate to you; (c) handle and interact with them in a way that gives them confidence and teaches them to trust you; and (d) teach your dog how to behave in a range of situations; all allow your dog to live a much happier, less stressful life. It’s also more fun for you! A well-socialized, well-trained dog is such a joy to work with and take places! Whether it’s going for a hike, doing training sessions, or taking your dog to the store, once you know what you’re doing it becomes a lot more fun to do things with your dog!

   Understanding your dog’s needs and how to work with them gives them and you a more fun, more enriching, less stressful life.

All of that might seem abstract now, but we promise: as you make your way through the Primer – and hopefully go on to more books, classes, and trainers – investing just a little bit in learning how to work with your dog will be worth it – you will not regret it!

As you look at the educational pipeline above, or the chapters that follow, it might seem like a lot – “how can I possibly learn all this!” Don’t worry – we promise you can learn these things, and that it will be easier and more fun than it looks!

Here’s a few reasons why:

• It will quickly be intuitive: while on the surface it can seem like there are a lot of concepts to learn – a thousand nuances to socialization, crate training, separation anxiety, play, reinforcement, shaping, etc. – each of these concepts are not comprised of cold facts you will need to memorize. What you’ll find, especially as you start working with an in-person trainer, is that all the various things you are trying to learn will become increasingly sensible and intuitive.
• There are consistent overarching themes: by the same token, you will quickly start to see that each of the concepts we cover are not independent. On the contrary, they are all bridged by a set of overarching principles that apply in every situation. Principles like errorless learning, positive reinforcement, indirect exposure, and so on. In Aside #1, we will survey some of those themes (don’t worry if they don’t make sense yet – as you continue learning, come back to that list and they will come into focus). The implication is that each concept you learn makes every other concept easier to learn and more intuitive. Learning how to e.g., crate train properly will teach you principles that apply to separation anxiety training, potty training, socialization, and other scenarios.
• It will be fun! As we emphasized earlier, all of the concepts we cover are best learned in practice. That means working with your dog! Learning these concepts, taking a class, and applying all of that to working with your dog will be incredibly fun! It’s hard to overstate how rewarding it feels to try and teach your puppy something and see understanding ‘click’ in their brains, to see their excitement and joy at ‘getting it right,’ and to see how much more closely they bond to you for working with them, together as a team!
• It’s not as much time as you think: while it seems like there’s a lot you need to do with your dog, you’ll find it’s not as bad as you might think. Even 5-10 minutes of training a day will make a massive difference in your dog’s confidence, self-control, and general behavior, in your relationship, and in your understanding of how your dog thinks. Indeed, working with many dogs will often stimulate and tire them out more than spending 3X as much time taking them for a walk, hike, or run!
• You do NOT need to master all this on Day 1! Even the most experienced trainers in the world are constantly learning new things, from each other and from their dogs. You will not learn ‘everything’ on Day 1, Week 1, Month 1, or Year 1… and that’s OK! You’ll learn some things, practice and apply them, do some things wrong that you only realize later, and all of that will be OK. As long as you try your best and keep on learning, you and your dog will be fine – we promise! Dog handling and training are lifelong pursuits, so don’t panic, pace yourself, and enjoy the ride.

As discussed in the previous chapter, this primer surveys some of the basic principles any prospective dog owner should know to give their dog a healthy, happy, enriched life and to have a truly enjoyable, fulfilling experience as an owner. It is a starting point, meant to familiarize you with all the things you should learn over the course of the first year or two with your dog. Specifically, we will cover the topics below.

Table of Contents

To make sure you’ve ‘got it’ – and to show others (breeders, trainers, landlords, friends, etc.) that you’ve done your homework – we’ve designed the Responsible Canine Owner Certification (RCOC) exam to test your familiarity with those concepts. Once you pass that, there are a wealth of amazing resources out there for you to actually put the most important concepts into practice; we talk more about those resources and next steps in the previous chapter.

Damaging misconceptions about puppyhood: There are two common – and enormously damaging – misconceptions that far too many new puppy owners go into the experience with:

Summarizing:

1. Puppies don’t raise themselves! There are a slew of crucial experiences, skills, and behaviors you need to take them through. As we highlighted in the Introduction Chapter “Dogs Are Not Furniture” you have to teach your puppy, you are a parent, an educator to this dog. They do not magically become adorable, bonded, well-behaved adult dogs on their own!

2. The first few weeks and months are crucial. You can’t ‘put it off’ til later. Plan to invest more time and energy in the first few weeks, or suffer more stress and time loss later.

In the chapters that follow, we will take you through the most important things you need to do with your puppy in the first weeks, months, and years of your life together. Across them, you will need to get familiar with a puppy’s developmental stages, learn what and how to teach them and socialize them with in each of those stages, and put in the time (and patience) to help them grow into fun, happy, well-adjusted adult dogs.

Don’t worry: at first that may seem like a lot of work, and to an extent it is. You’ll see more concretely as we go, and we promise that process will be more fun and less difficult that it might look at first. And ultimately it is worth remembering: the work you put in now ultimately saves you time (and stress) later, we promise, on top of improving outcomes for your pup.

In the following chapters you will also see the potential consequences of not learning these concepts and putting in the effort. In total, if you don’t learn how to raise a puppy and put in the time to do it, you are creating a lifetime of problems, for you and your dog.

For example:

• If you don’t socialize your puppy, they may become aggressive to other dogs, people, reactive to loud noises, etc. – causing them and you stress, and posing a danger to others.
• If you don’t teach your puppy about appropriate ways to live in the home and give your puppy outlets for their high energy and curiosity, you may be limiting their coping skills and this stress may manifest in other ways.
• If you don’t gradually teach them to be comfortable spending appropriate amounts of time alone, it can get worse and worse, leaving them howling and barking nonstop – for hours – when you leave the house.
• If you don’t start teaching foundational behaviors, your puppy won’t develop the self-control, focus, and problem-solving skills that will make her and you happier and better partners throughout her life.
• And so on

If you’re getting an adult dog, you should still familiarize yourself with the material in this section, for three reasons:

• All of the socialization concepts still apply
• Some of the most common behavioral issues that adult dogs suffer from are covered in this section (those behaviors come from their puppy experiences after all), along with how to address them
• Understanding how a dog’s experiences as a puppy translate into their adult personality, behaviors, and perception of the world around them will make it easier for you to see where your adult dog is coming from, empathize with them, and help them adjust to life with you

In the following Chapters in this Section – such as Socialization Basics, Fear Imprint Stages (fear periods), Chewtoy training, etc. – we will cover the range of critical elements of a dog’s puppyhood that set you and your puppy up for success.

Before we dive into those topics however, it is useful to step back and briefly survey, at a high level, what the various age-based stages of a puppy’s development look like.

Getting familiar with that timeline helps you:

1. Understand what your puppy is experiencing at a given point in time, such as fear periods or rebelliousness, so that you can correctly interpret their behaviors – such as apparent regression from a week before – and respond to them appropriately, in a manner that avoids creating reactivity, damaging your relationship, or training bad behaviors.

2. Know what you need to do for your puppy’s development, and when; such as ensuring that you socialize them sufficiently during their critical ‘socialization window’

3. Provide a roadmap to organize the concepts we cover in other chapters

Once again, we want to emphasize that our treatment here is cursory, an introduction, meant to familiarize you with the basic concepts that you must – through both the remaining chapters in Section 1 as well as outside resources – go and learn. Notably, there are several wonderful books we can recommend that specifically go through the stages of puppy development:

• Ian Dunbar’s Before & After Getting Your Puppy
• Patricia McConnell & Brenda Scidmore’s The Puppy Primer

In addition, we will recommend a few books on specific topics throughout the Chapters that follow.

Developmental milestones:

• Like human babies, puppies are born with highly limited brain, motor, and sensory functionality; initially they will rely on tactile instinct to suckle and nest with littermates
• Around the second and third weeks of life, they will start opening their eyes, motor functionality will gradually expand, and the first beginnings of exploration and curiosity will emerge

What your breeder should be working on:

• Provide the litter with appropriate spaces to nurse, sleep, potty and – eventually – explore and play. Chapter: Choosing a reputable breeder
• Begin early mild ‘stressors,’ such as touch desensitization, to start building resilience and adaptability that will help enormously in their first few months of life. Chapter: Choosing a reputable breeder

Developmental milestones:

• This is their critical ‘socialization window,’ a time period where they are more able to adapt to and grow comfortable with new experiences; after this window, exposing them to new stimuli – people, places, objects, animals – becomes considerably more difficult. Chapters: Socialization Basics, Socialization with & reactivity to strangers, Socialization with & reactivity to other dogs, Environmental Socialization
• First fear periods begin, between 7-11 weeks. Chapter: Fear Imprint Stages (fear periods)
• Although they’ll grow more active with each week, they will continue to nap most of the day (and should be allowed to! They need that nap time to continue physical and neurological development!).
• Bladder control will gradually improve, and careful potty training will help, but that even in the latter half of this window your puppy will likely need to potty at least once during the night, and every time they wake up from a nap during the day (every hour or so to start). See chapter for more details. Chapter: Potty training, penning, and the expanding circle of freedom

What you and your breeder should be working on:

Before go-home date (typically ~8 weeks), at your breeder:

• Human Socialization: Expand socialization with people (while following Socialization best practices! See Chapter Socialization Basics), appropriately introducing the puppies to as many people as possible.
• Environmental Socialization: Start environmental socialization, introducing the puppies to a variety of new places and objects (while following Socialization best practices! See Chapter Socialization Basics). Chapter: Environmental Socialization
• Vet visits & vaccines: Take to vet for first medical examination and vaccinations. Chapter: Medical schedule, vaccines, and vet visits
• Personality Test: Bring in a trainer to conduct an aptitude/personality test. Chapter: Puppy personality variation
• Home Placement: Place puppies, deciding on what the most appropriate puppy for each home is. Chapters: Choosing a reputable breeder, Lifestyle fit of dog breed & personality
• Crate training: Ideally, although it is rarely done, start introducing crates and early crate-training. Chapter: Crate training

After typical go-home date (~8 weeks):

• Human Socialization: Continue (or start, if your breeder hasn’t) human-socialization, introducing your puppy to 200 people in their first 12 weeks of life (4 weeks after you get them)! Chapters: Socialization Basics, Socialization with & reactivity to strangers
• Environmental Socialization: Greatly expand environmental socialization, introducing your puppy to every kind place, sound, object, and stimulus that you could conceivably want them to be comfortable with at any point in their life. Chapters: Socialization Basics, Environmental Socialization
• Dog Socialization: Begin introducing your puppy to other dogs, in: carefully controlled scenarios; with dogs that are not reactive, do not resource guard, have low ‘aggression responses,’ are well-socialized, and are fully up-to-date on their vaccines; and with you present and carefully monitoring the interaction. This socialization helps teach your puppy how to accurately read and project dog body language, and avoids developing reactivity later. Chapter: Socialization with & reactivity to other dogs
• Play & Problem-Solving: Play with your puppy! Give them plenty of time to nap, but also start investing in play. Also start creating age-appropriate ‘challenges’ for your puppy, giving her problems to solve to develop her confidence, self-control, perseverance, curiosity, and intelligence. Chapter: Playing with your puppy & teaching her problem-solving
• Early manners Training: Begin early ‘training’ as part of play, to build foundational skills, build your relationship, and start good habits. Chapter: Behavioral training the first year
• Crate Training: Crate-train your puppy. Chapter: Crate training
• Chewtoy Training: Chewtoy-train your puppy. Chapter: Chewtoy training
• Bite Inhibition Training: Start bite-inhibition training. Chapter: Bite inhibition
• Potty Training: Start potty-training. Chapter: Potty training, penning, and the expanding circle of freedom
• Expanding Circle of Freedom: To teach good behaviors in an ‘errorless’ fashion (which we’ll explore in-depth), you will initially limit the space in which your puppy has unfettered freedom, gradually expanding that circle as you start to reinforce appropriate behaviors – like not pottying indoors, and not chewing on non-toy objects. Chapters: Potty training, penning, and the expanding circle of freedom, Errorless learning
• Separation Anxiety Prevention Training: You will very slowly and very carefully begin separation anxiety training. Chapter: Separation anxiety
• Grooming Exposure: Begin grooming ‘training’; they don’t need a lot of husbandry to start, but now is the time to start getting them comfortable (and happy!) to have their ears, paws, mouth, etc. handled. Chapter: Cooperative care
• Vet visits & vaccines: Continue appropriate medical examination and vaccination schedules. Chapter: Medical schedule, vaccines, and vet visits

There are a couple things worth pointing out in the 3-12 week developmental phase:

1. The socialization window is short! If you take your puppy home at 8 weeks, you only have 4 weeks to lay strong socialization foundations. As we will talk about in Chapter 1-2: Socialization Basics you absolutely can make up for lost time later, but any socialization you do after this 3-12 week window will have to be slower and more careful.

2. There is a lot to do in these first few weeks! The list above might rightfully seem daunting. While getting used to a new puppy, you also have to work on potty training, crate training, separation anxiety training, grooming exposure, etc. etc.

You might look at all that and be terrified, thinking “I can never do this!” DON’T PANIC! It’s not as bad as it looks! As we mentioned in Aside #3, there’s a few things that are going to help you:

• The first 4 weeks are busy, but it gets easier from there – not only do you get in the swing of things, but there is just less and less you have to work on as your puppy matures. As we will discuss in Section 3: A Dog’s Basic Needs, you will have to provide your dog with physical activity, mental stimulation, work/training, and your own company throughout their lives; but the extent of those needs peaks in these first months and tapers down fairly quickly over time.
• The more you do now, the less you have to do later – the reason we encourage you to do so much in the first 4 weeks you have your puppy is that these are all easier to do if you do them now. Not only are you in the core socialization window, but as we will cover in Errorless learning, bad habits are a lot easier to avoid than they are to un-train. If you put in the work early on, you save yourself a lot more work and stress later on!

So don’t be intimidated – you will be fine! The important things – and what we are really trying to get across by taking you through that checklist above – are:

1. Prepare before getting your puppy: familiarize yourself, through this primer and other resources, with the things you need to teach your puppy before getting your puppy. Waiting until after you get your puppy to start studying will just increase your stress and workload.

2. Budget extra time in the first 2-4 weeks: planning and allocating enough time in that first 4 weeks will save you so much time later on. Try to arrange a lighter work schedule for the first 2-3 weeks you have your puppy, and clear off any other non-essential responsibilities in that time. Give yourself the space you need! Again, it will pay off down the road

Developmental milestones:

• In this period, your puppy will increasingly sleep less, and start being more active. They’ll want (and need) more physical activity and mental stimulation. Chapters: Section 3: A Dog’s Basic Needs
• While the core ‘socialization window’ will be closed, they will still be more open to socialization than later in life, and you should continue to do so.
• Fear periods may recur periodically, depending on the dog. Chapter: Fear Imprint Stages (fear periods)

What you should be working on:

• Ongoing Socialization: You should have achieved most of your socialization goals by this point already (see above). However, (a) deliberate, appropriately-executed socialization should continue throughout their first two years of life, and (b) there will inevitably be gaps in their socialization, which you should work on carefully filling. Chapters: Socialization Basics, Socialization with & reactivity to strangers, Socialization with & reactivity to other dogs, Environmental Socialization
• Physical Activity & Open-Ended Exploration: You should start providing your dog with more and more opportunities for physical exertion and open-ended exploration, such as long-line hikes, sniff-aris, and play sessions with other (appropriately-chosen, see above) puppies and dogs. Bear in mind age-appropriate limits however. You cannot rely on puppies to self-regulate, and over-exertion at this age can lead to joint and muscle problems later in life. Chapters: Puppy exercise and over-exertion, Need for physical activity, Need for open-ended exploration
• Manners Training: As they start to mature and their self-control and mental faculties expand, continue with associative learning, both informally during play sessions/life interactions and formally in short training sessions. You will start with simple and foundational behaviors such as Sit, Down, Give, Touch, and Leave It, and eventually work up to more advanced behaviors and ‘tricks.’ Chapter: Behavioral training the first year
• Expanding Circle of Freedom: As your puppy matures and continues to be prevented from engaging in ‘bad’ behaviors (like stealing food and chewing on furniture), you will continue to gradually expand the space in which they have unfettered access. Chapter: Potty training, penning, and the expanding circle of freedom
• Separation Anxiety Prevention Training: You will continue separation anxiety training. Chapter: Separation anxiety
• Grooming: Continue grooming exposure to build adult grooming habits. Chapters: Section 5: Husbandry
• Vet visits & vaccines: Continue appropriate medical examination and vaccination schedules. Chapter: Medical schedule, vaccines, and vet visits

What you should be working on:

• Ongoing Socialization: You should have achieved most of your socialization goals by this point already (see above). However, (a) deliberate, appropriately-executed socialization should continue throughout their first two years of life, and (b) there will inevitably be gaps in their socialization, which you should work on carefully filling. Chapters: Socialization Basics, Socialization with & reactivity to strangers, Socialization with & reactivity to other dogs, Environmental Socialization
• Physical Activity & Open-Ended Exploration: your puppy should now be ready for adult levels of activity. Indeed, their total energy needs will likely exceed what they will need as adults. Be sure to achieve that with an appropriate mix of play and exploration. Chapters: Puppy exercise and over-exertion, Need for physical activity, Need for open-ended exploration, Need for social time with other dogs, Off-leash requirements
• Formal Training: As their self-control and foundational skills expand, you should continue to deepen (improve response time and adherence of) critical core behaviors like Down and start moving to more advanced behaviors like Recall. Chapter: Behavioral training the first year
• Grooming: Move to an adult grooming schedule and continue reinforcing positive experiences and behavior. Section 5: Husbandry
• Vet visits & vaccines: Continue appropriate medical examination and vaccination schedules. Chapter: Medical schedule, vaccines, and vet visits

The first 3-12 weeks of a puppy’s life (~4 weeks after the typical 8-week go-home date) are what is called their ‘socialization window,’ a period during which their experiences now are more likely to translate to greater adaptability later.

We will talk more about that time window and its consequences below, but the basic implication is that puppies must be exposed – multiple times – to as close as possible to every type of situation and scenario they will encounter later in their lives, including:

• Human interactions (Chapter 1-3) – having them meet as many people, of as many ‘types’ (men, women, adults, children, tall, short, different skin tones, different clothing, different hats, etc.), in as many contexts (at home, outside, in other homes, in public, etc.) as possible
• Dog interactions (Chapter 1-4) – having them meet a variety of other (well-socialized) dogs, in a variety of contexts (play, passing in street, in front of your house while you’re indoors, etc.)
• Environmental experiences (Chapter 1-5) – exposing them to as wide a range of objects, places (stores, malls, yards, homes, streets), and physical, auditory, and visual stimuli (rain, loud noises, traffic, fireworks, fire, fountains, bicycles) as possible

That process is called ‘socialization.’

Thorough and appropriately-conducted socialization is critically necessary to raising a well-behaved, happy dog, because it makes them comfortable in a wide variety of circumstances later in life, preventing them from becoming reactive (fearful and aggressive) towards people and dogs, in addition to a slew of other benefits such as improving their resilience, adaptability, confidence, and curiosity.

Failing to properly or thoroughly socialize your puppy risks turning them into adult dogs that are fearful and reactive to a range of experiences, leading to a life punctuated by stress and anxiety, and posing a potential danger to other people and dogs. A lack of socialization, or negative socialization experiences, are among the greatest causes of behavioral issues that lead to re-homing, abandonment, or euthanization for millions of dogs every year.

We will go deeper into the importance of socialization below, but the bottom line is that sufficient, properly-implemented socialization is something you ABSOLUTELY MUST DO with your puppy.

Other than training (Section 2), we will devote more time to Socialization – four entire chapters – than any other concept. It is that important.

In the bullets below and chapters that follow, we will take you through:

• How to socialize your puppy in a proper manner – how to create positive experiences with new people, places, animals, and objects
• Why thorough socialization is so critical – the many benefits of socialization, and the consequences of failing to do it

The point of each socialization experience is to teach your dog that that situation – and new experiences in general – are not scary. That only happens if your dog feels safe, reassured, and rewarded in what would otherwise be a scary situation to them.

That process is particularly difficult – and important – for puppies because dogs as a whole are particularly prone to fear responses:

• Dogs – both as puppies and adults – are, in general, predisposed towards wariness of situations and stimuli they have not encountered before. While predisposition to caution does vary with personality differences between dogs (see Chapter 6-5: Puppy personality variation), that variation is a relative factor, not absolute. Even the most curious, outgoing puppy will tend to have an automatic fear response to new experiences.
• Furthermore, puppies go through distinct ‘fear imprint stages,’ where they are especially primed to both be afraid of new things and to have that fear ‘imprinted’ (learn to always be afraid of that thing). We will explore these periods and how to handle them more in Chapter 1-6.
• Finally, domestic canines easily imprint negative experiences. As we will talk about more in Chapter 2-11: Single-event learning, dogs unfortunately are primed to imprint (learn) very strongly from unpleasant experiences . That means that fear – a negative emotion – can form quickly and, if not addressed, can easily lead your dog to develop reactivity (i.e. a conditioned fear response) towards people, places, objects, or other dogs.

As a result, you should generally assume that when you expose your puppy to a new situation, there is a good chance they will have a fear response.

If you do nothing, that fear response can imprint: your dog can learn to be afraid of that type of person, place, dog, or object. Each time they encounter the stimulus, their fear response will reinforce itself more deeply. At best, that will turn into anxiety and misbehavior; at worst it will turn into dangerous reactivity.

Ultimately therefore, socialization is about helping your puppy see that those ‘scary’ situations are not scary, making them happy and comfortable with new things.

Socialization is therefore a two-part job:

An important note on the second point: ‘not being afraid’ is not the same as ‘being happy/excited.’ Your ultimate goal is to have your dog be neutral in these situations. Unlike behavioral training (Section 2), where you use positive reinforcement to make your dog over the moon about something, your goal here is not to get your dog worked up. First off, a neutral response is a win in socialization – don’t stress about trying to get your dog super excited. Second, sometimes over-excitement can be nearly as problematic in socialization situations, both practically and emotionally for your dog, as fear. So do use positive reinforcement, but don’t try to achieve unadulterated joy in all scenarios.

So how do you achieve this goal in practice? In the next bullet, we will take you through some general techniques.

So you expose your puppy to a new situation, and they are wary – what do you do? How do you take a potentially scary situation and turn it into a fun, positive one?

In general terms, you do it by exposing them carefully, gently, and supportively, showing them that you are present and they are safe, and pairing the experience with lots of praise and positive reinforcement.

We will take you through some more concrete techniques below. To help you visualize them more clearly, try imagining a few common first-time exposure scenarios:

• A new type of surface they’ve never walked on
• A strange person they’ve never met
• A loud noise like a vacuum machine (or fireworks!)
• City traffic
• Children

When you expose your puppy to a new situation like those, they may be cautious or wary; they may even step away or retreat. So how do you overcome that wariness? Here is a toolkit you can practice and use:

Techniques for socializing your puppy with a new experience

Essentially, the goal is to create an overall positive emotional state in your dog. By creating a positive experience around the new stimulus, they learn that it is OK, safe, not dangerous.

Unfortunately, as should now be clear, it is an uphill battle, because they are coming into most new experiences with fear. As long as you monitor your dog’s emotional state however, you will be fine. Plus, the more socialization you do, the better you will get at it!

It’s also important to remember that a small amount of stress is good for your puppy. Too much stress just leads to a spiral and negative associations (see above), but a small amount of stress – which is then overcome with lots of positive experiences and reinforcement – helps build their resilience and adaptability. In Chapter 2-27: Building core capabilities we’ll talk about that in more depth.

The important thing is that, by following the techniques we laid out above, you ultimately turn those stressful experiences into positive ones. That gives your puppy confidence, and the skill set to adapt to new experiences later in life!

When exposing your puppy to a given stimulus – vacuums, people with hats, etc. – you have to go through the process multiple times, for each stimulus.

That is necessary for your dog to develop a pattern and reinforce the comfort – to recognize that it’s not just this vacuum this time that’s safe, it’s all vacuums all of the time.

That means LOTS of socialization. For example, as a benchmark for human socialization, we follow Ian Dunbar’s recommendation of meeting 200 different people in the first 12 weeks of life (in the next Chapter, Socialization with & reactivity to strangers, we will go into more detail on that).

The more hesitant your puppy is about a given experience, the more exposure they need to it. Just remember to go SLOWLY; per above, do not push it such that you increase their reaction to it.

One of the biggest challenges in making sure your puppy is sufficiently socialized is that the window for socialization is extremely short.

As we introduced in Chapter 1-1, the first 3-12 weeks of life are a critical ‘socialization window,’ a period when they are most receptive to acclimating to new experiences. While, as discussed earlier in the chapter, they will be fearful, they will also – with proper encouragement from you (see socialization techniques above) – overcome that fear more readily now than they will later in life.

Since most people get their puppies at 7-8 weeks old, and many breeders do not do much socialization (there are some exceptions, and those breeders are worth every extra penny if you can find them – see Chapter 6-3: Choosing a reputable breeder), that means that most owners have only 3-4 weeks to get much of their socialization in!

During that 3-4 week window, you need to expose your puppy to a wide range of experiences with other people, places, objects, and dogs.

In the chapters after this one – Socialization with & reactivity to strangers, Socialization with & reactivity to other dogs, and Environmental Socialization – we will go into specifically what sorts of experiences you need to socialize your puppy with.

For now, we want to highlight two points on timing:

• The first 4 weeks: A great deal of socialization needs to be completed in the 3-to-12-week-old period (first 4 weeks after go-home). Not all socialization necessarily needs to be completed in this window, but much of it should, for two reasons:
  1. As mentioned, they are most receptive in this period. Any socialization you do later will be harder, take longer, and not generalize as well to new experiences.
  2. Socialization in this first 12-week window lays stronger foundations that make later socialization easier: the more new stimuli they experience and get comfortable with in their first 12 weeks, the more confident and adaptable they will be with future new experiences when you continue socialization later.
• The first year: After the core socialization window, you should still keep working on socialization throughout their first year. Your first 4 weeks will be the more intense period, but even after that you should continue to regularly work on socialization, for two main reasons:
  • To fill in gaps – experiences (people, places, objects, etc.) that you missed in the primary socialization window.

    It’s impossible to actually cover everything in 4 weeks: even if you had the time and energy, your puppy can only go through so many new experiences in a day (it’s exhausting for them after all!).

  • To continue building on and reinforcing past experiences. As mentioned, dogs need exposure to stimuli multiple times to grow lastingly comfortable with them. Repeated positive experiences over their first year of life will build enduring positive associations to those stimuli in particular, and new experiences in general.

The bottom line is that one of the first things you need to do after bringing your puppy home is start socializing them – every single day – with a wide variety of experiences.

While that means more work in the first few weeks and months, it pays big dividends: socialization at this age is faster and stickier than later on, and a few weeks of work pays off with a lifetime of a happy, strong, well-adjusted dog.

Sadly, many new dog owners don’t realize this. Dogs mature so much faster than human children, the socialization window closes so rapidly, that we often don’t appreciate how narrow our window is. Many new dog owners only start to learn about socialization as a concept after problems, like fear and reactivity, have cropped up – at which point it is much harder to address! Missing this window – and missing socialization in general – is perhaps the single greatest source of the most serious behavioral problems in dogs.

For socialization to be effective, it has to be comprehensive, not just frequent. Anything you do not expose a puppy to in the first year of their life – and ideally the first 12 weeks – they risk later becoming fearful of and reactive to, creating stress for your dog and headaches (or even danger) for you.

That means you must socialize your puppy to the full range of experiences you want them to be tolerant to – i.e. (nearly) everything that you expect they will encounter later in life.

For example:

• If you want them to be able to come to your future children’s little league games without being stressed, acting out, and causing disruption, you should take them to some little league games, or at least take them to meet plenty of children.
• If you want them to be able to go on roadtrips with you, you better make sure they get experience while young to stay in hotels, traveling in the car for a long period of time, etc.
• If you want them to not act out when you groom them, you should be exposing them to clippers and combs daily when they are young, even if they don’t actually need much grooming yet (we’ll discuss this more in Chapter 5-1), and prioritize making those experiences fun and positive!

To be reasonably comprehensive, we recommend coming up with a ‘checklist’ of experiences to expose your dog to. You can go about that in three steps:

1. You can start with our checklist below – it includes many experiences that new owners might not intuitively think of, like people wearing hats, or people with facial hair.

2. Then, sit down and brainstorm other life experiences you want your dog to be prepared for.

3. Finally, as you go about your daily life with your puppy, watch for her reactions; if she reacts fearfully to something, take a moment to, using our socialization techniques from earlier, acclimate her to it. Then add it it to your checklist to keep working on.

See below for the checklist

Note: this list itself is not tested on the RCO Certification Exam, it is purely for your reference. You can download a printable PDF here.

In implementing these, be sure to follow our Socialization Techniques above. In addition, see the following chapters – Socialization with & reactivity to strangers, Socialization with & reactivity to other dogs, and Environmental Socialization – for more details on execution.

People (Chapter 1-3)

• Men
• Women
• Children, of various ages
• People of different skin tones
• Taller people
• Shorter people
• People wearing hats (can be you)
• People wearing sunglasses
• People with facial hair
• People wearing hoodies (can be you)
• People wearing big jackets (can be you)
• People carrying walking sticks (the third ‘limb’ can surprise a lot of dogs)
• Strollers
• People with canes
• People in wheelchairs
• Bicycles and people on bicycles
• Greeting strangers, having strangers approach them and interact with them (this is an important one, but requires some finesse – see Chapter 1-3: Socialization with & reactivity to strangers for details)
• Strangers walking in front of your house
• Unfamiliar people walking in your yard
• Unfamiliar people coming into your house

Dogs and animals (Chapter 1-4: Socialization with & reactivity to other dogs)

• Other dogs, of different sizes (especially large dogs), genders, breeds, ages, intact/neutered, and demeanors (see Socialization with & reactivity to other dogs for how to do this appropriately)
• Horses, in different scenarios (trails, farms)
• Chickens
• Livestock

Places/weather (Chapter 1-5)

• City traffic
• Crowded places
• Stores (many stores allow dogs; will likely require some obedience training first)
• Parking lots
• Malls
• Children’s sports games
• Restaurant patios (will likely require some obedience training first)
• Other peoples’ homes
• Fountains
• Boats
• On busses
• On trains
• In the car
• The ocean
• Rain
• Snow
• Strong winds
• Beaches
• Woods
• Gravel
• Hotels
• Apartment Buildings
• Any other natural ecosystems you’re likely to hike in
• Different Surfaces, like grass, pavement, turf, grates, etc. (see Chapter 1-5 for why and what we mean)

Objects (Chapter 1-5)

• Fireworks
• Lawnmowers
• Vacuum cleaners
• Robot vacuums
• Television
• Loud children’s toys
• Musical instruments

To a first-time dog owner, the short time window to cover so much can feel intimidating. As we will lay out in the deep-dive chapters – Socialization with & reactivity to strangers, Socialization with & reactivity to other dogs, and Environmental Socialization – you shouldn’t panic, it is doable, and will be easier than you think.

Even so, there is one very big way you can make your life a lot easier: find a breeder who does an appropriate amount of early socialization, including things like touch-desensitization and bringing them places to meet new people and see new environments.

That early breeder socialization isn’t strictly necessary – you absolutely can catch up in those first few weeks you have your puppy home. But if you find a breeder that does a good amount of early socialization, you will be starting from a stronger, easier place:

• Your puppy will both have more experiences under her belt already, reducing the pressure on you
• And – as a consequence – your puppy will be more adaptable and more readily exposed to even more new experiences.

What’s more, your breeder can socialize before your puppy’s fear periods start, making the socialization process itself much easier for her.

Bottom line, the more early socialization your breeder does, the easier your job will be.

In a later chapter, Choosing a reputable breeder, we cover other things to look for in a breeder. We strongly recommend you follow that guidance to make your – and your puppy’s – life a lot easier.

The importance of putting the time and energy into sufficiently socializing your puppy cannot be overstated. It is the single most important thing you can do for your puppy. To make that clear, we’d like to survey the benefits of socialization, and the consequences of failing to do so.

The consequences of poor socialization

If you don’t socialize your puppy, they risk becoming fearful and reactive to people, places, objects, or other animals.

Here are some very common examples of poor socialization outcomes, ranging from mild annoyances to life-threatening:

• Barking at different races/ethnicities or disabled people: If you don’t socialize your puppy with people of a full range of skin colors, or people with canes or wheelchairs, they may bark at those people whenever they see them.
• Refusing to potty in the rain: If you don’t socialize your puppy to rain (especially if it’s infrequent in your area), they might avoid or refuse to go out whenever it rains, going potty somewhere hidden in the house.
• Reactive to children: If you don’t socialize your puppy to children, they could be frightened or nervous around children, causing them to bark, run away, hide, and jump at kids, scaring them.
• Reactive to dogs: If you don’t socialize your puppy to other (well-socialized) dogs, they will have a high likelihood of becoming dog-reactive – barking, lunging, or even biting or attacking other dogs when they get too close. They will likely never be able to experience the joy of playing with other dogs, and if they do play with other dogs they run the risk of ‘snapping:’ not having a clear line between play and sincere predation, violently attacking and harming other dogs.
• Reactive to strangers: If you don’t socialize your puppy to meeting strangers, they will have a high likelihood of becoming human-reactive – barking, lunging, and even biting or attacking people. This is where dog-human aggression comes from (along with ‘negative socialization’ in the form of dog abuse), and unfortunately often leads to putting the dog down.

Now you can see why lack of proper socialization is the strongest driving factor behind the hundreds of thousands of dog euthanizations conducted each year, on top of the millions of dogs who simply cause their owners stress and inconvenience with their reactivity.

The bottom line is that if you don’t socialize your dog well, you are signing them up for a life punctuated by extreme stress, and potentially creating a danger for your dog, yourself, and others.

Why dogs are particularly prone to reactivity

There are a few reasons why, scientifically, dogs are particularly prone to developing negative behaviors as a result of poor socialization:

• Prone to fear response – as we discussed in the bullet above on ‘socialization & fear’[link], dogs in general – and puppies in particular – are prone to having a fear response to new stimuli.
• Sensitivity to negative experiences – fear does not feel good; it is therefore what’s called a ‘negative association.’ We will talk much more about positive and negative reinforcers in the later Section 2: Core Training Concepts, but for our intents here the idea is fairly straightforward: when an experience is negative for us, we tend to avoid that experience in the future.

  While pretty much all creatures – from humans to amoeba – form positive and negative associations, it turns out that how strongly we respond to those can vary a lot from species to species.

  Dogs are highly sensitive to unpleasant experiences. When they experience something bad – like a feeling of fear – they are more likely than most animals to avoid the perceived cause of that experience.

  As a result, not only are dogs prone to be afraid of new experiences, but they are also more likely to ‘imprint’ that fear, and want to avoid that experience in the future.

  To put it differently, fear is self-reinforcing: it is an aversive mental state, so when your puppy is afraid of something, and nothing is done to allay that fear, they will associate that stimulus with a feeling of fear. When they encounter that stimulus again in the future, they will remember the fear, and the cycle repeats, deepening that association.

  Imagine you were afraid of clowns as a child: perhaps nothing bad specifically happened to you, but you just found clowns intrinsically scary. As an adult, you can still remember that fear, you still associate clowns with fear and it brings up that emotion (although as an adult human, you have cultural knowledge – you know what a clown is – that can help you fight that fear; a dog has no such benefit).

• Single event learning – as if a predisposition towards fear and tendency to imprint that fear weren’t bad enough, dogs are also strong ‘single event learners.’ That means that dogs are primed to learn to like or fear something based on a single experience.

  That creates a great danger: a single bad experience with a stranger or another dog can easily imprint on your puppy forever.

  In a later chapter, Single-event learning, we will explore this phenomenon in more depth, including how to handle negative experiences if they do happen, to prevent them from imprinting.

So with dogs we have a triple whammy:

• They’re biased to be afraid of new experiences
• Unpleasant new experiences can quickly lead to the formation of fear
• They can permanently imprint that fear from even just a single negative experience

The end result is: socialization HAS to be a deliberate process – both in terms of getting your dog broad exposure, and making it positive. If you just leave your dog to her own devices, she has a high likelihood of becoming reactive.

The benefits to socialization

Thankfully socialization isn’t just about about avoiding bad outcomes – it also yields tremendous benefits. Early puppy socialization:

So while early socialization is a bit of work, it pays big dividends!

All of the above might seem hard, but really you will get the hang of it.

Even so, there might be a particular stimulus, a particular experience, that you’re really struggling with: for whatever reason your puppy is deathly afraid of it, they spiral out of control, and you can’t seem to get them to calm down.

In those situations, it is strongly advisable to book a session with a local in-person trainer, who can help show you how to deal with that particular situation.

That is particularly important for any fear your puppy shows towards other dogs or people. In Chapter 1-3 and Chapter 1-4 we will comment in more depth on those cases – and on the utility of doing some sessions with a trainer

We covered a lot above, and will add more nuance in the following three chapters, so it is worth pulling everything together. While we covered lots of specific techniques, they all tie back to four key elements at the root of effective socialization, which we can group into two buckets:

• Creating positive experiences: the root of socialization, and its most important component
  1. Positive reinforcement – creating positive associations through rewards like treats, praise, and play
  2. Mitigating negative responses – exposing to stimuli in a way the avoids or minimizes their natural fear response to unfamiliar things
• Creating broad exposure:
  3. Breadth of exposure – exposing your puppy to as wide and diverse a range of people, places, things, and creatures as possible, to both expand the set of specific experiences they are comfortable with and to instill the sense that new, unfamiliar things aren’t scary in general
  4. Repetition – exposing to stimuli not just once, but many times, creating enough frequency to consistently reinforce positive associations with those stimuli

As we highlighted in the previous chapter, failure to thoroughly socialize your puppy with strangers can cause them to become reactive towards humans.

A dog can be human-reactive to either all unfamiliar people, if they have been generally under-socialized, or to particular ‘types’ of people, if they have not been sufficiently socialized to specific groups, such as men, children, people of different skin tones, people with canes or walking sticks, people wearing jackets, people with facial hair, etc.

Human-reactive dogs are fearful of other people, because they have not been taught that humans – even unfamiliar ones around their owners – are generally safe.

Internally, that fear response causes them great stress (they are afraid for their lives, after all).

Externally, that fear translates into some mixture of threatening responses – such as barking, growling, raising their hackles, biting, and attacking – or extreme fear behaviors – such as cowering, rolling onto their back (often misinterpreted by owners as cute), urinating, or running away and hiding.

Given that we – and therefore our dogs – live surrounded by humans (even most rural households receive regular visitors and take their dogs places like parks, hiking trails, restaurants, barbecue’s, parties, etc.), human-reactivity in a dog means that:

1. Their lives are punctuated by extreme stress. Remember, if your dog is exhibiting a fear response, the situation might seem fine and normal to you, but they are literally afraid for their life.

2. They pose a great risk to others – and therefore themselves. Even if 99% of the time they don’t harm another person, that 1 time in 100 can cause serious harm, and may result in your dog being put down.

3. You are greatly limiting where you can bring them and what you can do with them. Don’t you want to be able to take your dog to kid’s birthday parties? Or picnics? Or hiking on trails with other people around? If you don’t socialize your puppy, you are enforcing upon them a lifetime of solitude!

Clearly, as a responsible puppy owner you MUST ensure that your puppy or adult dog is thoroughly socialized to other humans! Failure to do so signs them – and you – up for a more limited life punctuated by stress and danger.

Fortunately, human-reactivity is usually incredibly easy to avoid through socialization during the puppy phase!

That means meeting lots of different people, in lots of different circumstances, particularly within the 3-12-week-old puppy socialization period.

Number of people

How many people does your puppy need to meet? We follow Ian Dunbar’s guidance, and recommend that you make sure your puppy meets at least 200 different people in their first 12 weeks of life.

That can seem like a lot, especially given that you take your puppy home at 8 weeks, but I promise it is not as difficult as it seems:

• First off, if you chose a good breeder, they will have done a good amount of socialization already, giving you a strong head start. See Chapter 6-3 for more qualities to look for.
• Even if they haven’t however, if you make an effort to socialize your puppy in one new environment per day, it can add up quickly.

  For example, if you take your puppy to a dog-friendly store (like some grocery stores or a hardware store), you can easily introduce them to 10 or more individuals throughout the store (people love meeting puppies), from patrons to staff to checkout clerks. If you went to 4 stores a week, that’s 40 people a week alone.

• Besides taking your puppy to stores, you can invite friends and relatives over – and go to their houses – to introduce the puppy (Ian Dunbar, in Before & After Getting your Puppy, has the wonderful suggestion of holding short ‘puppy parties’ to get people to help).

  You can also take your puppy to playgrounds, baseball games, and other public spaces where you can introduce them to people. Just make sure to keep them happy and engaged and not overwhelmed! Remember our lessons in Chapter 1-2!

So as intimidating as 200 different people sounds, it really is quite achievable. Over 4 weeks – assuming your breeder did no socialization – that is 7 people a day, a very manageable goal with access to public spaces. Generally speaking, people are more than happy to take a moment to say hello to your puppy. As long as you are deliberate, you will hit the target.

You can also now start to see how the techniques we introduced in Socialization Basics work: if your puppy is going to all these public places where people (calmly) fawn over her, give her treats, encourage her, and generally don’t do anything threatening, she will quickly come to love being around other people! They bring lots of praise, happiness, and rewards after all! That is how you raise a well-adjusted dog.

Diversity of people and contexts

In addition to socializing with a high number of people, you must also ensure a comprehensive diversity of people. Dogs do not generalize well.

For example, if they are socialized almost entirely with women, they will not mentally extend that sense of comfort to men. The first time they see someone with a beard, or a cane, or a hat, they will likely react, even if they’ve met hundreds of people before.

That means making sure you get your dog exposure to all different sorts of people, in a wide variety of contexts.

For ‘sorts of people,’ make sure to include not just different ages and genders, but also unintuitive things like:

For ‘wide variety of contexts,’ try to socialize your puppy not just at your home, but in other people’s homes, stores, parks, parking lots, etc. Again, this will help them generalize that meeting people is fine anywhere, not just meeting people in a specific setting.

(note: as we will discuss later in the chapter, all of this discussion applies to non-reactive puppies. If you have an adult dog or puppy displaying any reactivity towards a stimulus – especially towards other dogs or people – do not try to socialize them on your own! You must work with a professional trainer. See later in the chapter for discussion on this point)

In the previous Chapter, Socialization Basics, we laid out a series of techniques to use to make your puppy comfortable with new experiences and create positive associations. All of those techniques apply to exposing your puppy to new people.

In addition, here are a few techniques specific to meeting a new person:

• Stand between your puppy and the new person, but off to the side, showing your puppy that you are present, aware, and relaxed.
• Let the puppy come to them, rather than them approaching the puppy. It can help if you kneel next to the person, between them and your puppy.
• Give the new person a treat, and have them offer it to the puppy underhand, with their palm open, letting the puppy to eat it out of their hand.

  Note: if your puppy is particularly nervous, don’t have the stranger give them a treat or touch them. Instead, you can give your puppy a treat and reward them for merely observing the stranger calmly, for observing them or for displaying any sign of curiosity.

  Note: the person should extend a treat in an open palm, they should not extend a hand to ‘sniff.’ That physical projection is aggressive, not helpful.

• Ask the person not to lean forward or ‘loom’ over the puppy. The best (least-threatening) posture is to get down and match their vertical level, positioning yourself parallel to them to avoid a confrontational posture until they get comfortable.
• For very shy puppies, having the person present their back to the puppy with treat hand stretched behind them is often a less threatening posture.
• Ask the person not to reach over the puppy’s head – that will make them afraid
• If the puppy still shows reluctance you can try having the stranger toss the food away from them. This give the puppy the opportunity to create space while simultaneously tapping into their chase instinct.
• Often times dogs can view taking food from a stranger as subservient or transactional. An interactive alternative such as rolling a ball for the puppy to chase can be a wonderful alternative, especially when the goal is establishing what might be an ongoing relationship with this new person.
• Aside: ‘people-pleasing’ behavior: this goes back to what we covered in the previous chapter – do not force an interaction; if you prompt a nervous puppy to take a treat from a stranger, they may take the treat not because they are calm, but because they are trying to ‘appease’ you and make the threat go away. As always, be sure to watch your puppy’s body language, and do not move forward with socialization when your dog is nervous! If they’re nervous, take steps (as outlined in the previous chapter) to help them calm down. Forcing a nervous dog to interact with strangers will only deepen reactivity

As always, several of the wonderful puppy books in our further reading page contain a number of other effective, helpful techniques for introducing new people to your dog. Ian Dunbar in particular highlights a ‘pass the puppy’ game that is fun and effective, which we paraphrase here:

• Sit on the ground in a wide circle with several friends or relatives.
• Have one of the people across from you call to your puppy, speaking in a high tone, and holding out a treat or one of your puppy’s favorite toys (a tug-toy is perfect); encourage your puppy to go to them.
• Once your puppy goes to them, have the other person (and you) shower them with praise and give them a treat or play with the toy.
• Then have another person in the circle do the same thing, getting the puppy to come to them. If you’re using a toy, have the person with the toy toss it over to the new person

This game is a great way to make your puppy excited about new people – they are a lot of fun after all!

Unfortunately, there is a not-insignificant population of adopted adult dogs who are reactive to strangers, either because of under-socialization or deliberate negative-socialization (people misguidedly raising them as ‘guard’ dogs – see next bullet below – or otherwise abusing and mistreating them).

Thankfully, most of these dogs can be reformed, and learn to be comfortable around even strangers.

Here are some recommendations for doing so. As a disclaimer, it is important that you understand that reactive dogs can pose a danger to others – their fear, as we’ve highlighted, can manifest as aggression and violence. As such, as we emphasize below, if you have a reactive dog then we strongly recommend that you at least start by working with a professional trainer who specializes in reactive dogs. With that in mind, here is some guidance on applying socialization to adult dogs:

• Carefully follow the usual socialization approaches, as laid out in Chapter 1-2 and in the bullet above.
• Go very slowly, be patient, and be deliberate. As always, socialize without physical contact first! Reward observation from a safe distance, only increasing proximity as reactions become neutral. Remember your goal is to make the experience positive, so do everything you can to set your dog up for success. Start in familiar environments, don’t force them to the person, and use your own body and positioning to show them that everything is ok. You should be in between your dog and the ‘stranger,’ interacting with the stranger as if everything is normal. Your dog may bark at first, but with repeated neutral experiences they should see ‘ok I guess everything is OK.’ As they calm down, even marginally, reward that with praise and treats. And be careful in identifying what ‘calm’ looks like – a lot of body language owners interpret as calm, like licking you or rolling over, is actually a fear response; we will talk more about body language in Chapter 4-5, but honestly a session with a non-compulsion trainer is the fastest easiest way to start to learn those body signals. Eventually, when they are calm, have the stranger offer them treats in the manner we outlined above, and ideally eventually toys as well. Do NOT have the stranger approach your dog! Let your dog go to them, once they understand that nothing bad is happening.
• Work in one ‘stranger’ at a time, starting in familiar environments and only later moving on to novel ones.
• If you can afford it, we strongly insist on hiring a local trainer specializing in reactive dogs. They can teach you techniques, help you design a socialization plan for your specific dog, and help you get started. Ultimately you will need to do the work, but they can show you how to do it safely and effectively. Reactivity can lead to extremely dangerous situations – do not try to socialize a reactive dog without professional help. Make sure to work with a non-compulsion trainer: as we discussed in Chapter 1-2, if your dog is reacting with fear to strangers, layering negative reinforcement on top of that fear might achieve suppression, but it will make the underlying reactivity (which is rooted in a fear response) worse. See Chapter 2-23 for tips on identifying an appropriate trainer.

Most importantly, do not simply let it go. Too many owners accept reactivity in an adult dog as unchangeable. Despite the emphasis we put in the previous section on socialization during puppyhood, dogs are remarkably adaptable, and you can dramatically mitigate reactivity, often with far less work than you might initially anticipate. Your dog may never love being around strangers, but at the least you can make them tolerant to them, saving them (and you) stress, reducing the danger of them biting someone, and opening up access to far more life experiences.

Finally, be patient and do not get discouraged! If your dog is very reactive – becoming violent and uncontrollable when they see another person – it will initially feel like an impossible, insurmountable obstacle. We promise, however, that when you start to work on socialization deliberately, you will see results quicker than you’d think. You will be amazed at how much a reactive dog can transform in a month after regular, careful, thoughtful socialization sessions. Further, progress in dog training is not linear, you may run into points of stagnation that feel hard to get past, but that does not mean your goal of a neutral response to people can’t be achieved!

Dogs have been used for millennia in agricultural settings to guard livestock from predators, such as protecting chickens and fowl from foxes and weasels, or protecting grazing animals from wolves and cats. We explore that history more in Chapter 6-11: Guard breeds.

In those situations, we rely upon (and selectively breed to accentuate) two natural canine instincts:

• Instinct to protect their ‘in-group’ (their ‘pack’, their ‘family’, people they know) from other people/creatures they are not familiar with
• Fear response to unknown people and creatures

Some people today however purchase companion dogs to be guards against other humans, in urban or suburban settings. To promote their guard instincts, they deliberately under-socialize the dogs, encouraging them to be fearful of and reactive to other humans.

The desire to protect yourself and your family is entirely understandable. Under-socializing your dog, however, to guard against other people is extremely foolish, for several reasons:

1. First off, dogs are naturally wary of strangers, protective of their ‘in-group’, and protective of their den-space (your house). As a result, a well-socialized dog would still alert you to strangers entering your home uninvited, or otherwise threatening you. The idea that even the friendliest dog would happily welcome a stranger coming into the house in the middle of the night flies in the face of every ounce of their genetic coding. Your dog will automatically do what you desire – blocking, barking at, and intimidating entrants. Under-socializing them is not necessary.

2. Dogs are terrible at guarding against human threats, because dogs are terrible at recognizing accurately what is and isn’t a threat in human contexts. As humans, we understand human society – we understand the notion of parking lots, maintenance workers, electricians, visiting relatives, etc. We have context. Dogs lack that context, and as a result their ability to judge what is and isn’t a threat is enormously impaired.

   That is why, for example, professional police dogs are specifically trained not to respond to threats on their own! Rather, they are trained to look to and rely upon their handler’s judgment, and obey handler commands, both to act and to retreat.

   Even if your dog correctly judged threats and non-threats 90% of the time, that 10% of the time can be deadly. What if a child approaches your car or your picnic to pet the dog? What if an emergency worker needs to enter your house? Training your dog to be reactive is the worst thing you can have in a guard dog.

   As we will explore more in Section 2, your dog’s job is never to act unilaterally; you should be teaching them to look to you for direction.

3. Better solutions exist – cameras and alarm systems are far more effective deterrents.

4. Deliberately letting your dog become human-reactive is, as I hope we’ve made clear, both incredibly dangerous to people and incredibly stressful for your dog. That constant hyper-awareness is the same type of behavior we ask of soldiers in conflict zones – constantly watching for threats, and being surrounded by them.

The bottom line is that deliberate under-socialization is both cruel and pointless.

In the later Chapter 6-11, we will discuss breeds of dogs that have, over many generations, had their wariness of strangers fostered to predispose them to, predominantly, protect livestock from predators.

With thorough and properly-conducted socialization, as we have laid out, puppies of those breeds can absolutely be happy and comfortable around strangers. Because of their predisposition however, that process may prove a little more challenging at the start, and it becomes especially important to start early and make sure to socialize with as many people, in as many contexts, as possible.

Essentially, the stakes are higher for these breeds – they are much more prone to becoming reactive with under-socialization. As such, if you are getting a guard breed – such as a Cane Corso or , which is particularly popular at the moment – it is critical that you:

1. Know what you’re getting into; what the disposition of this breed is

2. Really be on top of thorough socialization, especially with strangers

3. Be aware that developing new people introduction strategies with these breeds is highly achievable, but depending on the dogs genetics the good feelings we are trying to foster for new people might stay situational and may NOT automatically generalize to every new person they meet.

We will explore these breeds, their behaviors, and what you as an owner need to know about them more in Chapter 6-11.

Does that mean that if you don’t have a guard breed, you don’t have to worry about socialization? Obviously not – as we hopefully made amply clear at the beginning of the chapter, all dogs need early, comprehensive, and properly-executed socialization. The only difference with guard breeds is probability and stakes: failure to socialize them has a higher probability of leading to a reactive outcome.

As we laid out in Chapter 1-2, you need to expose your puppy – in an appropriate fashion – to (nearly) the full range of experiences they may encounter in their lives, building their comfort in those situations specifically, and confidence and adaptability more generally.

We’ve talked about how that applies to people and other dogs, but those ‘experiences’ also apply to any novel environmental factors – places, weather, and objects.

As we’ve mentioned, dogs are not very good at ‘generalizing;’ they may love playing with a wide range of toys, but when you bring in a red firetruck they may find it terrifying. Combined with their lack of human context, a whole range of everyday places and objects can fill them with fear, seemingly innocuous things like:

• Vacuums
• Rain
• Statues
• Balloons

Your puppy, not understanding what those things are, can default to classifying them as threats.

As a result, if you either:

• Do not expose your puppy to a wide range of places and objects early in life
• Or, when you expose them and they have a fear response, do not apply appropriate socialization techniques (cf. Chapter 1-2) to acclimate them to it and create positive associations

Then your puppy can grow into an adult dog that is uncomfortable around new places and things.

In contrast, if you give your puppy lots of positive socialization experiences with lots of new places and things, they will grow into a confident, adaptable adult dog that is comfortable in a wide variety of new situations.

Just as with stranger socialization (Chapter 1-3) and dog socialization (Chapter 1-4), it is therefore your responsibility to appropriately socialize your puppy – in your first few weeks together – with a wide range of unfamiliar places and objects.

So what sort of things do you need to expose your puppy to? The goal is breadth – as many different types of experiences as you can think of, to build that range of comfort in different types of contexts.

As a starting place, you can use our checklist in Chapter 1-2.

To add to that, think about:

• What are types of places and objects that are very different from what my puppy has experienced so far? e.g., beaches, apartment buildings, baseball games, stores, malls, or pools.
• What are places and objects that are loud, big, or move on their own, and therefore prone to causing discomfort? e.g., traffic, public spaces, vacuum cleaners, lawn mowers, or bicycles.

The more diverse a set of experiences you can create, the more adaptable your puppy will become!

In each case, make sure to follow the socialization techniques and principles we laid out in Chapter 1-2. Remember your goal is not just exposing your puppy, it is creating a positive experience that – first – mitigates and dissuades their fear, and – afterwards – rewards their calm and curiosity.

Beyond a deliberate ‘list’ of socialization targets, watch for things your dog is afraid of, and make sure to show them it’s OK.

It might be a random stick, or a lawn chair, or car with a funny shape. If your dog reacts to something, don’t simply move on.

Take a second, say it’s fine, go stand next to the object yourself, putting your hand on it if possible while watching your dog, showing them it is ok. When they calm down and come to investigate themselves, praise and reward them, and let them explore the object – they’ll likely touch it and jump back to see what it does, for example.

When your dog is afraid of something, that’s an opportunity for you to work with them to teach them it’s safe.

An important area of exposure that many owners miss is surfaces. Dogs are much more aware of surfaces than we are – they walk on their paws after all, and use their paws as a key sensory organ.

By nature, puppies are highly suspicious of new surfaces, and it is not uncommon for them to refuse to walk on textures they’ve never seen before.

To overcome that, make sure your puppy gets exposed to and rewarded for walking on lots of different surfaces as early as possible. That will make them less sensitive to different surfaces as they get older; otherwise, they will start to avoid unfamiliar surfaces, even refusing to walk on things like grates, leaves, or even grass.

Some surface to make sure to get them on are:

If they show reticence to any other surfaces, make sure to note that and do more socialization work around that surface specifically – encouraging any exploratory moves they make onto it with praise and rewards.

As always, do not force them onto new surfaces! As we covered in Chapter 1-2: Socialization Basics, that will only create negative associations. Encourage them, let them explore, and reward them as they do. Remember, your goal is to make the experience fun and exciting for them!

If they are nervous about a surface, take it slow, show them it is safe by going on it yourself, let them experiment, and when they experiment praise and reward them, even for (literal) baby steps.

To help encourage them, you can bring one of their favorite toys, or some great treats, out onto the surface with you. The ‘pull’ of longing for those rewards will usually be enough to get them to experiment.

Because dogs are so surface sensitive, you’ll want to prioritize surface exposure very early on, literally the first couple weeks you have your puppy. If you nip this in the bud, it will not be a problem.

As we discuss in the later chapters in Section 4, dogs are very different from primates. One instance of that is our perception of touch: primates find it comforting, while dogs find it threatening. Their natural response to touch as puppies would be to recoil.

We can teach our puppies to love human touch – petting, cuddling, etc. – by creating lots of positive associations with it.

For touch in particular, very early desensitization, in the first few weeks of life (while still with the breeder), is an important part of development. Any responsible breeder will therefore do some very light touch-exposure with puppies in the first couple of weeks, holding puppies in their hands, and eventually very gently massaging them.

Once you get your puppy, you should continue that process with more active socialization: pet and touch your puppy when you are praising them, treating them, and playing with them. For example if you’re playing with a tug toy together, rub their back or neck while you do so. This gradually teaches them not to pull away, and that in fact touching them is associated with good things.

Over time, your puppy will grow more and more comfortable with human touch, and eventually come to actively seek it out. In Section 2: Core Training Concepts we will explore in more depth this psychological process of positive reinforcement leading to affinity.

With their limited mobility and freedom (we will talk about this further in Chapter 1-10) puppies don’t usually need a collar or leash right away. Nevertheless, it can be extremely helpful to create early positive associations with collars and leashes for your puppy. By making your puppy happy and excited about her collars and leashes, she will become:

• Much easier to get a leash on in the future
• Much more comfortable and happy when wearing a collar or leash, making it easier to socialize them in places where they are leashed

On the flip side, if you only introduce collars and leashes to your puppy later on, it will initially weird and therefore uncomfortable to them, making them more prone to wariness and fear when wearing them (initially at least).

You can socialize your puppy with collars and leashes as follows:

If you do this thoroughly, you will find that your puppy becomes incredibly excited when she even sees her leash! It comes with lots of rewards after all!

As with all socialization, the earlier you do this work, the deeper the positive associations will be, so doing this training early should help a lot.

As a final note, make sure to go through this process with multiple leashes, to get them to generalize. You don’t want them to be comfortable only with just a single specific leash.

In addition to initially introducing collars and leashes to your puppy in a positive manner, you need to make sure to not use collars and leashes improperly. Unfortunately many, many handlers unwittingly and grossly misuse leashes in a manner that creates negative experiences for their puppies, leading to ‘leash reactivity’ – or hyper-vigilance while on-leash.

Here are some all-too-common behaviors you need to avoid:

• Do not apply constant pressure: The leash should always have a bit of slack. If you are constantly tugging on the leash, you are taking all the fun out of the experience, frustrating your dog, increasing their stress and anxiety, and making them leash-reactive.

  Obviously that’s much easier said than done: puppies are excited to go explore all the sights and smells of the world around them, often leading them to pull on the leash as they try to go where they want. In Chapter 2-28: Loose leash walking we will cover how to handle tugging without applying constant pressure and how to train your puppy or adult dog to give you more slack. It will take patience and consistency at first – it’s one of the hardest things to achieve with puppies – but eventually you will get there.

• Do not grab her collar: If your puppy is out of control, whether on-leash or at home, it can be tempting to grab her collar to restrain her. Do not do that. If you grab your dog’s collar only when something (she perceives as) negative is happening – such as when you are trying to clip her nails or brush her – you are (a) making her hate her collar, creating collar-reactivity (anxiety and hyper-vigilance), and (b) by forcing her to do what you want, making the experience as a whole negative, which is – as we hope you have learned by now – the complete opposite of what you are trying to accomplish.

  Obviously you should absolutely grab her collar or leash in an emergency situation, such as if she is trying to bolt out the door or lunge at another dog. Just don’t grab her collar in normal, every-day circumstances. Of course, as we’ll discuss in Chapter 1-9: Errorless learning, you really shouldn’t be giving your puppy those opportunities to misbehave in the first place. We will talk about what that means much more in later chapters.

• Do not use the leash as a restraint to socialize your puppy: If your puppy is afraid of or reactive towards something, exposing them to that while on a leash will only make them more afraid – by constraining their movement, while they try to lunge or flee, you are increasing their sense of powerlessness and therefore fear, rather than confidence and sense of security. If your puppy is afraid of or reactive to something, you should be exposing them to it in a carefully controlled environment, with you present and forward, and following all of the practices we laid out in Chapter 1-2.

  Of course if your dog is reactive, you do need to physically prevent them from running after or away from the target of their fear. A leash is generally not the best way to do that however: instead, choose the context of the situation, for example showing your dog other dogs from behind a fence.

That is just a brief survey of best practices, we will discuss proper leash handling in more depth in Chapter 2-28.

Good leash handling takes some practice and always benefits from professional feedback. As we’ll discuss later on in Chapter 2-26, you should aim to take an introductory obedience course in your first few months with your puppy. Either during class or afterwards, you should show your trainer how you use your leash and get some feedback from her on ways to improve.

It is very useful to have your dog be comfortable in your car; not only should you be taking your dog all sorts of places – stores, the woods, the beach, etc. – but in practice you will have to take them places from time to time, such as to the vet, the groomer, daycare, etc. Chasing and fighting with your dog every time you want to go in the car is anxiety-producing for both of you, and will result in you taking them fewer places, to both of your detriment.

In addition to the usual socialization protocols, as laid out in Chapter 1-2, here are some car-specific recommendations:

• Nausea is often an issue – start young to acclimate them. In cars, for most dogs, the issue is usually less fear of the car and more discomfort and nausea from the motion. Aside from vomiting, you know your puppy is starting to get nauseous if they start drooling or swallowing more than usual, or curling up tightly and rigidly. To help combat that, it is ideal if you can get your puppy plenty of driving experience when they are very young, to help them acclimate.

  Other tips for reducing nausea include:

  • Lowering the temperature in the car – colder temperatures help reduce nausea
  • Don’t drive right after a meal – an empty stomach helps reduce nausea, so waiting until before a meal is usually better
  • Use an essential oil or dog pheromone that calms the motion sickness response – some owners have found lavender oil and adaptil©️ to help
  • Leave the music and radio off – dogs have comparatively sensitive ear drums and loud noises can disorient them even more
• Make the car a fun experience: get excited about it (”ready to go in the CAR ?!!?!?”), and give them special toys and high-value treats that they only get in the car, at least at first during this socialization process. The car should be something they are pumped to get into.
• Start with short drives: try to start them with short 5-15 minute drives, which both helps keep their nausea down and helps keep any agitation or anxiety from growing. Instead, they learn “hey that wasn’t so bad, a short trip and all done!”
• Go fun places: if the only time your dog gets in the car is when they have to go somewhere boring (the vet, the store, etc.), they will quickly hate getting in the car. Instead, make sure you mostly drive your puppy fun places – like for hikes in the woods, or the park to play fetch, or grandma’s house for play and treats. Early on you should aim for at least a 4:1 ratio of ‘fun destinations’ to boring ones, to reinforce that the car usually goes fun places!

  Note: when you are leaving somewhere fun, make sure to doubly reinforce (with treats and toys) getting back in the car. Otherwise, they may start to try and avoid getting back in the car after a fun experience, since they know that means the fun is coming to an end.

All puppies go through recurring ‘fear periods’ that come and go throughout their first year or two of life. The first fear period generally starts between 5-9 weeks of age, most often around week 7 or 8, depending on the breed. At around 6 months of age there is often a recurrence, with occasional fear periods cropping up until as late as 18 months. Each period can last from just a few days up to several weeks.

During a fear period, your puppy will suddenly become much more wary of new experiences, more easily frightened by new objects, people, and places.

That means that during this period, they can more easily have a negative reaction, and a more severe negative reaction, to bad experiences. That fact increases the probability of becoming reactive, as we introduced in Chapter 1-2 and will dig deeper into in Chapter 2-11: Single-event learning.

If you’re paying attention to your puppy’s behavior at all – particularly if you’re doing the socialization work you should be (Chapters 1-2, 1-3, 1-4, and 1-5) – it is usually pretty obvious when she enters a fear period: a puppy that was totally fearless yesterday – happily going to new stores, meeting new people, playing with new toys – will today suddenly seem frightened of everything, backing away, cowering, or yipping all the time.

These periods are a natural and unavoidable part of puppy development, as the puppy’s brains start opening up to ‘fear-avoidance behaviors.’ Evolutionarily, that may have helped puppies learn to conservatively identify threats and stay safe.

We obviously have a challenge: fear periods, where puppies are more wary of new experiences, start at around 8 weeks, but that is right in the middle of the critical socialization window!

Don’t worry, you can keep socializing, you just have to adapt your approach accordingly! Remember: your puppy’s development is critically tied to going new places and having new experiences – you cannot let fear periods stop you.

As such, keep socializing, keep training, and keep doing everything you would otherwise do with your puppy.

At the same time, you do need to be cognizant of the fear period and adjust your socialization approach accordingly. Fear periods make your puppy more likely to imprint a negative experiences. If you socialize blithely, you risk creating negative associations that can lead to reactivity.

It is important therefore that you pay attention to your puppy’s behaviors, recognize when they have entered a fear period, and adjust your socialization approach:

In other words, during fear periods follow the same practices we laid out in the previous four chapters, just be a little bit more conservative in your judgments on what your puppy is ready for.

The most common term for these spans of time where your puppy has a heightened fear response is ‘fear period.’ The ‘period’ terminology however leads to a misleading connotation:

• ‘Period’ is accurate in that the onset of these periods is biological. For example, the first such period starts for most puppies between 8 and 11 weeks of age
• However ‘period’ could also leave the impression that this stretch of time is automatically finite in duration, that it will end no matter what you do
• In reality, if you fail to socialize your puppy – or, worse, improperly socialize your puppy -a ‘fear period’ will not end on some automatic schedule

As such, we prefer to use the term ‘Fear Imprint Stages.’ That is yet another reason why it is so important that you do not stop socializing during these intervals!

Dog chewtoys are hard rubber toys with some sort of internal cavity that can be stuffed with food – either hard foods (like kibble) or spreads (like peanut butter or yogurt). They can be a variety of shapes, from the stacked rings made famous by Kong to corrugated cylinders to all sorts of other things. Here are some classic chewtoys (there are many others)

• The classic stuffable Kong (making sure to get the right size for your dog – see below)
• Stuffable teething sticks
• Benebones – not stuffable, but intrinsically flavored

Unlike other dog toys, chewtoys are designed to be durable enough to withstand weeks, months, or even years of chewing, while still having enough ‘give’ (they are rubbery, not hard plastic) for your dog to enjoy chewing on them.

You can use chewtoys either stuffed or unstuffed, depending on the circumstance:

• Stuffed: when stuffed with food, your puppy can use their tongue to try and lick and get the food out from inside
• Unstuffed: when unstuffed, they can chew on the toy, an activity most dogs innately find extremely satisfying

Chewtoys do several wonderful things for puppies and adult dogs:

• Problem-solving & mental stimulation: Stuffed with food, chewtoys provide mental stimulation and develop their problem-solving abilities, as they work to try to get the food out.
• Positive reinforcement: Stuffed or unstuffed, chewtoys are usually a ‘primary reinforcer:’ dogs intrinsically love them. Unstuffed, dogs and puppies love chewing on things. Stuffed, they are getting some very special, delicious treats (more on that below). We can therefore use chewtoys as a powerful tool in socialization and behavioral training – more on that below.
• Occupational therapy: Whether trying to get food out or simply chewing on the rubber, chewtoys allow dogs to release pent up energy and focus on something manual, repetitive, and satisfying, allowing them to calm themselves when they are stressed or overexcited.
• Dental health: Chewing on the rubber helps clean dogs’ teeth and gums. Some chewtoys in particular are design specifically for dental health, such as by using protruding ridges to get in between teeth.

The above benefits to chewtoys make them an incredibly valuable tool in our puppy rearing toolbox.

We can highlight a few particularly valuable early uses for chewtoys, that we will dive deeper into in later chapters:

• Crate training: As we discuss more in Chapter 1-8: Crate training, crates tap into a dog’s ‘den instinct’ to provide a sanctuary, a refuge. Even so, you will need to initially acclimate your puppy or adult dog to the crate, showing them that it is indeed a safe and fun place to be. Stuffed chewtoys make that process a lot easier: if your puppy only gets their favorite, extra-special, ultra-tasty stuffed chewtoy when they are in the crate, it will help make the crate one of their favorite places to be.
• Socialization: As discussed in the previous chapters on socialization, your puppy will often be afraid or wary of new people or places. Chewtoys are a wonderful tool to help override that fear response and signal to your puppy that everything is fine. If you take your puppy to friend’s house, for example, giving them a chewtoy can help them settle down, giving them something to focus on. It also creates positive associations with the new place, accomplishing the main goal of socialization.
• Occupational therapy: Sometimes your puppy will be overexcited or anxious; maybe she’s overstimulated, in a fear period, hasn’t gotten enough exercise, or is just having a random ‘puppy moment’ so common during development. Whatever the cause, a chewtoy can sometimes help her calm down. The chewing gives her something to focus on, has a stimulating effect, and triggers pleasure signals that help override neurological stress and fear signals. Chewtoys are therefore a great way to help calm your puppy.

  If you leave a chewtoy out, preferably near her crate, it also gives her a tool for self-soothing – when she feels stressed or anxious, she will learn to go to her chewtoy and redirect that energy, rather than directing it in undesirable ways such as barking or chewing on other things (like your shoes or furniture).

• Divert from furniture-chewing: We talk about this more in Chapter 1-10 and Chapter 1-9, but you can completely avoid your puppy ever chewing on furniture if you pursue both (a) an ‘errorless training’ approach, where you avoid them ever starting the habit by not giving them the opportunity, and (b) showing them acceptable things to chew – like chewtoys. The combination of the two eventually leads them to understanding that there are two distinct categories of objects: objects I can chew and objects I can’t chew. By letting them chew on chewtoys to their heart’s content, while at the same time preventing or discouraging them from chewing on other things, they will quickly learn the distinction. As long as they have a pleasurable outlet for chewing – the chewtoys – they will eventually not even be tempted to chew on anything else.
• Separation Anxiety: Similar to general occupational therapy, chewtoys can be used to help alleviate separation anxiety. We will discuss this more in Chapter 1-12, but briefly: if you give your dog a chewtoy stuffed with their favorite filling whenever you leave the house, it does two things: (1) it gives them something positive when you leave the house, helping them learn “hey I guess not everything is so bad when they leave;” and (2) it gives them an outlet for their anxiety, helping them focus on something else and calm themselves. If an owner does a particularly amazing job with chewtoy training (which we’ll cover shortly), they could even manage to get their pups excited when they leave the house, at least early on, because they’re so looking forward to the reward. “yeah whatever bye dad, I’ve got my chewtoy to focus on.”
• Settle-training: As we cover in Appendix 1-3: Settle, teaching your puppy to settle themselves down, on a mat or at your feet, is an incredibly useful command, whether for bringing them places or getting them to calm down at home. Occasional chewtoys help teach and reinforce the behavior: first, the chewtoy naturally distracts them and gets them to calm down as they focus on it; and second, the chewtoy is a big reward to positively reinforce the behavior, making them more likely to obey your command in the future.

Those are just a few illustrative examples of how you can use chewtoys to train and handle your puppy – once you add it to your repertoire, you’ll certainly think of other uses.

Note that these use cases all apply to adult dogs too! If you adopt an adult dog, chewtoys remain a fantastic tool in your toolkit to help train behaviors and manage their energy or anxiety.

As you can see, chewtoys can make some of the most important early puppyhood things we work substantially easier! They are a powerful piece of our toolkit!

As much as chewtoys are intrinsically enjoyable to most dogs (’primary reinforcers’), it is worth doing ‘chewtoy training’ to accentuate those positive feelings, ideally making chewtoys really one of your dogs favorite things (in a later Chapter, Primary vs. learned reinforcers, we will talk about the distinction between – and utility of – ‘learned’ positive associations and intrinsic ones).

As you’ll see, in situations like Crate training and Separation anxiety, the more you can create deep, profound positive associations with chewtoys, the more effective it will be as a stress-reduction tool for your puppy.

We can achieve that by introducing the chewtoys in a positive way:

• The first few times you use the chewtoy, stuff them with some of your puppy’s favorite treats – peanut butter or yogurt usually works well (we’ll talk more about stuffing techniques later in this chapter).

  If you want to try a treat your puppy hasn’t had before that can be a great idea – novelty can be worth a lot – but definitely introduce the food to your puppy separately first, before adding the chewtoy, to make sure it is something that will excite them. For example, let your puppy lick a bit of peanut butter from a spoon. If they go nuts and really want more, then later on you can use peanut butter for the chewtoy.

• Try to get your puppy excited about the chewtoy before giving it to them. Do it after a short play session, then build anticipation by showing it to them and letting them sniff it while it’s still in your hand. Once they get excited and start wagging and jumping for it, ask them for a “Sit” or “Paw” and give it to them as a reward, making them feel like they’ve earned it.
• While chewtoys will be useful in all the scenarios we discussed earlier – like crate training, socialization, and separation anxiety – do not initially introduce chewtoys in those cases. You want to build a strong foundation of positive associations with the chewtoys first, before using it in situations that make them uncomfortable. If you don’t, they will associated the discomfort of the situation with the chewtoy, and the chewtoy will lose its appeal.

  Instead, introduce chewtoys on their own, in environments where your puppy is happy and eager. We will talk more about this below.

• While your puppy is chewing a chewtoy, praise them and give them attention (without distracting them – don’t pull their attention away), to further reinforce the experience as a good one.

The goal is to create a deep well of positive associations with chewtoys, to build on top of the ‘primary reinforcement’ that chewtoys innately provide.

It should not take long – a few sessions over a couple of days is all you should need for most dogs to desperately love their chewtoys.

It’s worth highlighting a note from the process above: make sure to NOT use chewtoys for working on anything else (crate training, separation anxiety, socialization, etc.) until AFTER you have finished chewtoy training!

The point of chewtoy training is to get your dog crazy excited about them, to give them a deep well of positive associations, so that you can use those associations later to make other experiences less stressful or scary. If you start using chewtoys in those stressful situations before you’ve finished chewtoy training, the opposite may happen: they could associate the chewtoy with the stress of the situation. In other words, instead of the chewtoy making the experience less scary, the experience can make the chewtoy more scary.

You need to solidify the chewtoy’s positive associations first, such that your puppy can anchor on them.

As we’ve hopefully made clear, chewtoys are a tool that makes other early puppyhood training efforts much easier. Given that many of those efforts should start on Day 1 of getting your puppy – especially crate training (Chapter 1-8) and socialization (Chapter 1-2), it is clearly useful if you can start chewtoy training in that first week you have your puppy as well.

Above, we highlighted all the ways you can use chewtoys to great effect to help your puppy deal with stressful or challenging situations. It is important however that the chewtoy isn’t just used at those times. If it is, your puppy can start to associate the chewtoy with bad situations, and it will lose its efficacy.

Rather, you should try to give your puppy regular access to unstuffed chewtoys, and give them a stuffed chewtoy about once every day or two for the first few months you have them. Over time, when a deep well of positive associations has been established, you can wind down the frequency of stuffed chewtoys to once a week.

If you’ve followed the process above for chewtoy-training your puppy, it will be a great source of fun and relaxation for them. As mentioned, that makes chewtoys a great tool for your puppy to self-sooth when they are overstimulated or stressed out, such as by a new experience: when they feel pent-up energy or anxiety, like when they are over-tired or a stranger visits the house, they can relieve some of that energy by chewing on an unstuffed chewtoy.

Often, they will start developing that habit intuitively themselves, given the positive associations you’ve created. You can expedite that however by teaching the self-soothing behavior.

To do so, when you see that your puppy is over-stimulated or anxious, simply try to redirect them towards a chewtoy:

1. Capture their attention

2. Show them the toy and move it around to get their focus on it and make it interesting/desirable

3. Make them do an easy trick they know like Sit or Paw to help keep them grounded

4. Give them the chewtoy as a reward for the trick, which should hopefully get them to start chewing on it (this is assuming you’ve already completed chewtoy training per above!)

Sometimes they’ll be too distracted, but when this works it will help them learn more quickly to use the chewtoy on their own to manage their energy.

You can stuff chewtoys a variety of ways; if you search online you can find lots of different fillings and techniques other owners use.

If you can, it’s great to try different approaches – and different chewtoys – and see what your dog responds most eagerly to.

Here are three techniques you can try – but again there are many more, feel free to experiment and look online for what other people do:

• Dry stuffing: fill the chewtoy with kibble, preferably a special kibble that they love but rarely get. Make sure to stuff it full enough that the kibble doesn’t just fall out on its own.
• Spread stuffing: fill the chewtoy with a spread, like peanut butter or yogurt. You can even mix in kibble.
• Frozen stuffing: if you fill with a spread, you can even freeze stuffed chewtoys. Puppys sometimes love that – the spread solidifies so that when they lick it it takes longer to get it all out, and the colder chewtoy can be soothing in their mouths during teething and even more fun to chew.

In the 2-3 initial training sessions, make sure to:

• Use really good stuff, your puppy’s favorite foods – you want to make the chewtoy as exciting as possible
• As mentioned above, only use foods your puppy has already tried and loved, ideally recently. You don’t want to introduce a new food and a new object at the same time, as it may make them wary of the food rather than attracted to it

After the first few sessions however, don’t maintain that same ‘maximum’ level of reward stuffing. You should gradually put lower and lower value foods in the chewtoy, reserving the highest-value stuff for times when you are asking them to do something particularly hard, like socialization or separation anxiety training.

For stuffed chewtoys, you should try to adjust the challenge of the toy to your dog’s level, to maintain their interest without frustrating them.

Toys with deeper cavities, smaller openings, and packed with larger or denser kibble will be harder for your dog to get the food out.

If you make the challenge too easy, your dog will get out all the food right away, missing the point of the chewtoy and quickly getting bored.

If you make it too hard however, your dog may get frustrated and give up and/or develop negative associations with the chewtoy.

Initially, during chewtoy training, err on the side of making the ‘game’ easier for your puppy. As they get better at it, increase the challenge both by swapping to new and more difficult chewtoys as well as using larger or more densely packed kibble bits, or stickier spread fillings.

It’s also good to occasionally introduce new chewtoys, with new shapes and cavities, even after initial training, to maintain interest.

Chewtoy sizing matters – it should be the right size for your dog, at their current age. It should be not so small that your dog can choke on it! The chewtoy should large enough such that it absolutely cannot fit down their throat.

On the opposite end, you do not want the chewtoy to be too large, for two reasons:

• If it is too large, your dog can’t fit their mouth around any part of it comfortably, so it’s not very fun to chew
• If the opening to the cavity is too large, it becomes too easy for your dog to get the food out

So following those criteria, try to get a chewtoy that is the appropriate size for your dog.

Since puppies obviously grow, that means you will need to start with smaller chewtoys, and graduate them to increasingly large ones until they are their full adult size.

This should go without saying, but if you stuff your chewtoys, you must wash them thoroughly after every use. If you leave food inside the cavity, it can host mold. Molds release a variety of toxins, such that when your dog eats them they can get sick and even die. Moldy bags of kibble, for example, have killed far too many dogs.

Thankfully most chewtoys are machine-washable, so you can stuff them and get them clean pretty easily – just make sure to get any lingering or stuck chunks of food out of there before you put it in the dishwasher (if you have one), and check them after they come out to make sure there’s no bits of food left in there (the small holes make them tough for the machine to reach everything). ‘Bottle brushes’ used for cleaning water bottles are often a helpful, inexpensive tool.

Not everything should be a chewtoy. While it’s OK for your puppy to chew some of her other toys, you should try to designate some toys as being only for ‘play.’ Rope toys, for example, can be tempting for puppies to chew on, but if you let them you will run into at least two problems:

1. You’ll go through a lot of rope toys, because they’re not durable enough to withstand chewing

2. When you want to use a rope toy to play with your puppy, such as to reward them for a behavior, they may take it away and go chew on it instead of playing with you. You have now lost that potential play-reinforcer (see Chapter 2-4: Different primary motivators for why that can be so important)

To avoid that, have a policy around certain toys that they be human-only – e.g., your puppy only gets the rope toy during human play-time, when you play with it together; she doesn’t get access to it on her own.

This behavior is not critical. Some owners put stuffies in the same category – only for assisted-play – and other owners don’t hold anything off-limits. Either is totally fine, just decide what you’re comfortable with and have a consistent policy, otherwise you’ll be living with the consequences indefinitely.

In addition to chewtoys, you should consider getting food-chews for you puppy. These include things like:

• Bully sticks
• Pig ears
• Cow ears
• Beef hides (not rawhides, see below)

These types of desiccated animal parts have much the same effect and benefits as chewtoys. Unlike chewtoys, however, they do not generally last nearly as long. As such, they’re not a replacement for chewtoy training.

They are however a fantastic high-value reward for your pup when you ask them to do something particularly difficult, like settling down quietly while you eat dinner, or being home alone.

With bully sticks, look out for choking risk once the bully stick gets down to a small ‘nub.’ You should replace the stick when it gets small enough to choke on. You can also find ‘holders’ available online that can prevent this from happening.

Most dog bones you will see in pet stores are cooked or dried for preservation. You should never give these to your dog: the drying process ‘cures’ the bones, making them, on a molecular level, harder than dogs’ teeth. As a result, dogs can easily and irreversible chip their teeth on dried bones.

Raw bones in contrast are not only totally fine to give your dog, they are also healthy – chewing on (raw) bones can help keep your dog’s teeth clean. If you are a raw feeder, mid-sized bones like turkey legs are perfect. Just avoid very small bones – like small chicken bones – as your dog can choke on them.

Similarly to bones, you should not give your dog rawhides. While they seem innocuous, the process used to make them makes them un-digestible to dogs, unlike bully sticks, pig ears, and the other chews mentioned above. As a result, when they break into chunks and your puppy swallows them, they cannot digest them, which leads to risk of blockage. In addition, the hard chunks broken off can cause choking in some dogs prone to ‘gulping’ their food.

‘Dog crates’ are plastic, metal, or fabric crates with one or more entrances that you can close and fasten.

We use crates to satisfy dogs’ natural ‘den instinct,’ providing them with a small, quiet, dark space that they feel safe, comfortable, and in-control in.

We will talk much more about how that effect works shortly, but ultimately crates give us a space that serves two purposes:

1. It provides a ‘sanctuary’ that your dog feels happy, safe, and comfortable in, helping us and them manage their emotional state

2. It provides a means to physically sequester your dog, keeping them away from situations that would cause them stress or danger, inside or outside the house

Properly using – and acclimating your dog to – crates is therefore a critically important part of responsible dog ownership.

In the bullets below, we will explore how crates work, when you should use them, why you should use them, and how to acclimate your puppy or adult dog to them.

First, we should address a common misconception. Many new dog owners – particularly those who grew up with family dogs that weren’t crate-trained – feel that crates are cruel. Owners think that because they are projecting a human primate perspectives onto canines – what human wants to be ‘locked in a cage’ after all? That thinking, however understandable, is misguided: crates – when properly used – provide dogs with both emotional comfort and practical safety.

In the initial stages of crate training – the first few experiences – that might not seem to be the case: just like she is about any new object and experience, your puppy will be wary of the crate. Frankly our own behaviors often unintentionally encourage that wariness: you are probably nervous about crate training, about whether your puppy will acclimate, and so when you very deliberately put out the crate and show it to her, you’re inadvertently making a ‘big deal’ out of it, raising her sense of ‘oh something weird is happening.’

Don’t let that mislead you: once you acclimate your puppy to the crate, it should very quickly become one of her favorite places to be. When your dog is tired or anxious (e.g., from loud noises, from strangers in your home, or from separation anxiety), the crate is where she’ll take herself.

That is in part because of dogs’ ‘den instinct’: dogs seek small, dark, enclosed spaces in which to rest. A familiar den protects them from predators, allowing them to relax. In our homes, a darkened crate in a quiet room also cuts down on stimuli, letting them rest. Crates, when introduced to puppies young and appropriately (i.e. with lots of positive reinforcement – we’ll talk about that shortly), do not make dogs feel trapped; they make them feel safe. The training and reinforcement we will discuss later in this chapter will further reinforce that sense of comfort and safety.

In calming dogs at the same time as physically sequestering them, crates also pull double-duty for us: they help us manage our dogs’ stress, while giving us a way to separate them physically from situations that would be stressful or dangerous for them (we will explore that more below).

So dog crates not ‘cruel’ in any way; on the contrary, they actually provide your puppy or adult dog with agency, control, and stress reduction that she would otherwise not have access to. In the next bullet, we go into how we use that and why that’s so important.

Obviously, crates – like anything – can be used cruelly. We have all seen the horrific images of puppies and adult dogs at puppy mills being kept for hours a day in cramped, unsanitary conditions. Crates, as with all training tools, need to be used appropriately and responsibly, in the manner we will teach you below. When you do so however, they are very much a positive influence on your dog’s life and emotional well-being.

Crates are therefore a powerful means to manage your dog’s stress and help them live happily in human society.

In a later bullet below on ‘crate training,’ we will talk about how to make our puppies feel maximally happy and calm in crates.

For now, however, let’s assume that we’ve completed crate training, such that the crate has become a space our dog adores, that she feels happy, calm, and safe in. Let’s look at how we practically use that to improve our dog’s daily life:

• Self-regulation/a space of her own: When available passively – i.e. left open and freely accessible in your home – the crate provides a sanctuary your dog can retreat to when they are tired or stressed out. For example, let’s say it’s an evening after a long hike and an hour-long playdate with one of her favorite doggie friends; she’s tired, but you’re watching a loud action movie on TV and the kids are running around trying to play with her. Her crate – ideally placed somewhere quiet, dark, and off-limits to the kids – is ‘her space,’ a place she can go and rest and know she won’t be disturbed.

  She can also use the crate to self-sooth when she’s over-stimulated, much like (and often paired with) chewtoys. When she’s overexcited and knows it, she can take a bully stick or one of her favorite chewtoys or stuffies into her crate and self-sooth with some occupational therapy.

  Essentially, the crate (after crate-training, which we’ll cover shortly) becomes her space, a quiet, solitary den where nothing bad ever happens.

• Calming/de-stressing: Like human children, puppies, especially when young but even up to 2 years old, can have a hard time regulating their emotions, especially when they are tired, over-stimulated, or hyper-stressed. Rather than letting those situations spiral out of control, crates give you a means to help your dog calm down.

  If your puppy is over-tired and acting out, putting her in her crate (again, after appropriate crate-training) helps her calm down and go down for a nap.

  If your puppy is over-stimulated because you have a bunch of friends over, some crate-time – ideally with a nice stuffed chewtoy (recall Chapter 1-7)- helps her calm down.

  If your puppy is stressed out because there are landscapers in the yard (if you haven’t socialized her yet) and is barking uncontrollably, the crate again helps calm her down.

  Essentially, the crate is a place where we will build lots of relaxed, positive associations such that it helps your puppy ground and re-center themselves. It is the ultimate ‘safe space.’

• Removing from a stressful stimulus: The crate not only provides a calming emotional influence, it also lets you physically separate your dog from stressful or dangerous situations. That might be a plumber or electrician doing work in the house, landscapers working in the yard, or a parade or fireworks outside. Proper socialization – which we covered in Chapters 1-2, 1-3, 1-4, and 1-5 – should both reduce those instances and increase your puppy’s capacity for adaptability and self-regulation, but that both takes time and will always have some gaps. The crate let’s you remove your dog from those stimuli, putting them in a safe, calm, familiar place.
• Outside the house: That same application is particularly useful outside the house. You can and should bring your dog to participate in as many parts of your life as you can, taking them to stores, friends’ houses, beach days, events, etc. whenever it is practical and you feel the inclination. There are often situations however, both expected and otherwise, that are not entirely dog-friendly; maybe there are too many people and it overstimulates your pup, or maybe some folks are afraid of dogs and they react to yours, or maybe it’s just a long day of activity and your pup is overtired and overstimulated. Diligent obedience training (Section 2) helps your dog both know how to behave appropriately and how to maintain self-control in those situations, but that takes time to develop. Having a travel crate you can deploy, putting your dog in a quiet room or shaded area, gives a safe and emotionally comforting (for the dog) option for removing them from situations outside the house that are stressful or dangerous for her.
• Nighttime Crating: Letting your dog sleep in your bed, particularly when they are adults, is totally fine if it is your desire. Crating at night however (in your bedroom, at least at first) brings substantial benefits to you and the dog, especially for puppies.

  For puppies, we go so far as to recommend that everyone should crate their puppies at night. Crating your puppy both helps with potty training (which we’ll discuss in Chapter 1-10) and generally keeps them out of trouble. It also helps them sleep better: remember, the crate (after crate-training) is a safe space: left exposed, they will be more wary and wakeful at night; in a covered crate, they know they are safe, and will get more of those long periods of deep sleep they need to develop.

  Even for adult dogs, they tend to relax better and sleep better in a crate in your bedroom (you will probably sleep better too).

  Finally, getting your dog comfortable with nighttime crating is also useful if you need to board them or leave them with friends or family while you are out of town. Sleeping in an unfamiliar place can be stressful for them; having a familiar constant, a sleeping ritual and environment that is unchanged, can help them a lot with that. If you want to minimize stress for your dog – and not keep your friends up all night – you should make them at least comfortable being crated at night.

  You don’t have to crate at night forever, but we recommend crating every night until the puppy is ~8 months old, at which point if you like you can reduce that to crating at least once a week just to keep them familiar with it.

• Potty training: We get into more detail on this in Chapter 1-10, but briefly: dogs will instinctively not go to the bathroom in their den. As a result, potty training is really about expanding their definition of what the den is (to a puppy, your house is a whole enormous world, they have no idea that that whole space is ‘inside’). Crates help you start that process: being small, the crates are much more clearly a ‘den’ for your puppy. As long as the crate is not too large, your puppy will not have an accident in there unless they can’t help it, reducing the risk that they wake up from a nap and go potty before you have time to realize that they’ve woken up.

The bottom line is that crates are one of our best tools for carving out a dog-friendly environment from our otherwise human-centric world.

As you read through all the use cases for crates above, you might have noticed that crates are particularly important for puppies: not only are crates a big part of potty training, they also help tremendously with stress reduction and emotional self-regulation, things that 8-week-old puppies – who have not yet completed socialization nor developed foundational skills like self-control and handler focus – are in particular need of.

As a result, you should begin crate-training your puppy on the first day you bring them home.

Fortunately, crate training usually goes fairly quickly if done properly and consistently. It does take some real work – we get into how to crate-train in the bullets below – but the fact that the crate is intrinsically an environment your puppy should find comforting speeds the process along substantially. As long as you introduce the crate positively and with lots of reinforcement, as we will lay out shortly, you should find that your puppy is comfortable in the crate within a week, and ecstatic about the crate within a month.

As much as crates satisfy a natural ‘den instinct’ in dogs, puppies still need to be acclimated and socialized to crating like they do anything else; it is a new experience after all, and puppies are wary of new experiences.

Their initial response to a crate – in part because of our body language as owners (see above) – will be wariness. As such you must, as you would with any socialization, introduce crates slowly and pair the experience with plenty of praise and rewards, to show them that it is safe and to create positive associations.

Below, we will go through tactically how to do that. First, we should highlight some key principles:

• Gradually increase enclosure and duration: Like socialization, reward each baby-step. Start by rewarding your puppy even just for getting near the crate, then getting into to, then to increasing degrees of the door being closed, until finally getting to the door being closed and latched, for longer and longer durations. Below, we step through individual stages you can use.
• Move the bar on rewards as you go: As you progressively advance crate comfort, move your rewards in parallel. For example, at first you’ll reward just for stepping inside, but as she gets more comfortable you’ll withhold the reward until she’s all the way in, until the door is closed, etc. In other words, gradually move the threshold on what she ‘has to do’ to get the rewards. This is exactly what we do when shaping behaviors, as we’ll cover in more depth in Chapter 2-7. This will require that although you will be going slow, you still need to be firm. If your puppy knows she can get away with being rewarded with the door open, then they will keep pushing the door open; if you hold firm and start only rewarding with the door closed, she will learn “ok, now to get my rewards the door needs to be closed.” So go slow, but be deliberate and consistent.
• At each stage, reward only when she is calm/settles: When you move from one stage to the next – delaying the reward until a new condition is met – your puppy will often complain (whine or paw at the crate). That is some combination of annoyance/testing boundaries (I got rewarded for X before, so I bet I can get her to reward for X) and anxiety (this is different and new and I don’t like it). Just as with socialization (see Chapter 1-2), do not reward the whining, reward the settling! When she settles down and relaxes, heavily praise and reward her – she will quickly learn “ok everything is fine, if I just chill out good things happen.” That might seem obvious, but in the moment it can feel like you should reward her for being in the crate – no, you should reward her for being comfortable in the crate.
• Reward heavily: We want the crate to be the best place in the world. This crate is heaven on earth. That means that she gets the best treats and the most amazing stuffed chewtoys in there. It is all about building excitement for the crate. You should not be using your normal training treats – this is where you pull out the best stuff.

With those principles in mind, here are a few stages you can go through to acclimate your dog to the crate:

• Step 1. Curiosity: Start by just introducing the crate to their space, rewarding them with treats and praise whenever they approach and explore it. As a new, foreign object, they may initially be wary, so reward for it like you would any other object you’re socializing them to.
• Step 2. Entry: Start encouraging them into the crate by tossing some great treats in there. Let them smell the treat in your hand first, to get excited, then toss them in. When they enter, praise and reward them heavily.
• Step 3. Duration while open: Start rewarding them for spending longer and longer periods in there. Give smaller and smaller rewards for entering, and instead start rewarding for staying in there, for longer and longer durations (for your reference, we will discuss duration training principles in more depth in a later chapter, Improving a behavior: adherence, responsiveness, duration, and form). Start with just a few seconds, and work up to several minutes. Per our principles above, if she walks out stop rewarding, and if she goes back in only reward once she’s had some duration in there. Gradually increase the duration delay before you start rewarding. Building a bit of anticipation on her part has the added benefit of making the crate exciting. At this step, move to stuffed chewtoy rewards: stuff her favorite chewtoy with her favorite foods, and place it in the crate. We’ll use that chewtoy approach for the remaining steps, supplementing with treats to reward for specific behaviors (like settling back down or waiting patiently).
• Step 4. Partial closing: Once she’s comfortable being in there, start closing the door very slightly – it should still be wide open. Gradually start closing the door more and more (making it ‘less and less open’). Per above, shift to only rewarding when the door is partially closed – now being inside on its own is not enough. If she pushes the door open after you close it, do not reward until after partially closing it again and her waiting – with the door partially closed, patiently.
• Step 5. Closed: Proceed with the previous until the door is fully closed, but still unlatched (so she can push it open). Praise and reward her for staying patiently in there without pushing it open. If she pushes it open, patiently re-close it and restart. The goal is to get her voluntarily staying in the crate, leaving the door closed. Spend plenty of time working at this stage, getting the duration (amount of time she spends voluntarily in there) longer by withholding rewards for longer and longer durations. Increase duration slowly – if she starts opening the door you’re back to square one, so you don’t want to push her patience so long that she does so. Also note to never reward after opening the crate; that would reward leaving the crate, whereas we want the crate to be the fun spot.
• Step 6. Closed & Latched: Now transition to latching the door. If you did step 5 carefully, this should be no problem – they shouldn’t be opening the door on their own. Per the principles above, only reward her when she settles down – if she’s barking or acting out, do not reward. Wait for even a moment of calm before praising and rewarding, trying to indicate to her that ‘calm’ is the right behavior.
• Step 6. Duration with you in the room: Continue working on duration with the crate closed and latched.
• Step 7. Separation anxiety (duration alone): Once she is happy and excited to be in the crate with you around, start graduating to you not being in the room. That is actually the beginning of separation anxiety training, which we will go into in more depth in Chapter 1-12: Separation anxiety.

For each stage, do not move on to the next stage until your puppy is thoroughly comfortable with the current one!!! Going too fast is a recipe for regression. At the same time, be firm: as you move the bar higher, stick to rewarding only for the new bar.

The acclimation process above will go much faster if you have the great fortune of working with a breeder that does crate training early on, around 4 weeks of life. If introduced at that age, the puppies will take to it more easily, and any crate training you have to do in the new environment of your home should be far faster.

Where possible that is wonderful, but unfortunately few breeders today do crate training (it is significant added work for them, and sadly few dog owners value it), so more likely you will receive your puppy at 7-8 weeks of age without them having had any exposure to a crate-like den.

Still, if you happen to find a breeder that does some early crate-training, you should seriously consider paying extra for that. It’s more work and expense for them, but it will make your life enormously easier on day one. As we surveyed above, crate training unlocks a lot of other useful techniques, including for potty training and separation anxiety, as we’ll see in later chapters. If your puppy can come even partially crate-trained on Day 1, that will make your first few weeks much easier.

In a later chapter, Choosing a reputable breeder, we cover other things you should look for when searching for a breeder.

As you go through the stages of crate training above, you will encounter regression: one day she’ll happily hang out in the crate for 10 minutes, and the next day she’ll start barking and whining after 10 seconds.

That is completely natural, don’t worry. That is all a part of how puppies learn and experiment. This type of regression will apply to every behavior you train.

When that happens, be patient and revert back several stages. Don’t worry, it will go faster each time. Just because they regress doesn’t mean you’re starting from scratch, they just need reminding. Do NOT force them or push them: that will just cause deeper regression and undo all your training. As long as you recognize the regression right away and restart promptly, moving back to a stage they are comfortable with, they will rapid return to and exceed where they were.

We will cover how to handle regression in behaviors in more depth in Chapter 2-16.

Even after crate-training is done, you need to maintain that the crate is a wonderful place, otherwise the behavior will extinguish (we will explore that phenomenon more in Chapter 2-25: Extinguishing undesirable behaviors).

So for the first few months make sure to give your puppy high-value rewards every time you put them in the crate. As they get older, you can phase that out to only rewarding some of the time, but in general the reward for going into the crate should be high and frequent.

After you have completed crate training – i.e. after they love their crate and go to it voluntarily – you should teach them to go to their crate as a command. That is quite useful, as you’ll no longer have to pick them up to put them in the crate, you can simply ask them to and they’ll know what you mean. It also makes them happier to go into the crate, as it is ‘voluntary’ (on request), rather than physically putting them in there.

We will go into much more depth on how to train behaviors on command in Section 2: Core Training Concepts, but as a preview the approach here is fairly simple: when you tempt them into their crate, start pairing that with a command, like “Go Crate” – saying the phrase every time you put them in. As always, you should be rewarding them for doing so, regardless of the command. Eventually, they will associate the word with the action, and learn to go to the crate whenever you say that cue. If you’ve done a good job with your positive reinforcement, they should dash over to the crate excitedly to get their reward.

Once a dog is crate-trained, you’ll notice that when she’s particularly tired or overstimulated, she will go into it on her own, perhaps bringing a chewtoy or bully stick with her. When she’s in her crate, don’t bother her. The crate should be a place she can escape stimulus.

If you have kids – particularly young ones – make sure they learn to leave your dog or puppy alone when they go to the crate.

Remember, crates are a space for alone time, not for playing. They are fun – with toys and chewtoys and treats – but solitary, quiet fun, not raucous, social fun.

To that end, if you have a crate in your living room, try to place it somewhere that both affords a view of the room, so that your dog can watch you (her family), but is also somewhat quiet and secluded, so that she can go there to avoid noise and disturbances. Even better is if you have a second room somewhere that is reasonably quiet. A bad location, for example, is your kitchen or a hallway, high-traffic areas where she’ll get no peace.

Along the same vein, do not use the crate to physically constrain your dog while you do something they don’t like, like grooming! If you are working on cooperative grooming, for example (see Chapter 5-1), and your dog is antsy about getting her nails trimmed, do not trim her nails in the crate! That not only creates negative associations with the crate, it’s also a betrayal: the promise of the crate is that it is a happy place, a safe place. It’s not the right place to be pushing stressors.

With crates, size matters. You should get a crate that is not too big and not too small for your adult dog (for puppies, get an adult crate with an adjustable partition, see next bullet for details). The crate should be just large enough that your dog or puppy can comfortably lay down, stand up, and turn around.

If the crate is too small, obviously it won’t be comfortable for the dog, defeating the point of being a space they can relax.

If the crate is too large however, it also defeats the point of the crate, it becomes just another room. For puppies, a crate that is too large will often lead to confusion and potty accidents (see next). Your dog should be able to lay with her back against most of 2 sides at the same time.

As mentioned above, we recommend nighttime crating to help with potty training. We get into more detail on this in Chapter 1-10, but it’s worth mentioning that if you put a puppy in an adult crate, it will be so large that they will often designate a corner as their ‘potty corner,’ defeating the purpose.

To provide a ‘den-like’ feel and maximize sense of security, it is usually best to place crates in corners or along walls. In addition, you want to be able to cover all sides but the entrance; some crates come with purpose-fit covers you can use, but otherwise a large blanket works just as well. Sometimes, such as during nighttime sleep, you may want to cover the entrance as well.

Sometimes however it is best to leave a crate uncovered, even if closing your dog into it. For example if there are visitors to your house – like friends or a plumber – and you are crating them because they are overexcited, you may want to try leaving the crate uncovered, so that they can still look out and observe. In those situations, covering the crate but still having noises on the other side can make them more anxious or overexcited, since the noise gives lie to the illusion of security. It very much depends on the dog however – try both covered and uncovered and stick with whatever calms her down more.

If you have a crate in your living room, it’s also helpful, if possible, to place the crate somewhere that both affords a view of the room, so that your dog can watch you (her family), and also is somewhat quiet and secluded, so that she can go there to avoid noise and disturbances. We talk more on that below.

You can find many different kinds of crate. We do not endorse a particular one here, but for utility we survey some common types:

• Metal crates – the most common type, these are affordable but a bit heavy and cumbersome
• Plastic crates – these are fine as well, a bit lighter than metal ones, but they often have 2 sides permanently occluded, limiting your options (there are scenarios you may want 3 of the sides visible)
• Higher-end crates – various companies and startups have begun making more expensive crates with various conveniences, such as easier collapsibility
• Foldable travel crates – collapsible fabric crates, these can be great for taking on the road, as they are light and easy to pack and unpack
• Car crates – rigid plastic crates specifically designed for car safety. They aim to significantly reduce the probability of injury or death to your dog in the event of an accident. We have not reviewed the experimental data on these, so we cannot verify that claim; however, the goal is very much a laudable one, so we encourage any pursuit of safer transport options for dogs in cars

We are certain there are many other types of crate out there, offering various benefits and conveniences. Which you go with is entirely up to your personal preference, it will not matter to your dog. Just make sure you have met all the criteria we’ve laid out so far:

Depending on their home and travel situation, many owners end up with more than one crate for different needs (e.g., one in the bedroom, one in the living room, and one in the car).

It is nice if you can put some kind of blanket or bed in the bottom of the crate, for comfort (your dog is sleeping there after all). Bear in mind however that during the summer months dogs will often prefer the cold ground (blankets and beds get hot to them). Just keep an eye on them and watch where they choose to sleep. If you find that they’re avoid the crate in the summer, sleeping on the floor instead, consider removing the bed.

The concept of errorless training is pretty simple: if you don’t want your dog to develop a bad habit – such as pottying in the house, chewing on furniture, or stealing food – try to avoid them having the chance to do it in the first place.

What you will find is that, amazingly, if you can go long enough without them ever having done a given thing, they will eventually never even try to do it, even given the opportunity; it would feel odd or abnormal to them. If they’ve never chewed on a shoe (because of your care and vigilance), then over time the likelihood that they would even try to chew on a shoe goes down.

In contrast if you let them make a mistake and do the bad behavior, all of a sudden it is now ‘in their repertoire’ so-to-speak; they can conceive of it, and may try doing it again.

There’s a few ways you can think about this effect:

• Mistakes become habits: remember, your puppy doesn’t know that it’s wrong to chew a shoe, or pee in the house. How could they know that? So if by chance they give it a try, because it seems fun and they don’t know any better, then it becomes a behavior they are familiar with. If they had fun while doing it (chewing for example, as we discussed in Chapter 1-7, is pretty enjoyable), then they will definitely do it again.

  Once they’re familiar with a behavior, they are more likely to try it again. The more they do it, and the more fun they have, the more it becomes a habit.

• It is much harder to untrain a bad behavior than it is to stop it from developing in the first place. In a later Chapter, Extinguishing undesirable behaviors, we will dive into how to get your dog to stop doing a behavior your don’t like. It’s probably no surprise however that it takes a lot more work to ‘extinguish’ a behavior than it does to just keep your dog from forming it in the first place. With errorless training, you are avoiding it happening in the first place.
• Making a behavior ‘alien’: On the flip side, if they’ve never done something before (because you have never let them), it would feel odd to them.

  Imagine: if your puppy has only ever pottied outside, never inside, for months and months, it would feel pretty ‘weird’ to them to potty inside.

  That is what you want with your dog: you want bad behaviors to feel abnormal, to feel alien, to feel unnatural. The longer they go without doing a behavior, the ‘weirder’ it will feel to do it, and the less and less likely they become to actually try. Essentially, the behavior starts to exit their normal set of habits.

  The puppy phase is a time when puppies are generally more prone to trying new things, to experimenting. As they get older their habits start to establish. The longer you can keep them from developing bad habits, the less likely they will be to even try those things later on, once they already have established mental norms.

Some common examples can help you see and understand the errorless training effect:

As you can see, you have two options with any behavior you want to avoid:

• Errorless: A few months of vigilance, and you’ll never have to worry about it. With any given behavior, if you can remain errorless for a few months, letting your puppy form a healthy set of alternative habits, they will become very unlikely to develop the bad behaviors.
• Not errorless: Allow errors, and you may have to keep an eye on your dog forever. If you aren’t proactive in preventing your dog from developing bad behaviors, they will almost certainly develop them. You’ll spend months un-training those behaviors, and even then you’ll pretty much always have to keep an eye on your dog.

Isn’t that a worthwhile payoff?

Bottom line: if you don’t want your puppy to do something, don’t give them the opportunity. If you can be vigilant for just a few months, it saves you years of stress.

This is an important topic, and Ian Dunbar treats the subject really nicely in his book Before & After Getting Your Dog – it’s a great book in general, and we strongly recommend checking it out.

It’s all well and good to say “don’t let your dog chew on furniture or potty in the house,” but how do you go about doing that?

The best (and frankly only) approach is to:

1. Identify what behaviors you want to avoid

   e.g., chewing anything other than toys, pottying indoors, stealing food, jumping on strangers, etc.

2. Remove or pre-empt/anticipate the opportunities to do those things

   e.g., make sure your puppy doesn’t have access to anything other than toys to chew (in the next chapter, Potty training, penning, and the expanding circle of freedom, we will talk about constraining the area your puppy operates in)

   e.g., take your puppy out to potty at regular intervals and every time she wakes up from a nap, pre-empting her need to potty (we’ll talk about this more in the next chapter as well)

   e.g., never giving your dog food from the table, and never leaving food on a table unattended around her

   Note that you still need to meet any underlying needs – their need to potty, their need to chew (see Chapter 1-7), their need to eat. Do NOT expect them to ‘overcome’ those needs – rather, give them appropriate outlets for those needs (chewtoys, regular bathroom trips outside, regular mealtimes, etc.) to prevent the bad behavior.

3. After an appropriate period of errorless behavior, gradually start relaxing constraints and giving her opportunity while under supervision

   e.g., in potty training, as we will talk about in the next Chapter, go gradually longer between potty breaks

   e.g., in chewing furniture, start allowing her access to furniture, shoes, handbags, etc. – while under watch

   Watch her carefully. If she goes for something she shouldn’t – like food or furniture – prevent her from doing so. After enough reps of being exposed to the opportunity but not acting on it, she will eventually get acclimated to ‘that is simply not a thing we do.’ It will leave her mind as an option.

   Be careful not to proceed to this step too soon. As we made clear above, errorless learning is most effective – if you allow errors in, the learning will take longer. The slower you go, the less likelihood of an error, the faster and deeper learning will be. Slower training leads to faster progress!

The perfect vigilance we talk about above can seem like a lot, but there are two saving graces that make it not as bad as it might seem:

1. A single error isn’t the end of the world. The fewer errors your dog makes, the faster your dog will learn. But as long as an error is one-off, it won’t undermine all your hard work. It just means learning will take a bit longer

2. It’s just a few months of vigilance – then you can start to relax. As the protocol above lays out, you can eventually relax. One of the authors regularly leaves food unattended on the coffee table with his 1-year-old dog, who has never even tried to take a bite.

   The longer your dog goes without exhibiting the behavior, the less and less likely it becomes that she would do so. Over time, you can gradually relax your restricted environment, keeping an eye out to make sure the dog doesn’t lapse. If you got her as a puppy and were consistent from Day 1, you can start relaxing pretty quickly after 6-8 months of age. If you either got an adult dog that already had the unwanted behavior, or a puppy that you initially lapsed with, you will need to be more careful.

   In this way, errorless training is an investment: more vigilance for a couple months now, repaid with years of not having to watch them. Our dog, for example, has never chewed on a single shoe, furniture, or anything other than an approved toy. We don’t have to worry about what we leave on the floor, or where we leave him – isn’t that peace of mind worth a month or two of vigilance?

As we will see when applied, in other chapters, to things like potty training, furniture chewing, barking, and jumping on people, errorless learning is the best way to prevent your pup from developing unwanted behaviors. Conversely inconsistency – being lax and allowing unwanted behaviors to go unchecked – only makes it harder for your pup to learn how to behave in a socially acceptable manner.

At the same time, your puppy is not a robot. They have biological needs and desires – for activity, for play, for chewing, for hunting. They cannot be expected to have absolute, perfect self-control and prevent themselves from indulging in their natural, instinctive impulses, any more than we can expect a three-year-old human child to sit quitely through a boring hours-long dinner without any occupation, no matter how well-raised.

You need to have reasonable expectations of what your puppy can and can’t do, in two particular ways:

• Make sure their core needs are met first. In Section 3, we will talk at length about your dog’s basic needs for physical activity, mental stimulation, and social engagement, as well as some ways to meet them. If your puppy isn’t getting enough activity or stimulation through healthy, appropriate outlets, you cannot expect them not to try to find other, un-approved, outlets. That’s neither fair nor reasonable. If you don’t want your 6-month-old border collie tearing up the house, errorless learning is necessary but not, on its own, sufficient – you also need to make sure they are getting plenty of other activity outlets for their energy.
• Have age-appropriate expectations, and gradually build their capacity. In Chapter 2-27 we will talk about ‘core capabilities’ like self-control and how to build them. It’s important to recognize that we build these capacities gradually. As we emphasized in, for example, Chapter 1-8: Crate training and Chapter 1-12: Separation anxiety, you need to take a highly incremental approach: start of easy, and gradually make your requirements of them harder. If you go slowly enough, rewarding them and building their confidence on the way, their capacity for self-control will gradually develop. Age plays an important role here too: plenty of training and practice will build even a young puppy’s self-control, but even the best-trained 6-month-old pup in the world can’t be expected to control themselves in the same situations, to the same extent, as 4-year-old.

The bottom line is errorless training is a powerful tool, but you need to always respect your dog’s needs and capacity. Never ask them to do something they can’t do – setting them up for failure does no one any good.

In approaching potty training, the most important thing for you to understand – and to continuously remind yourself of – is that your puppy does not know what to do. How could they? They need to be taught that ‘we only potty outdoors.’ Heck, they need to be taught that ‘indoors’ and ‘outdoors’ are distinct places to begin with!

That might seem obvious, but ‘in the moment’ owners often feel lost or frustrated at their puppy’s accidents. It is important that you remind yourself: from their perspective, when they need to go to the bathroom they have no idea that they are supposed to do that outside, not inside.

As such, your objective in potty training is really teaching them the concept that pottying inside is different from pottying outside. When they have an ‘accident,’ it is not because they are being ‘bad’ or disobeying you, they simply do not realize they are doing something ‘wrong.’ Once they understand the ‘right’ behavior, they will do everything they can to behave correctly.

If you can remember that, you will do a much better job of potty training, because you will:

1. More intuitively focus on educating your puppy, not ‘correcting’ them (never ‘correct’ your puppy for accidents – we will talk much more about that below)

2. Naturally be more pro-active, rather than re-active; since you know that your puppy has no idea where to potty, you’ll learn to anticipate when they need to go and get ahead of that rather than waiting for them to somehow indicate something they don’t even know they should be indicating

Below we will walk through how to teach your puppy that there are right and wrong places to potty. First, however, make sure you understand the principle underlying all of them: the goal of potty training is helping your puppy understand that pottying happens only outside. Once you give them that understanding, they will try their best to not potty indoors.

In the last Chapter, Errorless learning, we covered one of the most important concepts in dog training. Potty training turns out to be one of its most common and useful applications.

In potty training, errorless learning means anticipating when your puppy will need to potty, and making sure it happens outdoors.

Getting ahead of it, to avoid accidents before they happen, will take some diligence and attention on your part for the first few weeks, but it will pay off with much faster and more consistent potty training, letting you relax a lot sooner. I promise – it is worth the effort.

The power is in consistency: the more consistent you are, the faster and more easily your puppy understands that outdoors is where she does her business, not indoors.

Consider it from her perspective:

• If she occasionally goes potty indoors, and occasionally goes potty outdoors, how is she supposed to realize that only outdoors is right? Even if it’s one time in ten, it will take a long time for her to get the pattern.
• If, instead, she never (or as close as you can get to it) goes potty indoors, she will rapidly learn that outdoors is where you go. The pattern becomes clear to her, the right habit forms.

Now you might say “sure that sounds great in theory, but how on earth can I entirely avoid accidents?” Later in this chapter, we will lay out ‘three tactical pillars’ that will help you achieve that errorless potty training.

Before we lay out the ‘three tactical pillars’ to errorless potty training, there’s one more concept we want to introduce: puppy den instinct as applied to pottying.

As discussed in Chapter 1-8: Crate training, puppies are born with an ingrained ‘den instinct’ – distinguishing the safe, protected space where they sleep from the ‘outside world.’

As part of that den instinct, puppies will tend to not potty in their ‘den’ if they can at all avoid it.

The problem is that puppies do not realize that your whole house is their ‘den.’ Remember how big your house seemed when you were a child? To a brand new puppy, your house is an entire vast world. It is filled with all sorts of exciting and unfamiliar places and objects and creatures to explore – it’s way too big to be their ‘den.’

Even so, we can use their den instinct to our advantage in several ways. We will see that in one of our tactical pillars below, the ‘expanding circle of freedom.’ For now, just understand:

Screwing up den instinct: as a final note on the den instinct: you can screw that instinct up! When we let puppies potty where they play or – worse – sleep, they start to unlearn that instinct, and instead learn that it is fine to potty anywhere (the complete opposite of errorless training). Here are a few common ways that can happen:

• Using a crate that is too large, such that they start pottying in one corner of it
• Keeping them confined too long, such that they are forced to pee where they sleep when they can’t hold it any more
• Letting them pee anywhere in their play area, where they also frolic and nap

Again we come back to errorless training: the more you allow pottying indoors, the harder it will be to unlearn that behavior.

As we emphasized above, your puppy only has accidents because she does not understand that she is supposed to go outside.

If she has an accident indoors and you reprimand her, she will not understand why she is in trouble!

If you do so, it will NOT potty train her, it will not help her understand what she is supposed to do.

On the contrary, reprimanding her for an accident will teach her to have negative associations with potty. She will become afraid to potty, especially with you around. That means that she will be less likely to do her business outdoors when you ask her to. Instead, she will wait until you’re not looking and will try to hide her pee, somewhere indoors.

Obviously, that approach is not only stressful and traumatizing to your puppy (imagine being afraid to pee as a child), but also works against housetraining.

Accidents happen; at the end of this chapter, we cover how to handle them appropriately. But needless to say, you should never, ever reprimand your puppy for having an accident indoors.

Errorless potty training is fantastic in theory, but how on earth do you consistently pre-empt your puppy from having accidents?

We recommend three tactical ‘pillars’ to doing so, each of which we will detail in separate sections below:

• Pillar 1: pre-empting accidents: know when your puppy will likely need to pee, and take her outside at those regular intervals, before she realizes she needs to go.
• Pillar 2: the expanding circle of freedom: giving your puppy free access to your entire house from Day 1 is asking for trouble, not just with potty training but with every other bad behavior you can imagine (chewing on shoes, stealing food, etc.). Even if you live in a 350 square foot studio apartment, your house is much too big a ‘den’ for an 8-week old puppy. You should give your puppy free, unattended reign only to an area that is appropriate for her age, gradually expanding that area as she gets older until eventually it includes your entire house.
• Pillar 3: potty time is business time; the fun happens after you potty: when you take your puppy out to potty, do not do anything else until she has pottied! If you walk her around and let her explore, she’s learning that delaying her potty is rewarding. Instead, go for a walk or do fun things after she does her business.

We will go into detail on each of those concepts below. Put together and diligently executed, your puppy should learn highly consistent house-training within a few weeks, and with barely any accidents in that time.

The easiest way to achieve errorless (zero-accident) potty training is simply to make sure you are taking your puppy outside at sufficiently frequent intervals to do her business.

If you take them out frequently enough (and make sure that they potty – see Pillar 3 below), they will consistently be emptying their tank outside, and will not have an accident indoors because they do not need to go. With each passing week your puppy’s bladder control will improve and you can gradually make the timespan between taking them out longer and longer.

After weeks of pottying only outdoors, never indoors, they will quickly start to associate only outside with pottying, and they will start to wait to potty until going outside.

How do you know when to take your puppy out? You can follow 3 metrics:

All that might seem like a lot of vigilance, but we promise that:

1. if you stick to it, the process will go pretty dang fast, and you’ll have several hours between bathroom visits within a few weeks

2. once you get into the habit of it, learning the timing and your puppy’s signals, it won’t take as much of your attention as you think

What if I can’t be with my puppy all the time? The strategy above implies a requirement that not everyone can meet: someone needs to be with your puppy at all times for the first ~4 weeks after you take them home. If you cannot do so – if you need to leave your puppy alone for several hours at a time in the first few weeks after you take them home – there are alternative strategies. We outline that ‘non-ideal’ approach in a separate bullet below. Those alternative approaches will work, you will be able to housetrain your puppy, but know that it will take much longer and be less consistent than the ‘ideal case’ we outline here.

As mentioned in the previous bullet, you want your potty break interval to be short enough that you almost completely avoid accidents, but not so long that your puppy often does not need to potty when you go out. Ideally, you want to get your frequency just right such that your puppy develops a habit of “every time I go out, I potty.”

Achieving that habit confers two benefits:

1. It reinforces the pattern – every time your puppy does her business outside, it adds one more iteration, one more data point, to the habit of “outside is for potty.” The more she does potty outside, without doing potty inside, the more she will start to associate going outside as a necessary first step before going potty.

2. It builds bladder control – if she gets in the habit of going potty every time she goes out, her bladder control will start to improve, both because she’s deliberately peeing when she goes out, and because she’s holding it until then. Essentially, you are trying to slowly move her away from ‘peeing happens on its own’ to ‘I choose when to pee.’ If you follow these recipes, that bladder control will develop organically.

In Pillar 3, below, we go into more detail on how to tangibly achieve this, the protocol/recipe you should follow when taking your puppy out.

Now the part most owners dread: nighttime pottying. There is good news and bad news.

First, the bad news:

• Your 7-week-old puppy will need to potty in the middle of the night, so you will have to set alarms to take her out at an appropriate interval, just as we do during the day. Otherwise, errorless training will break down and you will be taking her out in the middle of the night for a long time.

However, there are two pieces of good news:

• They need to go much less frequently at night than during the day. While sleeping, dogs (and humans) release hormones that suppress our urinary response, which keeps us from peeing ourselves while asleep. While a 7-week-old puppy may need to pee every 1-2 hours during the day, they should be able to make it at least 3-4 hours at night, so even on Day 1 you will probably only need to go out maybe 1-2 times at night.
• Nighttime progress is very, very fast. If you do get ahead of it and take them out frequently enough from Day 1 – as well as follow the other nighttime training points below – they will quickly get the idea. You can expect that within a few nights you will only be taking them out once a night, and within a week or two they should be sleeping through the night.

The bottom line is that while the first few nights will be tough, you should be back onto a normal sleep schedule within a few weeks at most.

How will you know when they can go longer at night? We’ll talk about that in the next bullet on crates at night.

As discussed up top, puppies will instinctively avoid peeing in their ‘den’ if they can at all avoid it. At night, we use that to our advantage by crating them. If they wake up and need to pee, they will try to get your attention before doing so in their crate, such as by whining or woofing.

If you think your puppy can go longer intervals between potties at night, this safety mechanism lets you try extending that window (longer time between alarms) without disaster – if you push the timing too long, they will try to wake you up.

If you don’t crate your puppy, then when they wake up they will wander around and find a place to potty, almost certainly before you wake up.

A few important points on this:

• You should still set an alarm. Relying exclusively on your puppy to tell you when they need to pee at night is just asking for accidents to happen. Your puppy’s feedback should be a safety valve, not a primary plan. It is a fallback letting you experiment with the boundaries on how long you can go at night between potties.
• Use an appropriately-sized crate. As discussed in Chapter 1-8: Crate training, the crate should be just large enough for your puppy to comfortably sleep, stand, and turn around in. If it is any larger, your puppy will designate a corner as the ‘bathroom corner,’ which will undo both your hard work crate-training and your hard work potty-training. Since puppies grow rapidly, the best approach is to get an adult-sized crate that comes with an adjustable partition, allowing you to gradually increase the interior size of the crate as your puppy grows.
• They may wake you up just to play – handle that appropriately. Just like puppies don’t know that only outside is for potty, they also don’t know that nighttime is only for sleeping. Your puppy will sometimes wake up, but instead of putting herself back to sleep may want to play. In those cases, she may wake up and start whining and woofing to get your attention, trying to get you to do something fun with her. You, of course, have no way of knowing if that’s because she wants to play or needs to pee. We cover how to handle this in a bullet below.

Crating your puppy at night has an added benefit: it helps teach them that nighttime is for sleeping. As we discussed in Chapter 1-8: Crate training, the crate is a calm, relaxing place, it is the den, where we rest, it is not the playpen where we run around and frolic. When your puppy wakes, being in the crate will help your puppy learn to settle themselves back down to sleep, instead of getting antsy and roaming around.

If your breeder did some crate-training already, it will help with the transition. If not, this is yet another reason that you will want to start crate training on Day 1. See Chapter 1-8: Crate training for how to go about that.

As mentioned in the previous point, puppies will sometimes wake up at night and want to play. They’re not being bad, they just don’t yet understand that nighttime is only for sleeping, you have to teach them that.

Doing so is fairly simple: when they wake you up at night, whining or woofing, take them out, give them a chance (on leash) to go potty, and, whether they go or not, take them right back in and re-crate them. Do NOT play with them, walk them, or let them roam or explore. They do their business and they go back in the crate to sleep, those are their only two options.

If you don’t do that – if you let them walk around and explore at night – they will start waking you up all the time just to be let out.

As with every other kind of behavioral training, errorless works: be consistent, always go right out and back in, and they will quickly learn to only wake you up if they need to go bathroom.

Once again, you can see how useful crate-training is: the crate is plenty big to comfortably sleep, but not big enough to mess around. Being in the crate signals clearly to them that they should be sleeping. And, by the way, the puppies need that sleep!

A few tactical notes:

• Cover the sides of the crate. As mentioned in the previous chapter, Crate training, you should use a blanket to cover all four sides of the crate at night, cutting down on both light and noise to help them sleep better.
• Leave a (unfilled) chewtoy with them. Puppy brain development can be weird. Sometimes they will wake up and really can’t go back to sleep. That’s OK: to handle that eventuality, it’s not a bad idea to leave a small chewtoy with them in the crate, something they can use to occupy themselves and help them fall back asleep. If you’ve been diligent about not playing with them, and always putting them back in the crate right away, they will soon learn not to bother you if they’re just bored at night. They’ll just occupy themselves with the chewtoy until they fall back asleep
• Try not to even say anything. Nighttime potty should be, on your part, silent. Talking to them only increases a sense of activity. Open their crate, pick them up, leash them, take them outside, let them do their business, and take them right back in. If you’ve paired a command (”go potty” – more on this below), you can say that.
• They may still fuss, be firm but use nonverbal comforts. If they are just bored – you’ve taken them out and brought them back in and they’re still whining – don’t cater to that. Leave them in the crate, and let them settle themselves back down. At the same time, don’t let them work themselves into a frenzy – if they are whining, you can place a hand under the blankets, to show them that you’re there, and everything is fine. That should calm them, and once they settle they will eventually fall back asleep

As an aside, note that this is NOT what you should do during the day – during the day when they potty outside you should reward them with play and exploration. We talk about that much more in Pillar 3 below.

This suggestion is a bit unintuitive for owners, and the first time you do it might be a bit scary, but we promise that it works. Puppies will not pee while they are being held. If they are mid-pee and you pick them up from behind, holding them with your hands under their front shoulderblades – they will immediately and reflexively stop.

So if you see them just about to pee, don’t be afraid to run over and pick them up. They will stop peeing, and you can safely carry them outside to finish their business.

One thing to not do if your puppy is mid-accident is yell at them. They do not understand the word “stop.” If you yell at them, it will only confuse them and make them panic. It will not stop them from peeing, and it will create negative associations with pottying, as we warned you against above.

The above protocol, taking your puppy out every time they need to pee, obviously only works if someone is around to do so. As we noted above, we recommend that you try to have somebody home with your puppy at all times for the first 4 weeks after taking them home (8-12 weeks into their life). If you really cannot do that, if you must leave your puppy alone for extended periods of time before they are fully housetrained, there is an alternative approach we lay out here. Bear in mind however: this approach will result in potty training taking significantly longer and being less reliable. Instead of completing potty training in 3-4 weeks, it can take a few months.

Even so, many owner’s lives just do not allow them to have someone with their puppy at all times. In those cases, you can do the following:

1. Make sure to crate-train your puppy right away, see Chapter 1-8: Crate training

2. When you are out of the house for longer than your puppy can hold her bladder, set up the crate opening onto a small penned play area for her, as we will describe in Pillar 2 below

3. In the penned play area, put a pee pad or square piece of astroturf. While home, encourage your puppy to pee on that spot once or twice. She will then quickly identify that as her ‘bathroom area’

4. When you leave the home for extended periods, leave her with access to that bathroom area

   A couple tactical notes on setting that up:

   • Keep the penned area as small as possible. As a puppy, when you’re not home, she should be napping in her crate or using the bathroom if she needs it. Too much freedom will just get her into trouble (as she gets older, this gets relaxed – see Pillar 2 below). She should just have access to her crate and her pee area, with enough separation between the two that she doesn’t get confused about the delineation.
   • Make sure she cannot get out of the penned area! If she knocks over the pen and gets out, exploring the house unattended, you will come home to a host of bad behaviors you’ll have to spend weeks untraining.

5. While you are home, remove that potty area and stick to the usual recipe for potty training that we’ve outlined

6. Once her bladder control reaches a point where she does not use the bathroom area while you are out of the house, you can start fully crating her (without access to the potty area) while you’re out of the house.

   Obviously, make sure to take her out to do her business immediately before and after you go out.

7. Once she is fully potty trained, with no accidents for at least 2 months, and if she reaches a point where you are comfortable with her roaming the house unattended (see Pillar 2 below), you can potentially leave her at home uncrated, at your discretion.

   Note that many owners choose never to do this, and crate their dogs whenever they are home alone. That is perfectly fine and in many cases the best solution for your dog, as long as the periods they are home alone and crated are appropriate. As we will discuss in Section 3, you should not be leaving a dog home alone for 8 hours a day, crated or not.

If you live in a city apartment, we generally recommend that you take your puppy to the street to do her business. If you have a balcony, you can put out some astroturf or sod and train her to pee on that, but bear in mind that she may then always pee on your balcony.

If you live on a high floor with no elevator and no balcony, you would ideally still carry your puppy down to the street regularly. If you can’t or don’t want to, you can follow the indoor protocol from the last bullet, using an indoor potty area. We don’t recommend that, as again potty training will progress slower and less reliably, but it is an option.

As we discussed in the beginning of this chapter, puppies have a ‘den instinct’ that prevents them from pottying where they sleep, and wanting to potty as far from where they sleep as possible. The problem, however, is that on Day 1 your puppy does not understand that your entire house is the ‘den.’ Remember, as physically mobile as they are, they are still mentally babies, they were just born: from their perspective, even a tiny city apartment is a vast world.

To teach them that the entire house is their den, we recommend a ‘gradually expanding circle of freedom’ approach: start by using a pen to limit how much of your home they have unattended access to, and gradually expand that area to be larger and larger, slowly teaching them that all of inside is their den.

Limiting the space your puppy has access to has two enormous benefits:

1. Partially aids potty training: since the pen (as opposed to the crate) needs to be amply large enough for your puppy to play and have fun in, it will be larger than just their sleeping area (i.e. the crate), so if you don’t monitor them and take them out at appropriate times (see Pillar 1, above), they will potty in their pen, which as discussed sets back your potty training considerably.

   Even so, by constraining where they have freedom, the pen makes it easier for you to keep your eyes on them to spot them before they have an accident, per Pillar 1 above. If they’re napping, you’ll be able to more easily monitor for when they wake up so you can immediately take them out to potty. If they’re awake, you’ll be able to spot if they start ‘circling,’ as described in the previous section. If they start to have an accident, you’ll catch it more quickly and be able to pick them up before they finish

2. Stops them from learning other bad behaviors: perhaps even more importantly, limiting the area they have access to enables errorless training of other unwanted behaviors, such as:
   • Chewing on shoes, furniture, or anything other than toys
   • Stealing food or counter-surfing
   • Barking at people outside
   • etc.

   By penning them you can control their environment: they will be surrounded by appropriate toys and treats, and will not have access to e.g., shoes, furniture, human food, or windows. As we discussed in Chapter 1-9: Errorless learning, the longer you can prevent them from ever even trying those unwanted behaviors, the less and less likely that they will ever do so.

   Furniture-chewing example

   Take chewing furniture or other non-toy objects as an example. As we discussed in Chapter 1-7: Chewtoy training, puppies (and adult dogs) love chewing on things, it is soothing and pleasurable to them. If you let your puppy roam free in your house, they will find ‘bad’ things to chew. If you instead:

   • Limit their access, such that they don’t have access to inappropriate things to chew
   • Give them appropriate things to chew (i.e. dog chewtoys)
   • Expose them passively, while you’re with them (see later bullet below), to ‘non-allowed’ objects around the house; i.e. play with them outside of their pen, around shoes and furniture but not letting them actually chew on them

   What you will find is that over time, your puppy will learn the difference between things they are and are not allowed to chew. Again, it is all about showing them a consistent pattern: these are things you can chew (your toys), and these are things you can’t chew (everything else). Puppies aren’t trying to be bad, they just don’t know – by following errorless training principles, you help them understand what they should and should not do. This errorless training really does work: as an example, one of the authors’ (now-adult) dogs is extremely mouth-oriented, using his mouth to explore even as an adult dog, and even he has never, ever, not even once chewed a shoe or piece of furniture. It would feel weird, odd, abnormal, uncomfortable to him – those things, in his mind, are simply not even in the category of ‘chewable things.’

Perception is relative. To your 7-week-old puppy, your studio apartment is a huge world, and their 5×5 pen is a plenty big playground. They’ve got their toys, they’ve got treats, they’ve got access to their crate (their sanctuary, per Chapter 1-8: Crate training), and you play with them in there – what could be better!

You still do need to make the pen fun! Size may not be an issue, but boredom can be if you don’t provide enough stimulation. Make sure to:

• Make sure they have plenty of toys and chewtoys in the pen, along with access to a water bowl

  Aside: if they enter a ‘splash phase’ – jumping and playing in their water bowl – you should temporarily remove it, instead giving them the water bowl periodically so they can drink, but not actually leaving the bowl in there.

• Make sure to play with them in the pen – get in there yourself. Don’t just stick them in the pen and forget about them!
• Make sure to give them plenty of exploration time outside the pen, both in your house, in the yard, and outside of the house per your Socialization efforts (see Socialization Basics). Outside-the-pen time just requires that you are paying complete attention to them.

In other words, the pen is their ‘home base’ – make it fun, and be part of it, don’t just sequester them in there.

Note that they may still whine at you, but that’s won’t be because of the size of the pen – it will be because you are outside of it. You’ll be doing something that looks like fun – like cooking dinner or talking on the phone – and they’ll want to participate; or you’ll be working and they’ll want your attention. The issue there is not the pen, so don’t worry about that. In those cases, be careful about ‘caving’ and reinforcing that behavior – your puppy should get plenty of your attention, but she also need to learn that sometimes she has to entertain herself. We will cover that balance in more depth in Chapter 1-14.

Once you’ve started on crate training (you should have right away, see Chapter 1-8), try to set it up your pen with crate-access, such that your crate is either in the pen or opens into the pen, so your puppy can go sleep in it whenever she wants (hopefully you’ve built that habit pretty well).

In terms of what to use for a pen, there are several options, including but not limited to:

• Premade dog (or baby) play pens
• Adjustable metal pen walls
• Baby gates used in concert with your natural hallways and furniture

What you use doesn’t particularly matter, as long as it meets a few criteria:

• Walls are high enough that your puppy can’t get over them
• Your puppy cannot knock the walls over
• Ideally ‘expandable,’ such that you can reconfigure the pen to cover a larger and larger area of your house (more on this below)
• Either your crate fits inside, or you can open your crate onto it

In terms of pen placement, make sure it is somewhere that you or someone else can keep a constant eye on the puppy, to look out for when she wakes up from a nap or has other needs.

As mentioned, you should play with your puppy in the pen, but you should also absolutely be taking your puppy out of the pen and playing with her around the house.

The pen is simply where she has greater freedom. Outside of the pen, you should always be interacting with her and always controlling what she can do, keeping her out of trouble. It’s important to introduce her to the rest of your house however, for several reasons:

• It’s a prelude to expanding the pen area (see below), introducing her to the idea that the whole house is the den
• It’s a chance for her to explore new environments and objects
• It’s a chance to expose her to things she should not do, without letting her do them, i.e. things she should not chew, or windows with people outside she should not bark at. By exposing her to those things with you there controlling her actions (e.g., using distractions to keep her from chewing things or barking at people), you continue and strengthen errorless training

The pen is where they have unfettered freedom and where you can leave them, temporarily, unattended. That does not mean that you should be leaving them unattended for any period of time, as we discussed in the previous Pillar 1.

While the puppy is awake, you need to keep an eye on them to make sure they don’t have an accident or escape the crate. More importantly, you should be regularly playing with them, as we discuss in more depth in Chapter 1-14.

While the puppy is asleep, you need to be watching for when they wake up, since – as covered in Pillar 1 above – you need to take them to potty as soon as they wake up.

If, for lifestyle reasons, you must leave your puppy unattended for prolonged periods of time, there are options on how to handle that. See our coverage of that situation at the end of the previous section on Pillar 1.

To start, when you first take your puppy home, your pen should be no more than about 6 feet x 6 feet in area, or a bit larger if the crate needs to be placed in the pen rather than attached. That is plenty of space for your puppy.

Over time, you should then gradually expand the area your puppy has access to, until eventually it covers the entire house.

In terms of when to expand the area and by how much increment each time, you should go off of your dog’s behavior. The more diligent your errorless training of not only potty but other behaviors (like chewing things they shouldn’t), the more quickly you can expand her area of access. Generally err on the side of smaller and slower – if your puppy has an accident or chews some furniture, it sets back your errorless training considerably.

A good approach for testing those boundaries is to increase the area of access, but when you do keep a hyper-watchful eye on your puppy for a day or two with the larger area, to make sure you haven’t gone too far too fast.

As always, it’s about paying attention to your puppy! Learning how to read her, learning her behaviors, learning her inclinations.

As you expand the circle of freedom, you will start to find that there may be areas that your puppy doesn’t spend much time in, purely by chance. This might be a corner of the living room you rarely spend time in, or a guest bedroom, or the bathroom. You might just be in the habit of playing by the dining table, and rarely play with them over by the TV, for example.

When you notice that, be deliberate about going and playing with your puppy in those ‘less popular’ areas. If you don’t, you will find that those are the most likely places your puppy will go potty. Because you don’t spend much time there, she may just not realize that those are part of the den as well, even though she has free access to them.

Eventually, your puppy will generalize the concepts of ‘indoors’ versus ‘outdoors’ (you’ll even find, for example, that some dogs won’t go potty in parking garages, because the roof above them categorizes it as ‘indoors’ to them). Until that is firmly established however, make sure to clearly show them that every part of the house (that they have access to) is part of their active living space.

When you take your puppy out to do business, always do so on-leash, and do not do anything fun until they potty. Don’t walk for blocks, or walk around the yard.

If you’re diligent about this, they will quickly learn that they need get pottying out of the way before they can go do fun stuff, and they will potty promptly when you take them outside.

If you don’t do this, your puppy will take longer and longer to go potty when you take them out, wandering around and exploring until the fancy takes them.

That is best understood with a classic, illustrative example that we detail in a separate bullet below, where well-meaning owners intuitively walk their dogs around trying to get them to pee, but that has the effect of teaching their dogs not to pee.

Fun and play should not happen before potty, but they should happen afterwards. Many owners take their puppies back inside right away, since – from the owner’s perspective – the reason they took them out has been met.

But think about that from a training perspective:

• Most likely, your puppy wants to be outside, having fun and exploring.
• If you take your puppy in everytime they pee, they are learning that if they pee they have to go back in.
• That negatively reinforces peeing! As a result, they will try to avoid peeing, since they know it means they’ll have to go back in!

Instead, make sure that after they pee, they always get to do something fun: play with them, treat them, and let them explore. That is in addition to of course praising and rewarding them for peeing outside in general.

Combined with the previous tactic – no fun until they potty – you are teaching them very clearly: nothing fun happens before you potty, lots of fun things happen after you potty, so potty as soon as you go out!

As they get older, and their habits become ingrained, you can start relaxing this requirement, more and more often taking them in right after pottying. Still make sure however that sometimes you guys stay out and play, to avoid extinguishing the behavior (we will talk more about this in Chapter 2-20: Repetition & Maintenance).

To see the above points in action, consider an all-too-common scenario that we see every day in cities: an exhausted dog owner wandering around the neighborhood, begging their puppy to pee. We’ve see owners brought to tears, desperate for their dogs to do their business.

If we think for a second, we can quickly see how this situation comes about:

1. You take your puppy out to pee

2. She does not do so right away, instead pulling towards a flower bed or tree. You think “ok let’s try a few spots to try to get her to pee”

3. You keep taking her to new spots, thinking that eventually you will ‘hit on one’ that gets her to pee

4. From the puppy’s perspective, what does that look like? “the longer I wait to pee, the more new and exciting things I get to see! And I get to pee somewhere better and more interesting!”

5. As a result, each time you go out – and as your puppy’s bladder control improves – your puppy will take longer and longer to do her business!

6. When you finally do get your dog to pee, you rush back in, relieved you can finally go about your day

7. Now however, your puppy is learning: “ouf when I do eventually pee, all the fun stops and we go back in”

8. All together, your puppy has now learned that she should wait as long as possible to pee!

The underlying problem here is that the owner is not recognizing: YOU are the adult, the parent, you are there to indicate when it is safe and they should potty, and when it isn’t. The owner in the above scenario is looking to the puppy, trying to figure out where ‘she wants’ to pee. That is entirely reversed from what it should be, and sends confusing messages to your dog

Sometimes you’ll take your puppy out and they just won’t pee. Maybe they don’t need to, or maybe they’re distracted. Either way, that’s totally fine. Don’t release them or play, just:

1. Wait two minutes to give them a chance

2. If they don’t pee, come right back inside

3. If you think that they do need to pee (e.g., if it’s been a while or they’ve just woken up from a nap), go back out in another couple minutes to try again

Continue that iteration until they pee, then let them explore or play and have fun outside as usual.

Building this habit of pottying as soon as they go outside is not strictly necessary for the healthy development of your puppy. It is however enormously beneficial to your quality of life, not just during the puppy phase but also when they are an adult dog.

You don’t want to be wandering around outside every time you need your dog to pee, especially in the middle of the night or when you’re otherwise busy. You want to be able to take your dog out, have them pee, and move on.

This skill does not just apply to the puppy phase either; building this habit – or failing to do so – will last throughout your dog’s entire life (although you can train this habit later in life too, see below).

On top of that, this practice helps improve bladder control. As mentioned above in Pillar 1, these small instances of getting themselves to pee helps them transition to deliberately peeing, rather than just having it happen on its own.

Throughout this process, it is easy and useful to teach them a pottying command.

You do that by simply saying whatever command you want to use (e.g., “Go Potty”) while they are peeing. As you continue to do so, they will gradually learn to associate “Go Potty” with, well, going potty.

Once they understand what the command means, you will be able to use it to tell them what you expect them to do. That is incredibly useful for communication between you and your puppy, since it helps them understand what you are waiting for.

Consider a scenario: you take your puppy to a friend’s house, and you want them to go potty before you go inside. So you follow protocol and wait outside with your puppy until they do their business. To your puppy however, this is a strange and exciting new yard. They:

By teaching them “Go Potty,” you can signal clearly to them that’s what you are waiting for. Since they want to explore this new place, they’ll happily potty as soon as they realize what you’re asking for (after all, fun stuff always happens after pottying, doesn’t it!).

If you adopt an adult dog that doesn’t pee promptly when going out, you can teach them the habit the exact same way you would a puppy. Simply go out on leash, and don’t let them play, walk, or explore until they’ve done their business.

We summarize the above protocol in the following flow diagram:

We covered this at the beginning of the Chapter. If you’ve forgotten why, return to that bullet. It is pointless, cruel, and counter-productive. Don’t do it.

Even if you follow all of the guidance in this chapter, accidents will happen. If you do a good job, you will have only a handful ever, but they still do happen.

When it does happen, don’t worry: your ‘errorless’ training isn’t completely undone! Just try to do the following:

1. Clean it up properly – we explain in the below how to do that

2. Understand why it happened – think about the situation, and try to figure out why the accident happened. For example, maybe she just got up from a nap, or maybe she was over-stimulated because of the vacuum. Use that understanding to pre-empt it next time

3. Take a step back, more conservative, on your potty training – you don’t want one accident to turn into regression. If you were able to be a bit more relaxed about your frequency or vigilance, tighten things up a bit more. If you were taking her out every three hours, bring it back down to every two hours for a bit. The more distance you can put between this accident and the next one, the less regression in potty training you will see.

As we will cover more in Chapter 4-4: Olfactory sense, dogs have an enormously more powerful sense of smell than we do. When it comes to going potty, dogs try to designate spots as their ‘bathroom spots’, where they go again and again. Obviously, you do not want one of those bathroom spots to be inside your house!

If you clean the accident up with normal household cleaners, your dog will still be able to smell the spot, even though you can’t.

Instead, make sure to use an enzyme cleaner, designed specifically for pet urine. Soak the pee spot in the enzyme cleaner and let it sit per the recommended instructions for whichever brand you buy. That cleaner will remove the urine scent appropriately, preventing your dog from continuing to smell it.

If you don’t use an enzyme cleaner, your puppy will have the scent of urine in the house, and you risk losing the association you are trying to build between ‘inside’ and ‘den’.

Even after potty training, there are scenarios – particularly in the first 18 months of life, but even into adulthood depending on the dog – where your dog will potentially have accidents. These fall into two categories:

• Over-excitement: you bring over dog or human friends that your puppy is incredibly excited about. She may then have an accident, either in anticipation or in the middle of play, because she’s so excited she doesn’t even realize she needs to pee (or poop).
• Illness: miraculously, even a 4 month old puppy will often be able to hold in diarrhea in the middle of the night long enough to wake you up and indicate something is wrong. Even so, stomach illness can strike fast and hard, and your puppy may not be able to control her diarrhea.

In these cases, just do your best to anticipate the events and stay on top of them:

• In the case of over-excitement, make sure to take your puppy to empty her tank before a playdate.
• In the case of illness, if your puppy has been having runny poops or otherwise seems out of sorts, pay particular attention to her signals, especially at night. If she rarely wake you up at night, she had runny poops during the day, and she is now whining at 2AM, you might want to take her out right away.

As a final note, there are some best practices for breeders that can set up you for an easier time of potty training.

Given the principle of errorless training, you can imagine that potty training goes a lot more smoothly if your breeder has already made headway. Of course newborn puppies cannot be consistently taken out to potty. However, good breeders will at least create a separate space in the puppy pen, such as with a pee pad or a square of astroturf, for puppies to do their business in (their den instinct will naturally incline them towards making use of it). The alternative is letting them potty where they play and sleep, which as we point out above causes them to start un-learning their den instinct of keeping their den and bathroom separate.

Not all breeders do this, and that is OK; while it is ideal and speeds the potty training process for you, the puppies will at the end of the day eventually learn regardless, so no long-term harm is done if breeders don’t follow this protocol. Still, if you’re considering a breeder it can be worth asking about how they manage potty spaces for puppies.

We go through a broader list of what practices to look for in a breeder in the later Chapter 6-3.

Dogs, like humans, are ‘social’ animals: they have evolved to operate in groups with other dogs and perhaps, after millennia of co-evolution with humans, even with people. Even more so than humans, dogs need to be around people or other dogs. They are simply not built to be alone.

As a result, when a dog is alone, everything in their brains is telling them to panic. Without training, all dogs suffer from ‘separation anxiety’ – panicking when they’re left home alone.

That panic can be disastrous, for humans and dogs. It leads to behaviors like:

• Barking all day: ever heard a neighbor’s dog barking all day long? It’s because they haven’t received separation anxiety training. Their owner isn’t home, so they’re panicking and barking up a storm.
• Destroying furniture: the anxiety can create a neurotic energy your dog will do anything to try to alleviate. As mentioned in the earlier chapter on chewtoy training, chewing things is an innately soothing experience to dogs. When stressed at home alone therefore, they will try to chew chair legs, wood tables, baseboards, doors, kitchen cabinets, shoes, etc. as a way to calm and distract themselves.
• Suffering enormous stress: the above behaviors are a serious pain to humans, but imagine what they reflect in the dog: extreme stress. As we said above, dogs are not built to be left alone. The anxiety they suffer as a result is tremendous.
• Developing reactivity: at her heightened level of stress, your dog is more prone to develop reactivity to any stimuli that enters her world while you are gone. People walking on your sidewalk, or landscapers in the yard, or kids playing next door can all become terrifying to her.

Fortunately, their instinctive separation anxiety does not mean that we can never leave dogs home alone, it just means we have to train them to be able to do so. We have to acclimate them, help them understand that they are safe even if they are alone, and work on calming some of those feelings of anxiety.

In other words, being left alone is deeply unnatural for dogs, but – as always – dogs are remarkably adaptable, so we can teach them. Further below, we will go through a protocol for acclimating them to being home alone. The approach and objective will be very similar to socialization: using a range of tools and techniques, override their feelings of anxiety by instead encouraging and rewarding more positive emotions.

The end result will be that your dog can eventually be left alone, stress-free, for hours at a time – but only if you do plenty of separation anxiety training.

Continuing the comparison with socialization, you will find, as we dig deeper later in this chapter, that separation anxiety training is all about creating positive associations (or at least not negative associations) with being left alone.

As such, if you leave your puppy home alone before completing separation anxiety training, she will, as we’ve discussed, panic. As with socialization, she will then associate that panic with being left alone, and those negative associations will make your separation anxiety training MUCH harder!

As a result, do NOT leave your puppy home alone until after you’ve completed separation anxiety training! That will only create negative experiences that will make it harder to do the training later!

Before getting into the details of separation anxiety training, we should talk about a second factor that can help relieve dogs’ stress when left alone: the environment you leave them in.

There are a few things you can do in your home to set them up for success:

• Leaving chewtoys: per Chapter 1-7, chewtoys are a fantastic tool for both:
  • Self-soothing, helping dogs quell stress and anxious energy; and
  • Occupational therapy, giving them something fun and pleasurable to do, distracting them from the fact that they are alone

  As we’ll get into later in the chapter, stuffing chewtoys with delicious food adds the benefit of positively reinforcing you being away, helping create positive associations.

  Bottom line, chewtoys are one of the best tools in your kit for working on separation anxiety.

  As a result, we strongly recommend you complete chewtoy training first before working on separation anxiety

• Crating: after crate training (Chapter 1-8), some owners crate their dogs when they are home alone, some do not. Both approaches have benefits; which you should take depends on your dog and your training history with them.

  Crating your puppy when you’re out of the house several potential benefits:

  • It keeps them out of trouble: keeping them away from things like food and furniture that they can get into if left alone.
  • It helps them stay calm: remember the crate should feel like a sanctuary to them, a place where nothing bad happens; it helps counteract separation anxiety by making them feel safe.
  • It encourages them to nap: the crate is their ‘den;’ in it, they only have the space (and the associations for) napping or quiet occupation, like chewing a chewtoy. Those are ‘safe’ activities while you’re out of the house, unlikely to get them worked up and anxious in the way that wandering around the house might.
  • It removes them from potentially disruptive stimuli: when they’re alone, all their fear responses are heightened. As a result, stimuli like noises outside or people they see out the window can trigger them to panic. Crating them in a quiet room far from the street serves to physically remove them from stimuli that could cause anxiety.

  It should go without saying, but if you choose to go the crating route do not crate your puppy alone until after you have completed crate training. As we covered in Chapter 1-8: Crate training, the benefits only exist after your dog has a deep well of positive associations with her crate. If you crate her before creating those positive associations, the reverse will happen: the negative experience of the separation anxiety will impart negative associations with the crate. She will start to hate both being left alone and the crate.

  While crating has its benefits, there are admittedly benefits for some dogs to leaving them uncrated:

  • For some dogs, if they are used to being around your house, at the window, etc. and are calm when left alone (i.e. after separation anxiety training), being able to move around the house can actually be calming for them, as they can see that everything is fine.
  • If you’re gone for more than a couple hours, letting them move and walk around is physically healthy. Obviously, that can only be allowed after sufficient errorless learning away from any troublesome habits, such as chewing on furniture or pottying indoors, as we discussed in Chapter 1-9: Errorless learning.

  We do not insist on one or the other approach: think about your puppy, where she is at in her development, how she reacts to things, and try one or the other route. If one doesn’t work well, try the other. Which approach you take can also change with time: perhaps crating works well early on, and over time she can graduate to having free roam.

• Minimizing disruptions: if you’re out of the house, try to not have strangers – like plumbers, electricians, landscapers, cleaners, or neighbors – come into or around the house. Why add another layer of stress and stimulus for your dog to try to deal with on her own? Whether or not you crate your dog, also consider closing off parts of the house, like street-facing rooms, where they are more likely to see things that make them anxious. Closing shades can be a good idea too.

So how do we teach our dogs to be OK on their own for a few hours? Below are a few tools and techniques. As always, we strongly recommend you check out any of the wonderful books on puppy training and development that cover this topic, such as those in our Further Reading[link] list.

• Introduce in small doses, and stay ‘errorless’: the most important technique in getting your dog used to being alone is working in small increments. To start, leave your puppy alone for a few seconds, that’s it. Literally go outside for 2-3 seconds, then come back in. Start with a couple seconds, then work to 5, then 10, then 15, and so on. You can gradually start working in larger increments: once she’s OK with 2 minutes, try 3 minutes, then 5 minutes, then 7, 10, and 15.

  The idea is that with each increment, you want to come back in BEFORE she panics. Once again this is an example of errorless training: if you consistently leave and then return before she panics, she is learning that “oh they always come back, and I’m always safe in the meanwhile.”

  The goal is that she never enters a panic state, which would only create more negative associations with you being gone.

  Going out for 2 seconds might seem like nothing, but it’s not: you have left – that will almost certainly catch her attention – and you came back. As you work up to 5, 10, and 15 seconds, she’s slowly acclimating to you being gone longer and longer, and each time it is totally fine. By keeping the steps small, no individual step feels jarring or disturbing to her.

  Since separation anxiety is such an instinctual and rapid-onset feeling for them, you must go very, very slowly at first for this approach to work. Again, you’re buying seconds to start, and always coming back before she panics or cries out. Always err on the side of shorter rather than longer duration; it will end up progressing faster in the end. If you push the duration too long and she panics, she’s now primed to panic and you’ll see serious regression. Go slowly, and you’ll see steady progress.

• If you push too long and she does panic/act out when you leave, use your voice to calm her but don’t come back in until she calms down, even for just 1 second: the ‘errorless’ iteration approach has an added layer of complication. If you mess up and push the duration slightly too long and your puppy cries out, it creates a catch-22:
  • One the one hand, you can’t just come back in. Think about what that reinforces: your puppy panicked and cried, and you came back, so now your puppy thinks that panicking and crying makes you come back. That trains them to panic and cry when you leave.
  • At the same time however, you need to get back in there as quickly as possible: if you let her fall into a panic spiral, you are undoing all the hard work you’ve done, creating deeper and deeper negative associations with being left alone.

  The resolution has two components:

  1. Wait for even a single second of calm, and come back in then. If your puppy panics, don’t come in while they are crying. Instead, wait for even a momentary break in crying, and come back in then. That helps avoid an association between barking/crying and your return. The timing is critical here, and tricky, pay attention. If they start crying again as you go in the room, stop and back out, waiting for them to calm before coming fully in. The goal is to show them “crying does not bring me in.”
  2. Use your voice to show them that you are nearby without actually going in the room. If you do nothing, they will fall into a panic spiral, so you need to help them calm down without going into the room. Talking to them – showing them that you are still nearby – can help do that. You can say their name and use a “settle” command, if you’ve taught that (we will cover that in a later chapter), to try and reassure them and get them to calm down. Most likely at first they won’t calm down (since hearing your voice has reinforced their crying), but now you’ve changed the dynamic: they know you are nearby and – by the tone of your voice – they know that they are safe. They may continue crying, but they will – at some point – pause as they try to figure out what’s going on. Your voice helps buy you that window of opportunity to come back in and reward being calm.

  If you go slow enough, this shouldn’t happen too often, but it will happen and you will need to be prepared. It is probably the hardest part of separation anxiety training.

• Start with just being in another room: in addition to keeping the duration short, you can also make the initial training process more gradual (and therefore more effective) by making the location change smaller.

  Rather than leaving the house at first, start by just leaving the room.

  Once you’ve worked your way up to a 10-15 minute duration in a separate room, then try leaving the house. When you shift to stepping out of the house, go back to 2-3 seconds (it will still feel out of the ordinary to her, so you need to start slow to help her generalize), but you can work up that duration much faster once she gets the idea “oh it doesn’t matter whether daddy leaves the room or the house.”

• Use chewtoys: short durations aren’t enough on their own to keep your pup from panicking. You also need to give her some distraction and positive reinforcement. The perfect distraction is a stuffed chewtoy. Building on Chapter 1-7: Chewtoy training, stuffing a chewtoy with one of her rare, favorite foods, something really high value, has several positive effects:
  • Distracts her: working on the chewtoy keeps her preoccupied, keeping her away from panic.
  • Soothes her: as we introduce in Chapter 1-7, chewing is a naturally calming experience. As such, it helps create a dissonance: the chewtoy is signalling to her brain that everything is fine, putting her in a calm state of mind, which helps dampen her inclination towards anxiety.
  • Positively reinforces alone time: giving her this amazing reward when you leave has the effect of rewarding her being alone. Sure you’re gone, but she got this huge reward – maybe you being gone isn’t such a bad thing!

  Chewtoys are one of the best tools for separation anxiety. As such, we strongly recommend chewtoy training (see Chapter 1-7) before working on separation anxiety.

• Try using a crate (after crate-training): per the earlier bullet in this chapter on environmental factors, a crate can be a helpful tool for calming your pup, controlling her environment, and giving her a sense of safety when you’re out of the house. See perspectives on that above, and consider using a crate during training.
• Don’t make a big deal out of leaving: when you leave, do not do anything special or act differently. That can be hard: when you leave the house you’ll naturally want to hug and kiss your dog and say goodbye. But by making a big deal out of it, you’re only heightening her awareness and sense that something is amiss. Instead, you can pick a simple command, like “bye bye” or “aloha,” to let her know to expect that you’re leaving, and then just leave. Keep your demeanor cool and casual.
• Expect regression: Just like we discussed in Chapter 1-8: Crate training, regression is a natural part of puppy learning and development. We handle it in the exact same way:
  1. Look out for it – do not expect that just because your puppy was fine being left alone for 15 minutes yesterday she will be fine today.
  2. Go back to basics – remember, with an errorless training approach, we want to avoid getting to a point where she panics. If she regresses, you need to catch it quick, and roll back your training to well within a point she can handle. If she’s crying out at 5 minutes, go back to 1 minute, and work your way up again. That will be faster than trying 4 minutes and having her cry. Remember, errorless!
  3. Be patient and be diligent – regression can be disheartening at first, but we promise you have not lost progress. On the contrary, the second time you iterate, it will go much faster. It’s not a step back, it’s just part of how puppy brain’s develop. She has not forgotten or lost what you’ve taught her.

With sufficient crate training, potty training, and separation anxiety, you can in theory leave your dog home alone for 8 hours a day.

Just because you can however does not mean you should.

On the contrary, we do not support regularly leaving dogs alone during the day for more than 5 hours at a time. Even then, if you are leaving your dog alone that long with any regularity you had better make sure they have gotten plenty of exercise and stimulation beforehand!

In Section 3, we go into more depth on the physical, social, and mental stimulation dogs require and deserve from us. For now, suffice to say that dogs are not meant to be alone for 8 hours a day, and certainly not meant to be left alone 8 hours a day without having plenty of time to explore outside, exercise, and play beforehand.

If you’re not willing to give your dog a reasonable amount of time to run, play, and engage with you every day, then you should not get a dog. Remember what we said in the introduction chapter: dogs are not furniture – they are living beings with complex needs and require your engagement and education. They are devoted partners, and you should treat them as such.

Some dogs are lucky enough to have owners that can be with them almost all the time. Maybe an owner works from home, or lives in a house with lots of other people. Those are happy dogs indeed. Even in those situations, however, you MUST do separation anxiety training.

Why? Because even if you almost never leave your dog alone, you may be forced to leave them home alone at some point. Maybe you will be going to a special event, or leaving them at someone else’s house while you’re on vacation, or maybe you’ll have a medical emergency. Regardless, on those rare occasions you want your dog to be prepared. The last thing you want to worry about on vacation or at the hospital is that your dog is losing their minds, destroying things, or even escaping the house in her panic.

So regardless of your life circumstances, you should train your dog to be OK on her own in the house. It is an important life skill for her.

After initial training, it’s important that you keep the skill up.

If you leave the house regularly – such as for grocery shopping or work – that will obviously happen naturally.

If you don’t however – if, for whatever reason, it’s rare for the dog to be alone – you should make an effort to go out of the house and leave your dog home alone for at least an hour at a time, once or twice a week.

If you don’t, the separation anxiety training will start to atrophy: imagine if your dog hasn’t been left alone for months, and then you go for a beach day and leave them alone for 8 hours. That will be pretty jarring to her, won’t it?

In-home camera systems, such as Ring and Furbo, let you check on your dog while you’re out of the house. These systems are convenient in that they let you know if your dog is reacting or relapsing. If they start constantly barking or crying, you’ll be able to tell. Without them, you’ll just have to assume they are doing fine, which can lead to unaddressed regression.

Some systems – Furbo in particular but ring has introduced this functionality as well – use machine learning to detect specifically if your dog is barking or crying, sending an alert to your phone so that you can be aware without periodically checking the camera.

If you don’t have a camera system, we encourage you to talk to any neighbors who are often home, and ask them to let you know if your dog regularly barks when your out. Many dog owners don’t even realize that their dog barks for hours at a time when they’re not home!

If you have two dogs, then reading all of the above you might think “thankfully by dogs are never alone – they always have each other – so they should be fine.” Unfortunately that’s not true.

A puppy’s relationship with her owners is different from her relationship with other dogs in the household. As we will explore more in Section 2, you are – if you properly train and interact with your dog – the parent, the member of the team that knows what is going on and is in control, the source of comfort and safety. Your dogs should be looking to you for guidance and direction when they are uncertain. As such, when you are out of the house it is quite possible for both dogs to panic, and even to feed off of each others’ anxiety! As anyone who has lived near two dogs that bark all day can tell you: dogs feed off each others’ emotions. If one gets anxious and worked up, that will generally cause the other one to get anxious and worked up.

As a result, your dogs need you around, not just each other. You still need to do separation anxiety training, and you still need to follow all the same guidance on not leaving them alone too often or too long.

That doesn’t mean two dogs don’t provide each other with comfort and occupation when you’re out of the house – they probably often do, and that may help alleviate some of the pangs of separation anxiety. But it does not eliminate them, or even mitigate them such that you don’t have to take all of the same measures as if you had only one dog.

Not to mention you never know when you’ll need to go somewhere – like the vet – with just one of the dogs.

Dogs are extremely social animals, even moreso than humans. We go into more depth on that in Section 3, but for now understand that puppies in particular need social interaction. They need you to play with them, to stimulate them.

If you simply put a puppy in her pen and leave her alone, she will:

• Get bored and destructive
• Get anxious from her isolation and lack of socialization
• Not develop her mental and social faculties, making her a less-intelligent, less-well-bonded dog

If you don’t want to play with your puppy, then don’t get a dog.

When you get a puppy, plan to spend 15 minutes every couple of hours interacting with them through play, training, or exploration. Later in this chapter, we will talk about the types of stimulation you can provide.

As we noted when we covered pens, in Chapter 1-10, your puppy will quickly always want your attention: they may often whine because they think you are doing something fun without them, or they just don’t like that you’re doing something else (like work) and are ignoring them.

In those cases, it is important that you do not cave. First, mentally check that your puppy’s general stimulation needs have been met – have you played with them enough recently?

If yes, ignore them until they calm down, then praise and reward them (for calming down) and go back to your business. They need to learn two important things:

If they start to work themselves up and get out of control, go over and use an easy command that they already know – “Sit” is a good one, or “down” if they know it; best is “settle” if you’ve taught that to them. Wait patiently until they obey the command, and once they do give them praise and a chewtoy (Chapter 1-7) to help them calm themselves down. If they start acting out again, repeat the cycle – never reward acting out, always reward when they calm down.

If, however, you realize you haven’t played enough with them today, such that they are legitimately under-stimulated, you should still initially ignore them and wait for them to calm down (you don’t want to reward the whining), but once they calm down you should go over and play with them. Be reasonable in meeting your puppy’s legitimate needs for engagement.

For your puppy, you should make sure they get a mixture of 5 key types of stimulation:

• Open-ended play – playing with you, just to have fun and build your bond. Games like rope tug or fetch.
• Semi-structured training sessions – dedicated times to teach them tricks and commands; we will cover behavioral training and training sessions later on in depth in Section 2, in particular Chapters 2-18 and 2-26.

  For now, just note a couple of things that we will expand on later:

  • Training sessions can – and should – be fun for your puppy! (and you!) As you’ll see in later chapters, just because we call it training doesn’t mean it’s not a game.
  • Formal training delivers numerous benefits, including: stimulating her mentally, building capabilities like self-control and focus, improving her problem-solving capacity, building a collaborative bond with you, teaching her to trust and listen to you, and, of course, teaching her behaviors and commands that are useful in a variety of situations.
• Problem-solving games – give them challenges to solve (that are not too difficult; set them up for success); we will talk more about this shortly.
• Solo occupation – entertaining themselves, per our bullet above on drawing boundaries.
• Independent exploration – with you around, to give her a sense of security, letting her explore the world, sniffing and touching things, especially outside. That stimulates her brain, gets her thinking, and makes her more adaptable. We will talk about that more in Chapter 3-5: Need for open-ended exploration.

As a dog owner it is one of your responsibilities to make sure you that you are getting your puppy regular stimulation in all five of those areas. Thankfully, all of them should be pretty fun!

There is an extent to which dog intelligence is genetic, but a lot of intelligence is also about early-puppyhood cultivation. The more you mentally challenge your pup, within reason, the more curious and deliberate she will become.

You can achieve this pretty easily: try to create lots of small, achievable challenges for your puppy, and reward them when they figure it out. You should do this throughout your everyday activities together.

Here are a few examples of things you can do:

Example Problem Solving games you can play with your pooch

• Teach her simple tricks like Sit and Paw (see Section 2: Core Training Concepts).
• Give her a puzzle feeder or snuffle mat, forcing her to figure out how to get her food out. Chew toys offer a similar challenge, per Chapter 1-7.
• Give her a toy, but place it behind some obstacles. Show her the toy and get her excited about it (for example by shaking it around and using a happy, high-pitched voice “what’s this? what’s this?”), then place behind some obstacle that she’ll have to navigate it out of, such as under a box she’ll need to push over, or behind a barrier she’ll need to walk around.
• If you want to work on her scent capabilities, you can hide a very smelly treat (or a very well-loved and hence well-scented toy) behind some obstacle, such as in an (open) box or behind a chair. Show it to her first, let her smell it to get excited by it, then hide it and let her go find it. As an aside, ‘Nose work’ like this is a fantastic thing to do with your dog – we will dig much deeper into it in Chapter 3-5, Chapter 4-4, and Appendix 2-1.

Importantly, do not make the challenges too hard! You want them to win every time, to solve the problem every time. If they just get frustrated and don’t solve it, they’ll just learn to avoid solving problems. We will talk a lot more about this concept in Chapter 2-15: Going slow & rate of progression.

If you screw up and accidentally make a problem a bit too hard, don’t just give them the reward – that teaches them that if they wait long enough you’ll do it for them. Instead, intervene and make the problem easier such that they can solve it. As we’ll talk about in Section 2, you always want to reward your dog for doing something, not just out of the blue.

In the later Chapter 2-27, we will talk more about your dog’s Problem-Solving capability, why it is important, and other ways to foster it.

In addition to play, puppies need appropriate levels of physical activity. We will explore that in more detail in a later chapter, Need for physical activity.

For now, understand that dogs in general and puppies in particular need daily exercise – such as going for walks, running around outside, etc. – in addition to household play. It is critically important for both their physical and mental development. In the latter case, exercise helps get their energy out, allowing them to better focus and learn all the other skills we have discussed in previous chapters

In terms of how much exercise they need, that can vary by age, breed, and your particular puppy. Below, we will provide some rules of thumb.

Puppies have a lot of energy, and as mentioned they need physical activity for healthy development. You have to be careful, however, not to push their activity beyond their bodies’ limits.

If you push a puppy too far – for example taking a 5-month-old puppy on even a 2-mile run with you – it can harm their joint and bone development, leading to serious health problems throughout their lives.

As such, it is important that you, as an owner:

• Understand what are appropriate and inappropriate levels of activity for your puppy at each stage of their development
• Do not take your puppy on activities that exceed their physical tolerances

The natural question then becomes: how much activity is appropriate? Unfortunately, the answer isn’t an easy formula. Appropriate activity levels depend on:

• Age – obviously this factor is the most significant. Most 12-month-old puppies can do essentially everything an adult dog can, whereas most 6-month-old puppies should still have the most intense activities – like running or long hikes – limited.
• Size – counterintuitively, size can work in either direction when it comes to activity: smaller dogs will have to strain themselves more for many of the same activities, but larger dogs can be more prone to joint and bone issues in their development.
• Breed/body structure – the puppy’s genetic history determines both their rate of physical development and how sensitive they are to musculoskeletal problems.

While that can be a bit complicated, we will provide some rules of thumb you can use as guidance below.

While the picture is therefore complicated, there are a few rules of thumb you can follow:

Hopefully those guidelines should give you some level of intuition and a baseline sense of what is and isn’t appropriate to do with your puppy.

Puppies – and many dogs in general – will follow you forever. They do so for at least two reasons:

1. As we’ve pointed out several times in this section, dogs are extremely social animals. You are their family, their pack, they want desperately to stick with you and mimic you.

2. Puppies are incredibly excited by the world around them. Whether you’re in the yard, on a walk, or hiking in the woods, they are surrounded by a colorful array of smells, sights, sounds, and textures that are both frightening and exciting to them. They will want to run and explore as long as they can.

Just because a 3 month old puppy will follow you on a 5 mile hike however does not mean they should. As we made clear above, over-straining a puppy’s body can have serious deleterious effects on their developing physiology.

As a result, it is your job to keep track of your puppy’s activity, and not let them over-exert.

You shouldn’t let the above warnings scare you. In the course of normal activity – playing in the yard, going to stores, going for walks – you are pretty unlikely to seriously overstrain your puppy. You do not need to ‘keep detailed track’ of your puppy’s activity. That would be overkill.

Rather, just don’t be an idiot: don’t take your 3-month-old puppy:

• For a 3-mile hike
• On a 2-hour playdate with an active 8-month old puppy
• On a run

In other words, you can follow two guiding principles:

In the latter case, activities to be mindful of, depending on the puppy’s age, are:

Each of these activities are of course fine and actually really good for the puppy as long as her age is right for the level of strain. You should be doing these things with your puppy when the time is right, just not too early.

But again don’t obsess. As discussed above, as long as your puppy is not operating at 5-10 times what she should be – or isn’t experiencing highly sporadic exercise (nothing for days then lots of exercise) – she will generally be OK.

As we mentioned in Chapter 1-1, adolescent puppies, between 6-18 months old, will not only often go through recurring fear periods (cf. Chapter 1-6), they may also begin to ‘rebel:’ they may suddenly stop obeying commands and behaviors that they adhered to perfectly when they were younger.

Do not fret, this is a natural part of puppy neurological development wherein they start to push boundaries and operate more independently. In this chapter we will talk about how to handle it.

First off, do not get mad at your puppy. We know it can be frustrating, after putting in all that work to build good behaviors, and seeing such wonderful progress, to all of a sudden experience such drastic regression. Getting mad at your puppy however is only going to make the situation worse, both by increasing your frustration and likely causing you to interact with your puppy in a way that only leads to more bad behaviors.

Don’t worry – you have not lost all the progress you’ve made. These phases are to be expected, and – if you handle them appropriately – you will soon be back on track.

While it is a natural part of their maturation, that does not mean you can ignore it when they start to rebel. As we emphasized in e.g., Chapter 1-9: Errorless learning and will come back to again and again in later chapters like Chapter 2-14: Improving a behavior, Chapter 2-19: Consistency & follow-through, and Chapter 2-21: Self-reinforcing behaviors, if you let them ignore your commands or do things that they know they are not supposed to do, good behaviors will quickly extinguish and bad behaviors will quickly self-reinforce.

Instead, when they start to regress on a behavior, follow two rules:

1. Remain errorless: If, for example, you ask them to offer a behavior that they know how to do, and they choose to ignore you, do not simply move on. Do not do – or let them do – anything else or anything fun until they have done what you’ve asked. Be patient, and wait them out.

   For details on how to go about this in practice, see:

   • For behaviors you ask for (commands): Chapter 2-19
   • For behaviors they initiate: Chapter 1-9

2. Go back to basics: Treat rebelliousness like a form of regression (Chapter 2-16). Rather than maintaining the same high threshold of expectations, go back to when you were first teaching or shaping a behavior, and start them from the beginning. If you don’t, they’ll just keep failing repeatedly, which makes both them and you frustrated, and negatively reinforces the behavior (we’ll talk much, much more about this in the later Section on Core Training Concepts). Don’t worry, if you go back to basics, they will rapidly progress right back to where they were, and the behaviors will be reinforced all the more strongly for it.

   For details on how to go about this in practice, see Chapter 2-16: Regression.

Everything we’ve covered might seem great on paper, but the first day you bring your puppy home it can quickly feel like it’s all falling apart: your puppy will be stressed, you will be stressed, and trying to start on crate training, potty training, chewtoy training, and socialization will feel overwhelming. You’ll panic because you’ll know the window for training and socialization closes so quickly. As you try to teach them things and socialize them, nothing will go the way it’s ‘supposed’ to, and keeping all these concepts in your head at the same time will feel impossible.

Don’t panic, everything is fine – if you’re thinking about this stuff at all, you’re already ahead of the curve, and you and your puppy will be fine, we promise.

It’s like this: the entire point of teaching foundational behaviors is teaching your puppy how to learn, how to work with you, how to listen to you, how to trust you, and how to live in human society. They don’t start that way from day 1, and that means that during the first few weeks and months of training and teaching your puppy will not get things right away! You can expect:

• They’ll get distracted, or frustrated, or scared
• They’ll seem to get something down solid one day, and the next day have seemingly totally forgotten it
• They’ll completely blow you off, not listen to you at all, and generally do lots of things they know they’re not supposed to

All of that is entirely natural. In Section 2: Core Training Concepts, we cover how to handle the ups and downs of training. Stick to those principles, be consistent and diligent, and you will see improvement. Training your puppy will get easier and easier (and frankly more and more fun) with time.

As long as you’re paying attention to your puppy and consistently trying to learn yourself, you will be fine; it will get easier and easier, as you practice and your puppy learns.

The important thing, when you’re struggling with a training session or your puppy is regressing or misbehaving, is be patient with your puppy! Don’t get frustrated. Take it slow, don’t be discouraged, and trust that progress is happening. If you’re working with them regularly, they are learning, and growing, and turning into a better, smarter, stronger dog.

And don’t forget to be easy on yourself. You will make mistakes, and that’s 100% OK! As long as you are thinking about the principles we have covered -and tapping into some of the many great educational resources out there[link to further resources] – you will get better and better, training will feel more and more natural and intuitive, and any bad behaviors you accidentally teach your puppy along the way you will be able to remedy, we promise.

By building a strong overall foundation, you will find it much easier to untrain whatever bad behaviors or socialization gaps that do emerge later on.

All that said, do set yourself up for success:

• Review this primer to familiarize yourself with the most important concepts a dog owner should know
• Take the RCOC exam to check and deepen your understanding
• Get a couple of the amazing books out there, especially on puppyhood, and consider tapping into some of the many other wonderful online and in-person classes and educational resources. See our further studies page for some of our recommended resources (but there are many other great ones out there!)

If you do that bit of work before you get your puppy or adult dog, you will find the first few weeks that much less difficult.

Sadly, most people – including most dog owners – have a gross misconception about what dog training is. They imagine ‘dog training’ is merely:

• Teaching your dog ‘cute tricks’ for entertainment
• Purely a hobby, for the sake of your own enjoyment and occupation
• A ‘nice-to-have’ – sure it’s convenient for your dog to listen to you better, but not strictly necessary

Those all-too-prevalent views of training are horribly incorrect, and – when owners espouse them – damaging to the lives of dogs and their owners.

On the contrary, as we have hopefully made clear in our prior chapters, and will show even more clearly throughout this section and the ones that follow, training is fundamental to your dog’s life and your relationship to your dog; it is – after Socialization (Ch. 1-2), and perhaps physical activity (Section 3) – the most important thing for you to do with your dog.

As we’ve highlighted in previous chapters – and will demonstrate even more here and in the coming ones – training is critical to:

• Developing key dog capacities like self-control and confidence
• Satisfying your dog’s need for mental stimulation and work
• Building a deep, sincere, and collaborative relationship with you, her handler
• Fostering your dog’s intelligence and problem-solving skills
• Teaching your dog how to navigate life in a human-centric world
• Living together with your dog comfortably, peaceably, and with minimal stress for both of you
• And more!

For puppies in particular, if you have one, early training:

• Builds good habits early on – and helps avoid developing bad ones
• Promotes their mental development
• Accelerates their maturation, building their self-control, obedience, and other capacities
• Facilitates socialization (more on this below)

We will come back to the benefits of training again and again, but to reiterate here: as a responsible dog owner, you must work on training with your puppy or adult dog, and continue doing so throughout their life!

Throughout the chapters in Section 2, we will introduce you to what training actually is and the techniques and best practices that are healthy and effective.

Before we dig our teeth in, in the next few bullet points we will try to briefly give you a better sense of what dog training looks like and why it matters so much.

As we will demonstrate through the chapters in Section 2, training your dog is more than getting them to do the occasional cute trick.

We actually aren’t in love with the term ‘training,’ because outside of the world of dog professionals, it can carry a misleading connotation: when most lay people think ‘training,’ they think ‘getting a dog to do a specific thing on command.’ While that statement is technically not incorrect, the connotation is that the behavior learned is (a) robotic, without judgment or mental consideration from the dog, and (b) limited to a highly specific action, a single event. Both of those things are untrue, and that mentality both sells the dog short and entirely misses the most important points of training.

Instead, we prefer you to think of it as teaching. There are some important differences in the connotations that we want to highlight. Training/teaching is not solely about your dog simply learning some very specific behaviors (although they do learn that); rather, it is just as equally about:

1. Them building an understanding of appropriate and inappropriate ways to behave

2. Them developing deeper faculties and capabilities – self-control, problem solving, handler focus, etc.