How do you determine whether an outing is appropriate for the puppy you are raising? How do you know when the puppy finds things too stressful?
As is usually the case in dog training and puppy raising, it depends on the individual puppy, the current state of the environment, and previous experiences. But there are some general guidelines you can keep in mind to determine if the pup should go or stay home.
Skill Building
Puppy raising is about skill building. You start laying the basic foundation of training and experiences for the puppy. Then you gradually build on those skills. So if your pup is well-behaved in Walgreens, and has a good established history of walking through the drug store on a loose leash, without scrambling across the linoleum floor or shrinking away at the automatic doors, great! You are ready to try Publix!
But what if you get to Publix, and it’s the shiny new Publix with the parking garage, elevators, and a large crowd? Maybe when you get out of the car, the puppy exits slower than with his usual gusto, and he is looking all around the parking garage, then jumps slightly as the automatic doors slide open.
That’s the point where you want to stop, take a note of the puppy’s reaction, and honor it by proceeding slowly. Walk around the parking garage with some treats, working on basic obedience. Go through the sliding doors to the main entrance, and play some fun obedience games. Even if the puppy appears “fine”, that may be a good time to call it quits and go home. The puppy has just had to deal with a lot of stimuli. Try looking at it from his point of view: the parking garage echoes, condenses the sounds and smells of vehicles, and may have dimmer lighting. The puppy is already on alert, and as you shut your car door, it sounds louder than it ever has before. So now maybe he is hyper-aware of all of the changes around him. Then you approach an automatic door, and while he’s seen the Walgreens door, he’s never seen THIS door, and the smell inside of the store is different than Walgreens. Plus, maybe a large family is exiting as you are getting ready to enter.
That is a lot for a puppy to take in, even a very confident and brave puppy! Spend 15 minutes socializing, doing fun obedience, and having a positive experience in the quietest part of the entrance you can find, and send whoever else you are with up to get any groceries you might need (many of you have heard me give this piece of advice: if you’re going alone to the grocery store with plans to actually shop, leave the pup at home… grocery store outings with the puppy should be about the puppy). Then go home.
The next time you visit that Publix, your pup will remember it as a place where some potentially scary things happened, but he had fun! And the scary parts didn’t last that long… so maybe this time, he is ready to try the elevator.
Ideally, a pup should not have an experience if he hasn’t learned the basic elements leading up to it.
“Exposures” is a mis-leading word
The purpose of taking a pup into different environments or introducing him to different stimuli is NOT to help him get used to it. Socialization really ends at 16 weeks; we complete a LOT of socialization in the puppy kennel, with a very carefully designed program. There are times in a puppy’s life (4 – 6 weeks of age) when they are naturally very curious and have little to no startle/fear response, so we break down the elements of important guide dog exposures and build a reference library for the puppy of sights, smells, sounds, and textures.
So during the age of 10 – 16 weeks, we’re looking to have raisers do some socialization with people, with household living, and small neighborhood exposures. The puppy can be a little more sensitive and likely to startle during this time, so keeping things positive, light, and fun is extremely important.
“Exposures” (I actually prefer the word “outings”) are really opportunities to gradually teach the puppy to behave and develop good habits, as well as to ascertain if the puppy shows any areas of concern.
Outings for the puppy should be gradual and based on his behavior. It is so important to be focused on the puppy when you are out and about because it is all about them. Bad behaviors can become habits very quickly; we cannot stress enough how important foundation behaviors and a good behavior history are. It is impossible to expose a guide dog puppy to every single thing that they might encounter as a guide dog. So let’s say you can’t get the puppy you’re raising onto a plane, maybe because you aren’t traveling anywhere that you could bring the puppy. If he has a history of being taught to walk nicely in crowds, focusing in spite of loud metal noises, settling nicely when riding on public transportation, and being obedient even when people try to talk to him, he is very likely going to handle his first airport as a guide dog just fine.
By the same token, if you are raising a puppy who gets overwhelmed by crowds, tucks his tail or startles at loud noises, or is unsettled on bus rides, that doesn’t necessarily mean he is out of the running to be a guide dog; however, that is important information to find out on your outings with the puppy, so the trainers can make an appropriate match later on. If the dog has that information recorded in his puppy history, they will not match him with someone who travels regularly on airplanes.
So “exposures” are really not about making sure the puppy gets around certain stimuli in order to “expose” him; it is actually about teaching him all of the basic behaviors, and also about gathering information.
Coming next month: What is a High-Stress Environment for a puppy? Part 2!
