COVID!!! What an impact it had on everyone, whether you’ve had it, lost someone to it, or it had an incredible impact on your finances, at least we can talk about it and express our feelings freely to those around us.
But what about our canine friends, have you considered what impact it had on them? With the first lockdown we saw the prices of dogs soar rapidly, due to the sudden increase in demand, with everyone being at home.
Whilst on the one hand the dog or more frequently the puppy would have someone around all day to give it the toilet breaks it needs and the time to adjust to its new home environment, what was done about the other majorly important early stages of socialization?
Now that life is getting back to a new normal, I’m seeing more and more dogs that are having socialization problems as a result of the lockdown impact. Puppies are most willing to approach life, and its wide range of different encounters between the age of 3 – 12 weeks of age, so normally when we collect our puppy at 8 weeks old, we still have 4 weeks of the ideal impressionable age to introduce new people and situations, we still must restrict certain situations until they are fully vaccinated, but car trips, meeting people from different households, etc. are all possible with careful planning.
By 12 weeks old, puppies are becoming a little more cautious over new encounters, and obviously the older the dog gets before these new exposures the harder it can be for your dog to have a well-rounded and confident manner.
So, you can already recognize that many of these youngsters missed the vital early stages, when we couldn’t get out and meet other households or travel around freely in our cars, so while all is not lost, we must be prepared for harder work to get the dog as confident and sociable as we would like.
You may be asking, what is the best way to achieve the goals we have for our dog, and what you’ll find is that different dog trainers will have different solutions, all of which work for them otherwise they wouldn’t use them. What I find works for me and has worked for all my clients so far is, in basic terms is to know the precise moment to praise your dog, let me explain, dogs love attention, and are very quick to learn how to get that attention, I will use a dog that I have recently been asked to work with as an example –
He is 10 months old, he is very wary of anyone new, was taking 2 people to put his harness on and wouldn’t walk on a lead, most of these issues being due to restricted movements as a youngster, sure enough when I went to see him for the first time he shot behind the sofa and hid, the owners did what was natural to them and picked him up to comfort him, to suggest to him that I was nothing to be afraid of, now this all seems to be perfectly sensible, however, this dog was using that behaviour to be a cue to get attention by being picked up, thereby, rewarding him for being fearful. In order to overcome this, I asked the owners to follow some simple new methods, whenever, someone new came into the property or near the dog, everyone was asked to ignore the dog completely, the dog now being somewhat confused as to why its normal behaviour wasn’t getting the attention it usually gets, would then start to seek attention from its owners, who again were to ignore it, having not received attention from them, it would eventually start to gradually investigate the new person, it’s at this point that the praise and attention needs to be given, thus rewarding the dog for the behaviour we desire. By consistently using this method, with-in 2 weeks the dog was far more accepting of most new people and a lot more settled, using similar methods he has overcome his issues with the harness and progress is being made on lead work, he is by no means the finished article but is improving daily.
This is not the only way of overcoming certain issues, but one in my armoury that I find works well.
