Musings From My Latest Adventure

As many of you that follow me on social media know, I spent three days last week in Colorado visiting my friend, Lise Morgan, at the beautiful ranch where she and her husband raise, care for and nurture many animals, including their beloved collies. Foxhaven Collies takes a very different approach to the breeding, raising, and preparing of puppies for their next adventure as someone's beloved canine family member.  Zelly is a Foxhaven collie: She is confident, inquisitive, loving and lovable, with beautiful movement, carrying herself as a collie should.  While staying with Lise, we shared many conversations about how puppies of any breed should be raised and the kind of challenges those puppies face right out of the gate as they head to their new homes.  I wanted to share one of those conversations with you all as I thought it was particularly important for anyone raising a puppy, or thinking about acquiring a puppy.  

Giving puppies a leg up on life begins even before they are born.  Nurturing their mothers with an appropriate diet, a predictable, comfortable space, and adequate rest and exercise ensures that mother dogs are not under undue stress as they prepare their bodies for the birthing process.  Those puppies will then come into the world and nurse from a mother whose body hasn't been constantly flooded with stress hormones, affecting the quality and quantity of her milk.  Even before their eyes and ears open, puppies are absorbing the experiences around them. These "puppy potatoes" respond to the warmth and care provided by their human caretakers.  Once eyes and ears open, it's a race to keep up from a developmental point of view!

The environment your puppy is raised in between birth and 10 weeks of age should be ever-changing.  Their space should grow in size and complexity and include safe spaces for hiding or resting in addition to chewing, climbing, and play opportunities, as well as the introduction of novel foods to prime their gut.  The variety of items available in their space should be rotated daily, at a minimum, to maintain interest and encourage exploration. Puppies should be observed after these rotations to see how they are responding to the novel items, placement of objects, etc., noting what objects garner immediate interest, if any items spook or startle a puppy, and if any are actively avoided.  Any puppy that startles, note whether they recover quickly or whether they move away and continue to avoid what startled them.  You want your puppy's response to be elastic, like a rubber band; you want them to bounce back and try again, as if to say, "I was afraid of that crunchy tunnel at first, but once I saw a sibling run through it, I wasn't afraid anymore!"  That's bounce back and that's learning.

As puppies mature even more, you want to know that they were exposed to situations and experiences outside of their breeder's home.  That might mean a stroller excursion into town with a visit to a coffee shop, or it might mean having a couple of friends come by to meet and engage the puppies.  You want to know that your puppy was exposed to all different kinds of people so, again, if they are startled the first time seeing someone in a hat, they bounce back the second time that they are exposed.  Which brings me to my main point of telling you all of this in the first place.

You can flood a puppy (or a dog) with experiences, one right after the other, over and over, sort of like having a puppy party where you invite twelve people over and a bunch of screaming kids and have them meet your new puppy.  Flooding is a therapeutic technique, yes, but it isn't generally a successful one, particularly with puppies.  Flooding refers to rapidly exposing an individual to fearful stimuli in the hopes of them overcoming their anxiety and moving past it.  Puppies who are flooded with fearful experiences, like that puppy party, become quickly overwhelmed, making a permanent negative association in their brain that their caregivers can't be trusted to protect them.  If instead, you introduce your puppy to one new person, or a couple of new people at a time, allowing the puppy to choose whether to interact with those new people, or simply observe, you are providing your puppy with supported exposure.  This falls under the category of systematic desensitization, a much more successful means of exposing a puppy to new people or novel environments, allowing them to build confidence through successive, successful exposures, with rest in between.  And, yes, rest is not just important, it is critical to the process.

I'm always harping on puppy owners to make sure their puppies get multiple naps every day.  The timing of those naps is important as they should occur, in particular, after your puppy has been somewhere new, acquired a new behavior, or solved a difficult problem.  That nap afterwards is when your puppy's brain processes what they learned, building new neural connections and pathways.  If they aren't allowed to rest, those new neural connections don't happen.  Rest is restorative in more ways than one!

Just as (hopefully) your breeder did with your puppy during those first 9-10 weeks, it is your job to curate your puppy's experiences every day once they are in your home.  Gradually exposing them to new situations, objects, and people.  Watch their body language and be aware of what they are telling you.  Are they moving away or boldly approaching?  Are they leaning away from new people, or leaning in?  Are they yawning, scratching, shaking their bodies as if they were wet?  That's a puppy who's overwhelmed.  Read your puppy's body language and respond immediately; don't let them get flooded or overwhelmed.  Instead, build trust in you and confidence in themselves through relationship rapport, responding to each other.  Your job is to provide your puppy with supported exposures to new things, building on the lessons they received from their breeder.  Your breeder gave your puppy their head start and the foundation. It's your job to continue to help your puppy thrive, becoming the well-balanced, confident, capable dog they were born to be.

It really was a joy to observe puppies raised this way.  When I temperament tested this recent litter of three Foxhaven puppies, I was reminded yet again why choosing a good breeder is so important.  For myself, I want to know that my puppy had all of those benefits right from the start, including a happy dam and a warm, nurturing home environment.  Daily, age-appropriate challenges, including novel food and food puzzle experiences as well.  And most importantly, humans who loved them, nurtured them, held them, played with them, and watched them carefully for signs of stress or anxiety.  If you can find a breeder who loves with their whole heart, uses science-based methods, and revels in every little developmental step with awe and wonder, then you've found your next puppy. I know I have.

As always, if you have questions about your pet's behavior, you know where to find me.

Here I am with Lise Morgan of Foxhaven Collies

 and her three, nine week old collie puppies!