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THE HAPPY PUPPY HANDBOOK is the only puppy-training manual you will ever need.

From preparing the house and garden before the puppy arrives, to introducing your new friend to all the family (including children and other animals), and solving problems like crying, night waking, feeding, upset stomachs, biting, chewing and jumping up, this book is packed with all you need to know as a puppy owner.

PIPPA MATTINSON is in touch with 150,000 dog owners every month through her website www.thelabradorsite.com and knows exactly what puppy-owners want. The founder of The Gundog Trust, her first book Total Recall has won praise from many happy dog owners.

About the Author

Pippa Mattinson is a zoologist and the founder of The Gundog Trust – the UK’s first gundog training and welfare charity. She is a keen supporter of modern, science-based dog training methods, and is passionate about helping people to enjoy their dogs. Visit her website for more information: www.pippamattinson.com

OUR UNIQUE PARTNERSHIP with dogs is built upon ten thousand years or more of friendship and co-operation. It has weathered all the changes we have experienced together on our journey through time.

It is difficult to grasp the sheer scale of the history we share with dogs, and fascinating to consider that somewhere back in the Stone Age your own puppy’s paleolithic predecessors were being embraced into human families. The depth of this association between our two species is reflected in the privileges we now allocate to our dogs and in the emotional ties we form with them.

Our relationship with the domestic dog is truly remarkable, and every new puppy represents the chance to reaffirm the bond between us.

The addition of a puppy to your family is a significant event and should be a wonderful experience for all concerned. Your puppy will be special and unique, a product of both his own genetic inheritance and of the loving environment you provide for him. And like every new puppy, his arrival represents the promise of a new life and shared future together.

The build-up to the day you collect your puppy will be exciting and even a little daunting. You will want to do the very best you can for him, to make sure you give him the right things to eat, and the right amount of exercise. You will also want to make good choices about your puppy’s health and training. The purpose of this book is to make sure you have all the information you need to look after your puppy on a day-to-day basis, and to make those important decisions about his care. Above all, I want to help you make sure that your puppy becomes a happy and valued member of your family and of the wider community.

Bringing a puppy into your life is not just a question of buying a new pet. It is a bigger decision than that, a much greater responsibility and opportunity. In many ways, dogs are far more than simply pets – they are an extension of our human family.

As you await the arrival of your new puppy, you will have expectations of your life together. We all want our puppies to be clean, happy, healthy and friendly. We want them to be gentle with our children and other pets. We may look forward to long walks together, games together, resting by the fire together. We hope that our puppy will come racing towards us when we whistle and that he will learn to follow basic house rules at home.

Whilst expectations are always high, life with a puppy is not always plain sailing. New puppies are messy, untrained and can be destructive and noisy. We all know that adult dogs should be clean, obedient, quiet and well mannered. But getting from the first state to the second in the space of a few months is not inevitable, as anyone who has met an untrained and bad-mannered adult dog will tell you. Raising a good canine citizen requires the input of a willing and committed owner.

Most people accept that they will need to invest some time and effort in realising their aspirations for their puppy. They appreciate that puppies need help to grow into well-behaved dogs. But many new dog owners are unclear about the kind of help their puppy will need, or the point at which he will need it. To complicate matters, there is a lot of confusing and conflicting advice available to new puppy owners. It can be difficult to know which way to turn. Should you dominate your puppy? Or train him with treats? Can you feed him chicken? Is it spoiling him to let him sleep on your sofa or let him eat before you? How can you be a pack leader and his friend at the same time? Are dog crates cruel, and should you teach your dog to wee on puppy pads or newspaper? There are so many questions, and so many different opinions on how to care for a puppy and how to achieve the dog of your dreams.

Throughout the next few chapters we will be building up your understanding and knowledge about how puppies learn and develop. We will look not only at the physical changes in your puppy’s body over the next few months, and how to keep him healthy, but also at what goes on inside his head. By the end of this section of the book, you will know the answers to the important questions above, and to many others, too. You won’t be dependent on outdated opinions to make good decisions for your puppy, or misled by the latest fads in dog care.

Puppies get into a lot of trouble for simply being puppies. A great deal of that trouble can be avoided if we close the gap between what is expected of the puppy and what he is capable of. Understanding what is normal for puppies is the first step in that direction.

People have speculated and disagreed for decades on the true origins of the domestic dog, but DNA testing has finally put the debate to bed. Your puppy’s ancestors were wolves, and some of the natural instincts he still carries in his genes are relics from his past and evident in his early behaviour patterns. Despite the way in which his development has been influenced by domestication, your puppy is still very much a dog. He still comes programmed with a whole bundle of instincts designed to ensure that he is fit for life as a social predator. And some of these instincts, which are perfectly acceptable in a wild-dog family, may result in behaviour that is decidedly inappropriate in our modern world. Chasing your neighbour’s cat, for example, is unlikely to go down well, yet many breeds of dog are still physically capable of hunting down and even killing small animals.

Some of your puppy’s natural instincts are actually quite useful to us. We can use his instinct for chasing moving objects to establish an excellent recall and to teach him to fetch a ball. His wolf-like instinct for keeping his den or sleeping area clean will help you to house-train him. Some puppy instincts are less helpful. Gnawing his way through the legs of your antique table, or digging up the herb garden, are rarely approved puppy pastimes, yet chewing and digging are very natural to puppies.

Just like our children, puppies need to be educated and taught that some of their most basic instincts must be kept in check. They need to learn new and often unnatural (for a dog) ways to behave. They need to be taught not to use indoor human buildings for toilet purposes, to play gently with their human friends, and to obey our commands and signals. All dogs need to be confident moving around in public places and among strangers, and to be friendly to the people they meet there.

Whilst many puppies integrate smoothly into human society and live contented lives as well-adjusted canine citizens, some do not. If not correctly managed, puppyish behaviours may persist. What was cute in a tiny puppy may be less endearing in a muddy 80lb adult. Behavioural problems, such as aggression, running away and separation anxiety, can develop and may result in dogs facing rejection by the families who not long ago awaited their arrival with excitement. Many of the problems dog owners face have their roots in early puppyhood. The great news is that the vast majority of them can be avoided, and what cannot be avoided can usually be overcome.

Educating your puppy into more grown-up behaviour is a gradual process, and often involves redirecting him into more appropriate activities or restricting his access to your more treasured possessions. Many people get into difficulties with small puppies because they allow them too much freedom, and give them access to frequent opportunities to make bad decisions before the puppy has the self-control or knowledge to make better ones.

To begin with, the vast majority of your puppy’s free time will need to be controlled. Life with a puppy can quickly lose its flavour if we have to spend every waking moment saying ‘No!’, ‘Stop it!’, ‘Leave that!’ Just like living with a toddler, we don’t want to be forever nagging at a puppy, so we make some changes around the house to reduce his opportunities for mischief. We’ll look at these simple preparations in more detail later on in this section, as they will make the next few weeks a great deal easier for both of you.

Gradually, as your puppy learns what is and what is not acceptable in our human world, you will be able to give him more freedom and more choices. Over the space of just a few weeks you will see some rapid changes. Of course, there may be times when you find your puppy’s behaviour challenging, or frustrating. There will be ups and downs, but with the help of this book, I hope you find the ups are many and the downs are few and far between.

Many of the instincts that our dogs have inherited from wolves are greatly diminished, some have been enhanced by selective breeding, and others lost completely. Puppies are much easier to befriend than wolf cubs, even when raised in identical circumstances. And dogs have become more skilful at reading and anticipating human behaviour.

In the light of recent research, a number of beliefs and understandings about the instinctive social behaviour of dogs have been revised or discarded. It is worth looking at these briefly, because they were widely held until just twenty years ago, and for many years the principles of all dog management and training were based upon them.

Wolves were understood to be pack animals that lived within a strict social hierarchy where a dominant animal held the position of leader or ‘alpha’ and maintained that position through physical strength and superiority. Any sign of weakness in the leader would lead to conflict and a challenge for his position of power. Dogs were believed to have inherited this social behaviour, and dog trainers believed that dogs had to be controlled and kept in their place through domination and strong pack leadership.

We now know that much of this theory was incorrect. Dogs do not tend to form packs or strict social hierarchies under normal circumstances; nor do they maintain social relationships through force or displays of dominance. Recent studies have shown that even wolves don’t form packs in quite the same way that we once believed they did. The original research was based on unrelated captive wolves that had been thrust together in a most unnatural manner. More recent studies of wild wolves tell a different story, of animals that live in a close family unit, led usually by parents and maintained without aggression.

What this new research means for you is that you don’t need to worry about dominating your puppy, and nor should you be concerned that he will try to dominate you. Dogs may fight over resources, such as food, but dominance is not something they value. You will achieve your rightful position as the head of your puppy’s family through controlling the resources available to him as part of an effective training strategy.

Our two species have grown and evolved together over time. Whilst your puppy retains some echoes of his wolf ancestry, he will be very much a modern dog. And although his natural instincts may govern a lot of his early development, he also has a huge capacity to learn.

With every day that passes, your puppy’s newly learned behaviours will have an increasing influence on his daily activities. Just like small children, puppies have little self-control or sense of danger, and life with a puppy can be hard work. But it should also be fun. Your puppy should fit in with your life, not the other way around.

Understanding how your puppy learns, and how you can influence that process, is the focus of our next chapter. Within that understanding lies the key to a happy and enjoyable relationship with your dog. By the time you have finished The Happy Puppy Handbook, you will know how to make your puppy feel at home, how to get him to sleep at night, and how to avoid him crying excessively. You will also know how to feed him and house-train him and how to keep him healthy.

But most importantly, you will know how to ensure that he grows up well adjusted and well equipped to live in harmony with all the other inhabitants of our crazy, chaotic and cluttered human world.

SUMMARY

• Life with a new puppy can be challenging.

• Puppies need a little help to become happy and well adjusted.

• Most behavioural problems can be avoided.

THE ABILITY OF our canine friends to learn amusing tricks, and even to carry out useful tasks on our behalf, is part of their enduring appeal. We can teach dogs to herd sheep, retrieve lost items, dance to music, guide and assist their disabled owners, and even to detect total strangers buried in the rubble of an earthquake zone. Dogs are very good at learning a wide range of skills.

Teaching a puppy right from wrong ought to be straightforward enough. Yet as attitudes towards dogs have changed, there seems to be increasing confusion over how to teach our puppies what is and is not acceptable.

Dog owners may be faced with conflicting advice. Training with food or other rewards may be dismissed by traditional-style trainers as too soft or permissive, whilst traditional-style methods may be dismissed by others as too harsh.

Puppies learn very fast indeed. They learn from you and from other members of their family, but they also learn from interacting with everything else around them. We all want our puppies to ‘sit’ and ‘come here’, to ‘lie down’ and to ‘stay’. Yet in the first few weeks in their new homes, what many puppies are learning is to ‘whine’ and ‘jump up’ and to ‘snatch’ and ‘bark’. Fortunately, we have a great deal of control over this process, provided we understand how it happens. For great results, you need to be clear how the mechanism of the learning process actually works – preferably before your new puppy sets foot inside your home.

The learning process that has evolved in dogs and other mammals is very straightforward. Inside your puppy’s brain, the consequences of every single action he carries out are recorded and allocated to one of three categories. Those categories are:

Which of the three categories those consequences fall into will determine how your puppy will behave next time he is in the same situation. Let’s look at some examples.

If your puppy pokes a tennis ball with his nose, it is quite likely to roll along the ground. If there is a bit of a slope, he may even get to chase after it. Things just got better for the puppy and his brain records a good consequence. Next time he sees a tennis ball, he will be likely to poke it again. On the other hand, if your puppy pokes a wasp with his nose, he may get stung, in which case things just got worse for him. A bad consequence is recorded and the puppy’s brain will look out for similar situations in the future. Next time he sees a wasp he will probably leave it alone.

Timing is a crucial factor in this process. If your puppy pokes a wasp and it flies away, then returns and stings him later, he will not connect the two and will probably poke a wasp again in the future. The consequence, good or bad, must accompany the puppy’s actions or follow very closely in order to have any effect.

This is all pretty obvious and applies to people, too. If what we do is followed by a bad thing, we don’t do it again. If what we do is followed by a good thing, we do it more often.

But what about our third category of outcomes? What if the outcome is registered by the puppy as ‘indifferent’? What happens if nothing changes? If your puppy pokes a large rock with his nose for example, rocks being what they are, he is unlikely to get a reaction. His brain adds the experience to the indifferent category.

But here is the interesting part. If there is no outcome, if nothing changes following the puppy’s actions, his behaviour is less likely to occur in the future. The effect is, in fact, the same as if the puppy had been punished. If repeated, this lack of outcome results in a process called ‘extinction’ because over time, the behaviour that it follows will die out. Here is a summary of our three outcomes and their influence on your puppy’s future behaviour.

The way in which these three outcomes control your dog’s future behaviour is no accident. The ability of your dog to record, and act on, the consequences of past behaviour has evolved to make sure that any behaviour that is beneficial to the dog will increase. Any behaviour that is not beneficial to the dog dies out, enabling the dog to preserve his time and energy for more productive activities. Puppies do what works for them.

In each of the examples opposite the puppy was learning without the intervention of his owner. We often call this ‘accidental learning’. In homes where puppies have a great deal of freedom, most of his learning is likely to be accidental. Raising a puppy without bad habits and with nice manners requires that we take control of the consequences of his actions to a much greater degree.

The ways in which we control the consequences of our puppy’s actions have changed significantly in the last twenty years or so. It is worth looking at just what those changes have involved.

Traditional dog training

In behavioural science, any consequence that makes a behaviour more likely to happen again in the future is defined as a ‘reinforcer’. Any consequence that makes a behaviour less likely to happen again in the future is defined as a ‘punisher’. An effective punisher must be something the dog finds disagreeable, an effective reinforcer must be something the dog finds highly desirable, and both must be easy to apply. Both punishers and reinforcers need to be free from harmful side effects.

Traditional dog trainers used what they thought was a fair balance between punishment and reinforcement. Unfortunately, the principles of effective training with reinforcement were not well understood, and many dogs were not offered desirable (to the dog) rewards nor rewarded in a way that creates a trained response. We will look at this more closely in a moment. But what this lack of knowledge meant was that traditional training leant quite heavily on punishment.

People’s attitudes to dogs today are very different from those of previous generations. Dogs are often considered as friends and family members, and dog owners are less inclined to punish them. Even putting to one side the ethics of using punishment, there are practical problems in its application.

Practical problems with punishment

We noted on previous pages that timing is a crucial factor in applying consequences. This can be a problem when it comes to punishment because, unsurprisingly, dogs do not like being punished. Most puppies do not hang around waiting to be smacked once they realise that you are in a bad mood. Catching and chastising a puppy where and exactly when a misdemeanour is committed is often impossible. This situation does not improve as the puppy gets older.

Regular punishment can greatly reduce a puppy’s desire to be near to his owner, and this may seriously impact on the quality of his recall. Punishment also makes the punisher feel angry when he should be remaining calm in order to think objectively how best to respond to his dog. In addition, many dogs become hardened to punishment and need increasingly severe corrections to achieve the same effect. You can see how an escalating spiral of harsh treatment can creep in to spoil a previously happy relationship, often because the owner was afraid of spoiling the dog by being too soft, and didn’t know what else to do.

Fortunately, times have changed and the way in which dogs learn through consequences is much better understood. Pioneering behaviourists and dog trainers have perfected positive-reinforcement techniques and transformed the way in which we now teach and manage our dogs. The movement away from punishment as a training tool is now widely established and training your puppy should be fun for both of you.

Modern dog training

The reliance that traditional trainers placed on punishment was not due to rewards being any less effective than aversives. It arose because trainers weren’t using reinforcement of the right kind, and in the right way.

Effective reinforcers must be highly desirable to the dog. And many dogs are not overly impressed with praise and patting. Just like you and me, one dog’s preference may be different from another’s. If you pay me in cabbages, I am unlikely to want to work for you again. Belgian chocolates, on the other hand, would be a different matter. You might be induced to provide your expertise in exchange for a white-water rafting trip, but your neighbour would sooner work for some tickets to the theatre. In the same way, some dogs will find tug games very motivating; others might prefer opportunities to retrieve a ball. Almost all dogs are impressed by certain foods – moist and highly flavoured ones are preferred. For puppies under three months old, it is also worth remembering that one of the most powerful rewards you can offer is your attention.

Studies have shown that dogs will work very hard for food rewards, and the harder the dog is prepared to work, the quicker a trained response can be created. Since food is easily portable and quickly delivered, it is an ideal dog-training tool. Using other types of reward is perfectly acceptable, provided that the rewards you have in mind are genuinely desirable to the dog in question.

The most important point is that you do not have any power to make an experience in itself reinforcing for your dog. You cannot force your dog to enjoy eating cheese, chasing balls or being cuddled. Your job is to observe and recognise what your dog perceives as reinforcing, and this requires a degree of honesty that most of us struggle with at first. We all want to believe that our dog loves praise, cuddling and being stroked by us, more than all the world. The hard truth may be that he would rather eat roast beef or chase butterflies.

Accepting that you can train a puppy far more quickly with chicken than with cuddles is only part of the battle. You also need to apply your effective rewards in an effective way. You cannot just shovel treats down a dog indefinitely and expect to maintain his new behaviour. Many people struggle with treat-based training because they don’t realise that in the long run treats must be delivered intermittently. Predictable rewards soon get boring. And bribing your puppy to be good is not the answer.

Training versus bribery

A bribe is something offered in advance in order to get the required response. If you hold out a piece of food to your puppy and ask him to sit, you are offering a bribe. Bribery is a highly ineffective long-term strategy. The owner of the dog has no control when the bribe is unavailable, or when the dog has his eye on a better reward, such as running around with your best shoes or playing with another dog.

Training is quite different. Training creates an automatic behaviour that endures, even when rewards are not always available. Dogs can be trained to respond to a signal, such as coming to your recall whistle, but also to respond to being in a certain situation, such as remaining silent in a crate, or sitting politely when visitors stroke him. Training is the process by which we create or modify a behaviour through the intelligent use of rewards. And to do this well, we need to understand how animals have evolved a way to remain persistent in the face of difficulty.

Pleasurable consequences are a great way to establish new behaviour, but they do not work as reinforcers if they continue to be predictable. This is because there is an evolutionary advantage to being persistent. Nature is not always predictable. A wild-dog family may chase five or six antelope before they make a kill. If they give up after the first chase, they would starve. Persistence in the face of intermittent rewards is essential. For this reason, dogs, and other mammals such as ourselves, are programmed to find random and unpredictable rewards more desirable than reliable and predictable ones. This phenomenon, which has been very well studied, explains our enthusiasm for slot machines and penny-pusher fairground games. It is very aptly named the ‘gambling effect’.

What this means for you is that once you have established some nice behaviours in your puppy, you will need to begin to provide rewards for them unpredictably – sometimes giving a big reward, sometimes a little one, and sometimes no reward at all. This will help you ensure that your puppy becomes addicted to good behaviour and that the behaviours you teach him become deeply ingrained.

Correcting bad behaviours

We have talked a lot about encouraging good behaviour. Positive reinforcement is a great way of training new behaviours but there are still times when puppies will behave badly. How do we stop a puppy from digging up the lawn, or jumping all over the furniture? How do we correct unwanted behaviours? Won’t we still need punishment for this?

So far we have looked at good and bad consequences, but we haven’t paid much attention to our third consequence. You may remember that an indifferent outcome, or no consequence, diminishes the preceding behaviour in just the same way as punishment. Extinction is a powerful tool and modern dog trainers are increasingly choosing it to replace the use of punishment. This means being pro-active in the way that we manage our dogs in order to ensure that undesirable behaviours are extinguished. We need to make sure that family members do not pet the dog when he puts his feet on their laps, or feed him titbits when he begs at the table. If the puppy receives no benefit from his behaviour, he will give up fairly quickly.

You can significantly hasten this process of extinguishing naughty behaviours by rewarding an alternative behaviour to replace the one you do not like. Ignoring your puppy when he jumps up at you, for example, will help him learn not to bother, but he will learn even more quickly if you also reward him for keeping all four paws on the floor.

A game of consequences

Modern dog training is a game of consequences and it isn’t difficult to play. But to stay ahead of the game you need to remember that your puppy is learning all the time, not just when you are intentionally teaching him. Consequences can work against us as well as for us. Great behaviours that you have trained can easily be extinguished. If you persistently forget to reward your puppy for coming when you whistle, he will gradually stop coming. Bad behaviours, such as yapping, can easily be accidentally reinforced by intermittently giving the puppy your attention while he is making a noise. So it is important to remember to save your attention for when he is being quiet. Good behaviours can also easily be unintentionally punished. If you immediately put your puppy on the lead after calling him to you, the recall has effectively been punished, and the puppy will soon stop coming back. Simple strategies, such as playing with your puppy for a few minutes before you clip his lead on, can make the world of difference.

Where possible, it is a great idea to reduce opportunities for your puppy to get into mischief or learn bad habits. Moving the bin into another room to prevent bin-raiding activities, and putting your precious stuff away will save much conflict.

You know how the game works now. You are aware of how easy it is to punish or reward the wrong behaviours accidentally. You understand why we use a combination of reinforcement and extinction to control and modify a puppy’s behaviour. You are almost ready to put all this theory into practice.

The beauty of this elegant system is that it can be applied to absolutely anything your puppy does. It can be used to teach your dog to carry out new behaviours on your command, to fix problem behaviours that have been accidentally created in the past, or simply to have a go at teaching your dog a few tricks. Most of all, the system is fun – for both of you.

As a human being, you have enormous control over the resources available to your puppy. Use it! Save titbits to give him later when he is resting quietly in his basket. Use his food to teach nice manners. Make the things he wants to do, such as playing with other dogs, or even simply going through a door, dependent on the thing you want him to do.

It isn’t as difficult as it sounds, because once you have got the hang of it, the game of consequences will become second nature. You will soon learn to wait for silence before letting your puppy out of his crate, or to wait for him to sit before you open a door for him to pass through. Making little changes in your behaviour to generate changes in his will come naturally. And don’t worry if your puppy’s behaviour isn’t perfect right now. Whilst it is always easier to establish good habits if bad habits are avoided, bad habits can often be resolved, as we’ll discover in Part Three.

We have spent quite a substantial amount of time looking at how puppies learn new behaviours, and in the chapters that follow you will be able to observe the practical applications of this knowledge – both in creating learned behaviours, such as teaching your puppy to toilet outdoors rather than on your carpets, and in reducing some of those annoying instinctive puppy behaviours, such as grabbing and biting at people’s hands and feet.

Perhaps, most importantly, this knowledge will help you avoid falling into the trap of inadvertently creating problems in your puppy where no problems existed to begin with. You will be able to avoid having to cope with a whining or fussy puppy that cannot bear to be left alone. You will be able to teach your puppy new and interesting skills and to establish good foundations on which to raise a model canine citizen.

Whilst common behavioural problems may cause conflict between puppies and their new owners, they are rarely a serious threat to society at large. If your dog begs at the table, if he puts his muddy feet on your visitors, digs holes in your lawn, or barks when you get your car keys out, you may be happy to live with that, rather than attempt to resolve it.

Aggression, however, is an altogether more serious matter. The next chapter focuses exclusively on how you can raise a friendly puppy, and help to avoid the disaster that is a dangerous dog.

SUMMARY

We will look more closely at practical training techniques in Part Two, but for now here is a summary of what you need to remember from this chapter.

• Think carefully about the consequences of your puppy’s actions.

• Avoid reinforcing bad behaviour, including with your attention.

• Reward good behaviour with lots of attention and desirable treats.

• Don’t let great behaviours die.

• Restrict your puppy’s access to things you do not want him to touch.

IT IS IMPOSSIBLE to overestimate the importance of good temperament in a domestic dog. It is without question the most powerful influence in determining whether or not a dog will fit into family life, bring pleasure to his owners, and even whether or not he is likely to be abandoned by the family who once loved him.

In many countries, including the United Kingdom, dogs are widely liked and trusted. Many people willingly approach and even embrace strange dogs without hesitation. The majority of dogs never abuse the trust bestowed upon them, but attacks by dogs are not uncommon and in many, if not most, cases they could have been avoided.

People often assume that, through years of domestication, dogs are naturally predisposed to be friendly towards all humans. They assume that the exceptions to this rule have been abused or badly bred. This is not the case. Dogs are instinctively friendly towards their family members, but extending that friendliness towards the whole of society is more complicated.

If someone stops to pat your puppy in the street, you will want him to respond in a warm and friendly way – not just while he is small, but even more importantly as he grows up. He needs your help to make this happen, because he is genetically programmed to become wary of strangers at quite an early age. And not without good reason.

For a wild dog living in a dangerous world, friendliness is likely to result in an early demise. Nature’s assumption is that something you have never come across before is likely to be dangerous, so you had better regard it with great suspicion. Many wild animals share this natural instinct for self-protection. As a result, indiscriminate friendliness is not a characteristic that your dog’s ancestors have passed on to him.

So, if indiscriminate friendliness is not a trait passed down from your dog’s wolf relatives, where does it come from? Why are most adult dogs friendly?

We have seen that wild dogs need to have a natural fear of strange and therefore potentially dangerous creatures, items and events. But dogs are social animals, and nature needs a mechanism to provide puppies with sufficient time to get to know and bond with all the members of their social group, before this fear of novelty kicks in.

In a wolf family, it is vital that each cub learns to recognise, and regard with affection, all those adults on whom his safety depends. Consequently, nature has provided a brief window of opportunity during which cubs are unafraid of new objects and experiences. Dogs have inherited this developmental window and the process of domestication has expanded it a little. During this period, puppies will readily bond with those who show them friendship and take care of them. Once it is ended, a natural wariness, and even fear, of novelty sets in.

This short time is the critical period for socialisation. Most puppies are right in the middle of it at the age when they leave for their new homes, which is why puppies are able to move in with total strangers and settle in relatively easily.

The critical period provides time for the puppy to acquaint himself with various aspects of the environment in which he lives, as well as enabling him to bond with his family. A wild puppy gets to know the wind and the rain, rivers and rocks, and to crawl among the undergrowth and feel at home in his natural world. The domestic puppy needs to do the same, though probably in a more urban context.

Used properly, this window of time during which your puppy will accept all newcomers into his life with equal enthusiasm is your ticket to a friendly puppy. This is when we can introduce a puppy to all manner of experiences and he will accept them readily. By the same token, the puppy that is isolated and shut away from new experiences during this important period is likely to be fearful and suspicious of many aspects of normal life. This can take a great deal of work to overcome and is quite a handicap for the dog concerned.

Triggers for aggression

In most cases, the catalyst for aggression in any dog is fear. Dogs do not normally use aggression to manipulate others. Aggression is triggered when the dog feels vulnerable or threatened.

In the natural world, wild carnivores are often exposed to danger. Aggression in the face of fear is sometimes needed for survival, but a wild dog or wolf has choices. When placed in danger, he can usually choose whether to fight or to run. He makes that choice based on what is of most benefit to him and those that share his genes. He may choose to fight to protect the resources he needs in order to survive, access to food for example. He may choose to run from predators much larger or heavier than he is in order to avoid death or injury.

A domestic dog, on the other hand, rarely needs to fight for resources, such as food, because we provide those for him. Most of the time, his best option when afraid would therefore be to run. But life is not that simple, and a domestic dog is frequently placed in situations from which he cannot escape.

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