The statement I made before about friends being more important than acquaintances applies to other dogs, too! There are certain things that are just better explained in dog language. Practicing saying ‘hi’ 500 times is good, but they also need to have full conversations, too.

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OTHER DOGS

Bite inhibition, play skills, and the nuances of communication are really only something other dogs can teach each other, so help your puppy make many canine friends outside of your family.

Have her interact with a variety of dogs: breed, age, neuter status, sex, play style, etc. This doesn’t just mean play time. Interactions should also include mellow time, like going for a walk to explore together, playing with their own toys near each other, or being trained by the same person (feed treats carefully so they don’t go nose to nose).

Note: Kira has some resource guarding issues and her brother needs help learning about cut-off signals. But the rest of the video demonstrates that socializing isn’t always about rough-and-tumble play.

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Meet up for walks with other people from your local puppy class and from your neighborhood. Have a dog friend or two come over for play dates in the back yard. Go for a short walk together first and then go into the yard together. Be careful if you have an older dog already – he may not want visitors.

Give permission to ‘go say hi’ when you are ready to let your puppy greet another dog or person. Introductions go best when they are either off leash in a safe area. Attempt to greet while moving on a walk, parallel or following, with the dogs gradually merging closer. The latter can be done on or off leash. Keep the leashes in a little ‘smile’ and avoid tangling. When they are on leash, nothing should be between you and your dog but the leash. It helps to rotate with the dogs as they move around. Call your dog away if he gets stiff, is too rough, tries to put his head over the other dog’s neck, or the other dog is trying to get away. Have the other owner call his dog if that dog is too rough or you see your dog giving cut-off signals or trying to get away.

You may need to step out of your comfort zone to find friends for your dog. Use good judgment on your personal safety, but you can use the bulletin board at your local pet store or coffee shop in your neighborhood to find dog friends. I wish I had done more of this for my dog, Peanut, but I was shy and my friends didn’t have dogs. We relied on puppy class and our local park for his socialization with dogs, even taking multiple puppy classes, but that kind of interaction was too intense for him to appreciate being around other dogs.

Here’s a video of me with Bean and a new Chihuahua cross friend he was making. I have both leashes at first and then swap to having the other caretaker have a leash. It’s not perfect, since I’m also filming. Notice that Bean’s leash is mostly loose the entire time, so he feels as off-leash as possible.

Note: if you are a trainer, considering offering matchmaking as a free service for your clients. This can be done on your site or as a Facebook group, for example.

OTHER SPECIES OF ANIMALS

Which species might your dog encounter in her lifetime? Cats? Geese? Pigs? Horses? Cows? Lizards? Geckos? Ducks? Elephants?

Puppyhood is the time where dogs make their database of what is normal, so have your puppy see and smell these animals now. Make sure your puppy is safe, can move away whenever she wants, and larger animals cannot step on her.

Make sure you are calm and relaxed during the greeting, and demonstrate that by having a loose body that is not stiff or frozen. Breathe calmly, preferably using diaphragmatic breathing (also known as yoga breathing or belly breathing). Move in a relaxed way to model the sort of attitude that you want the dog to have. Interact calmly with the other animal as well. All of the above applies to greetings with people and other dogs, too!

PLAY, CONFLICT RESOLUTION, AND SOCIAL CONSEQUENCES

Learning how to play is one reason that trainers encourage play with other dogs and people as part of puppy socialization.

Play is an important part of how dogs learn to interact with their species. Play is like fighting, but it has a continuous stream of behavior that’s incompatible with fighting. These behaviors signal, “just kidding!” and if that signal is understood, the mock fight continues. If a dog misses that signal, she might interpret the other dog’s attempt to play as a threat. She might give a cut-off signal (turning away, slowing down, avoiding eye contact, fleeing) and if the other dog responds to it, the play can continue when she’s ready to start again. But if her cut-off signal is ignored and the other dog plows into her, she might escalate to barking, growling, or snapping. That’s why humans need to carefully monitor the puppy’s play with other dogs.

Some dogs also don’t give enough play signals during their play, or don’t wait for the response of the other dog before continuing. Play contains many important social skills for puppies to practice!

Through play, puppies also get to practice hunting and get mental and physical exercise through play. Like humans, most dogs continue to play throughout their lives, which is an uncommon trait. It’s probably one of the reasons we like sharing our lives with dogs.

Let’s take a look at how puppies can learn proper conflict resolution. All puppies are unique, so there will be interactions when one puppy wants to play (call her Roxy) and another does not (call him Sammy). So here’s how we would want that to go.

• Roxy: tries to initiate play (makes eye contact, bows, spins)
• Sammy: tries to say no to the play by using a cut-off signal (avoids eye contact, turns away, moves away slowly)
• Roxy: accepts the rejection (Turns away and plays with another puppy or her person)

If Roxy didn’t do that on her own, we could call her away, cue and reinforce Leave It, or if needed, gently restrain her while Sammy moves away, then feed her a treat when she relaxes or turns away from Sammy.

For training geeks: With enough repetition of this sort of interaction, these puppies may learn something. Some of the learning was from social consequences. The reinforcers that are not provided by the trainer are called naturally occurring reinforcement.

Sammy will probably learn that his behavior ‘works’ via naturally occurring negative reinforcement. His behavior stops the interaction. What we usually see after enough of this is that he becomes confident enough to play with the other dog. Knowing that he can easily set boundaries and stop the play seems to build his trust in the relationship. As they become friends, the cut-off signals and play signals become more and more subtle.

Roxy will probably learn that sometimes other puppies don’t want to play with her, and that that’s okay. The play soliciting behavior worked with the next dog, so that’s naturally occurring reinforcement on a variable schedule. If we cue an alternate behavior and reinforce it, Roxy now has another option besides for chasing the other dog. Be careful, though, because cues trained with reinforcement can serve as markers, so the best moment to say Leave It or call the dog is when she hesitates or moves away from Sammy.

In the scenario with Roxy being restrained, that’s differential reinforcement of incompatible behavior and some classical counterconditioning for the restraint as well. The restraint can become a discriminative stimulus for the ‘leave it’ sort of behavior. If she were to bark or pounce on the other dog, she might need a short time out from the play (negative punishment and just time to reduce excitement). When you calmly put her back into the play time, we don’t want her to go right back and pounce on Sammy, for his sake. Give Roxy something to do that helps keep her from pouncing (holding a tug rope, for example). If that’s not enough, you might take her away from the play time, run up and down the street several times to tire her out, then walk up and down once and return to play.

Puppies need to have successful interactions, because perfect practice makes perfect. Puppies should interact with dogs that are at their level of interaction as well as just to either side of it. What I mean by that is that a puppy should have chances to play with dogs who are just a little more cautious than them, right at their level, and slightly more rambunctious. It helps no one to have a really energetic puppy play with a dog who wants to hide under the chair. It’s like putting a calculus problem in front of a child in first grade. They just aren’t ready.

Keep in mind that your puppy changes daily, so the puppy they met last week that was the brave and rowdy one may be more hesitant than your puppy this week. Train the puppy you have today.

Here’s an example of two dogs who know each other that are playing. They have abbreviated cut-off and play signals, and the hound sometimes ignores them and keeps pushing, but they are mostly in sync. Toward the end, a third dog charges in with a different style. You can clearly see both dogs freeze and not play with her. These social consequences help educate our puppies. In this video, the other dog was also removed after the cut-off signals of the other dogs.

[vc_video link=”https://vimeo.com/135895900″]

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