How did you socialise your puppy

[SalamanderingAbroad]

Friend with kids can come round, I’m hoping dh’s friend who has a lovely gentle dog will bring her round, but who and how else before she’s had her vacs...

And how should we ask people to greet her?

We take ours most places we go. If we are going our in the cat, she comes. I carry her to the local shop and dp waits outside. We visit friends with vaccinated dogs. They come to ours.

I dont ask anyone to greet her in a particular way. When people are coming in, or we are going to theirs we pick her up and the put her her down when people are settled.

With any kids, we ask them to sit down and be calm. And supervise play, gently helping them if they get to excited or she does.

I also carried mine out and about.

Took her into town where she could experience the noisier side of life. And let her see lots of different types of people and places, different traffic.

If you take a tiny puppy anywhere she will meet lots of new people, in my experience, as people will keep asking to stroke her: carrying a small puppy around Pets at Home is very good for this.

My dog's breeder did the whole thing with getting her friends to bring their calm children round to meet the puppies as it gets them used to small people, and the gentle dog is a good idea.

At the moment you just want people to greet her calmly and quietly when out, but in the house, when puppy is on the floor, you could ask people not to greet her if she's jumping up and start training her to have all four paws on the ground.

You could give people a treat and, once puppy has learned 'sit' you can get her to sit, the person can greet her and give her the treat for sitting nicely.

It's never too early to start training.

I took ddog everywhere with me as a tiny pup. And I mean everywhere. I carried him before he was allowed to put his feet down and he sat through rehearsals of a production I was in without a squeak. He also got taken to cafes, pubs, performing events that I do and basically, every outing that was suitable for him. I aimed at getting get him used to different sounds, different activities and different people. He's now (aged one) hugely sociable although he does tend to prefer people to dogs but apart from bigger versions of his own breed, remains chilled and not timid around them. The reason for his caution around his own breed is entirely down to an unfortunate incident when I stupidly agreed he could play with a friend's much larger lurcher and he got hurt.

I wouldn't make too much of socialisation provided you get out there and do it but also be aware that pups do need lots of sleep so try and get a balance between loads of activities and none at all! Encourage calm greetings and train any children at the same time as the pup. I did this with my granddaughters who soon realised that if they squeaked and endlessly ran around like sillies then the pup would get equally giddy and that's when he'd forget about teefs.

Carried them around
The street, pet stores, anywhere dogs are allowed really for different sounds and smells
Make sure you do night and day
We forgot about that and puppy is definitely more reserved in the dark now. Maybe just normal / coincidence though.

Also driving around in the car as ours hated it at first.

We also had a ton of visitors
And booked the vaccine in for as soon as possible so we could get out walking

We didn’t know any fully vaccinated dogs but you can do that too.

Re greetings - No fuss when people come in the house unless all 4 puppy feet are on the ground!
Outside the house people will just lunge at them and stroke them normally
I move away and make comments about how she hates x but she/he’d love a chest scratch etc. But obviously that is often ignored.

I think it’s just about puppy being ok in lots of situations and thinking everything’s fun.

Post vax we go to every shop, market, pub, restaurant, cafe, event, home etc that will have us to see everything.
It’s cost us a fortune as we wouldnt go out as much normally but at 15w our puppy seems to be fairly comfortable everywhere

We had a puppy sling and put dpup in it and took him out every day. Garden centres, town, coffee shops, parks, pet shops are all good places to go.

The idea is that the puppy will have met 100 different people before 16 weeks old.