02/08/2026
Let's talk about puppy socialisation 🐾
This is something I'm working through with Ziva at the moment, and I thought it might be useful to chat about what "socialisation" actually means.
I'll be honest: I don't particularly like the term. It can sound as though the route to a sociable adult dog is simply to meet as many dogs and people as possible. But it tells us very little about the quality of those interactions, or whether the puppy actually enjoyed them.
It also doesn't account for the individual puppy. Should a bold, highly social puppy have exactly the same experiences as a puppy who is naturally more reserved? Probably not.
When we humans talk about socialising, we usually mean going somewhere to interact with people: a dinner party, the pub, a club, a hobby group etc. I think this skews our understanding of puppy socialisation.
Now imagine that most of your early experience of "socialising" involved a busy pub (stay with me here!)
You didn't get much say in when you went, how long you stayed or who approached you.
Perhaps you weren't feeling it one evening, so you sat quietly in the corner, only for someone to keep trying to drag you up to do karaoke. Would you enjoy that experience?
Or perhaps you were the party animal, learning that every person you saw was there to engage with you, even when they were clearly minding their own business.
Maybe you'd been taken out so often that your social battery was completely flat. Instead of becoming more confident, you were overwhelmed and beginning to dread the next outing.
Or perhaps everyone you met was always chatty and happy to engage. What would that teach you to expect from future social encounters?
It's an exaggerated analogy, of course, but it highlights how narrow our idea of puppy socialisation can sometimes be. Instead, I prefer to think of it as helping a puppy learn about the world.
That doesn't mean meeting hundreds of people in different hats, greeting every dog or squeezing in as many experiences as possible. It means calmly experiencing different sights, sounds, smells, surfaces and environments, often without needing to interact with any of them.
It also means being supported by their human: someone who notices when they are finding something difficult, becoming overwhelmed or getting overexcited, and adjusts the experience accordingly.
For example, I've noticed Ziva is quite aware of road traffic (she's a herding breed, so things that move will get her attention). So when we're walking near a road, I help her disengage from traffic. That doesn't mean I'm making traffic our daily "socialisation task" or repeatedly exposing her until she gets used to it. It's much more relaxed than that.
And although puppies have important early developmental periods, worrying about a rapidly closing "socialisation window" can make us feel pressured to cram in as many dogs, people and places as possible. If we aren't careful, that can overwhelm a puppy and have the opposite effect from the one we intended.
The photos below were taken at 6.30am in a local shopping centre. There was distant traffic, a window cleaner, dogs walking on leads and someone chatting to me from across the street.
Nothing dramatic happened, and that was the point.
Socialisation doesn't need to be a big event. Sometimes the most valuable experience is simply being somewhere, observing the world and discovering that you don't have to interact with everything in it.
Calm, varied and guided by the puppy in front of you.
