06/17/2025
Our puppy 3 for big dogs students were hard at working holding their down stays while their humans chatted with each other in class last week!
I think it’s critically important for the proper behavioral development of our dogs to continue offering access to social opportunities throughout your dog’s entire adolescence, AND continue training in the presence of dog friends.
Something that I hear often, from both trainers and owners, is that daycare or the dog park or other off leash dog opportunities made their dog reactive because they learned to like the other dogs too much, or they became “hyper socialized”. But the truth is that it’s usually a problem of teaching the dogs that any time other dogs are around it’s “party time”, and the dogs never truly learning how to regulate and learn around other dogs as well! This is why our advanced puppy classes continue to feature both off leash playtime and on leash learning, so that we are teaching our teens how to practice their social skills, but also making sure they know how to respond to cues and regulate their feelings when on leash!
