05/13/2026
A very important piece on allowing puppies- and dogs- to choose. Often, we get hung up on exposure and forget that socialization is all about acceptance and neutrality. Forcing dogs into situations despite discomfort and fear can and will CREATE reactivity just as much as sheltering them will. Remember that a dog that is over threshold cannot meaningfully learn!
I want to touch on the relationship between agency and fear. In all interactions with novelty and challenges, it’s crucial that each puppy has agency and the ability to decide if they want to interact or retreat. This is a key concept, and one I see breeders and puppy owners struggle with.
When we see a puppy that’s frightened of something that WE know is harmless, our first impulse is to pick up the puppy and insert him into the situation that frightens him or carry him near to the person he is afraid of. We feel that, if we can just show him that there’s nothing to be afraid of, he’ll get over it. Unfortunately, not only is this not true, but it can sensitize the puppy to the thing he’s afraid of, because taking away his choice exponentially increases his fear.
So, no picking up and immersing or pushing the puppy into a person or thing. It’s all about the puppy making the choice. This is for three reasons:
1. Remember, dogs use space and distance to control the emotional temperature of an interaction – if you watch them, they will naturally do for themselves what I have been telling YOU to do for them…they will move away from the challenging stimulus until to make it emotionally lighter so they can process it. That is to say, a puppy will find his own “zero” set point by increasing or decreasing distance between himself and the scary thing and work forward from there. But if you take that same puppy and pick it up and physically move him past its point of comfort, you’ve taken away that puppy’s ability to regulate, and you’ve probably crossed into a non-workable area where the fear side of the see saw is too heavy to counterbalance.
To use a practical example, let’s say a puppy shows hesitancy about a person in a hat. That puppy may find that he’s comfortable taking the whole hat situation in from 5’ away. From there, he can gradually choose to move closer and closer as he assimilates the whole hat thing. You can work up from this point. But if you pick up the puppy and hand the puppy to the hat person in an attempt to “show him there’s nothing to be afraid of” you run a high risk of terrifying the puppy. You can’t work with a terrified puppy and, chances are, you’ve only added emotional weight of the fear side of the see saw and set back the process.
2. Regarding forced interactions such as mazes or obstacle courses that the puppy does not have an escape route from, you must be very careful with this that the puppy’s fear of being left behind and/or drive to stay with the pack is not carrying them into an area where they are truly terrified. In the excitement of the moment, a puppy can find themselves in a terrifying situation before they realize it and, sorry to sound like a broken record, if you’re working from a place where the puppy has terror, you’re probably doing more harm than good. So always either make sure the challenge is something very low and easy that you’re sure that all the puppies have done in the past or give the puppies a way around the obstacles.
3. Finally, and perhaps most importantly, grapple it to your heart with hoops of steel that your absolute most important goal is not to expose the puppy to a laundry list of things, but for the puppy to learn to overcome fear of novelty. Because you can’t possibly expose a puppy to everything he will ever see in his life, but if the puppy knows he can overcome fears, he has a total skill set going forward when he sees something new. When you pick up a puppy and insert him in a situation that frightens him, or when you run him in a pack over something terrifying, you eliminate that choice and control, and you wind up setting him back instead of equipping him to move forward in life.
So, whenever you’re dealing with a fear issue in a puppy or a dog, let the animal find his own starting point and work forward from there.
The puppy with the dot (Frida) on her head in this photo was so terrified of the Leonberger at first that we had to allow her to go back in the house and watch through the sliding glass doors. Frida had to be about 50 feet away from the Leonberger and also separated from the Leonberger by a glass door and a steel fence until Frida could find the emotional calmness to be able to look at this huge dog and assess the situation. It took a good 20 minutes until Frida was comfortable enough to come out and play with the Leonberger, but it worked out fine.
I have certainly had litters that took longer, or that did not engage with a large dog at all on the first exposure, but that's also fine. You are not going to change it by forcing the situation, and you'll only make it worse. You don't get to decide what the emotional set point of your puppies is in any given situation, you have to accept it and work from there .
If you're a puppy owner, our puppy course goes into explicit detail on crafting socialization experiences instead of flooding fearful puppies – (link in comments)👇
We also get into great detail about this in our breeder course (link in comments)👇
Breeders will also benefit greatly by watching our Shaping Emotional Responses video which does a good job of laying out the key fundamentals of counterconditioning (link in comments)👇
