Puppy Socialisation in East Yorkshire

Structured Socialisation

For puppies aged 8 weeks
to 1 year old

Join us for socialisation-based play & training with two degree qualified trainers to develop your puppy's...

Social skills
Confidence
Resilience
Focus

Let's play & learn!

What is socialisation?

The socialisation window is a period of rapid learning and brain development in puppies aged 3 to 12-14 weeks old. During this time, puppies quickly learn about the living beings that surround them and how to interact with them, which generally includes:

their human family
other unfamiliar people
familiar and unfamiliar dogs
the animals that inhabit the world

The goal of socialisation is to gently expose puppies to new dogs, people and animals, so that they can develop the social skills they will require throughout their life.

That means ensuring that your puppy has positive social interactions only.

It is important that these interactions are not limited to social play, but also include calmness, rest and independent activities in the presence of new people or dogs. Other social activities are also highly beneficial, such as dogs enjoying a chew on their own in the proximity of others, or exploring a garden together.

Another learning process called habituation goes alongside the socialisation period as your puppy becomes naturally more inclined to explore his environment. Habituation refers to learning about all the safe things that make up the world, for example:

sights (bicycles, high-vis jackets)
scents (perfume, deodorant, cleaning supplies)
sounds (traffic noise, vacuum cleaner, microwave)
sensations (being brushed, picked up)
tastes (sticks, leaves, stones)

Careful exposure is necessary to prevent fears to develop to all the experiences that make up day-to-day life. Do not feel rushed to expose your puppy to all environments in a short period of time. Puppies continue to habituate to their environment throughout their entire life.

Successful socialisation and habituation protect your dog from developing behaviour problems. We like to compare raising a puppy through mindful socialisation to vaccinations that protect them from disease. It provides them with a "good behavioural health pass", if you will.

To succeed with your puppy's socialisation, ensure new experiences are short and of low intensity, and allow your puppy plenty of restful sleep to process these experiences. Whether you are aiming to socialise your puppy to people or dogs, or habituate them to the vast world, the focus should always be on good quality exposure, rather than quantity.

Clare at Well Connected Canine
Jenny at Jennifer Bartlett Training and Behaviour
Jas at Training with Jas
Natalie at Quality Canines
Gemma at Natures Companion

What are Structured Socialisation Sessions?

In our Structured Socialisation Sessions, we aim to improve your puppy's behavioural health with targeted socialisation and habituation exercises.

This may include confidence-building enrichment, supervised play between well-matched puppies or simple training exercises. Play is not guaranteed unless there are suitable play partners for your puppy.

Our sessions are not your typical "free-for-all" puppy play parties, because these rarely provide the right environment for healthy social development for most puppies and can do more harm than good. During uncontrolled play, some puppies may learn to be inappropriately excited and rowdy, and more sensitive pups may get frightened and learn that other dogs are scary.

The goal is always to provide you with the skills to raise a behaviourally healthy puppy to grow into a happy, socially skilled, well-balanced adult dog.

Some of our socialisation topics are:

life skills training
sensory stimulation
canine needs
enrichment
canine body language
appropriate on-leash greetings

focus, calmness and settling around dogs and other distractions
body handling and grooming tolerance
household objects skills (hoovers/mops etc)
noise habituation (getting used to scary sounds)
... and many more!

Why are we offering socialisation sessions to dogs older than 14 weeks?

It is practically impossible to expose a puppy to the vast world in the 4 weeks between adoption and the end of the socialisation window.

It is also foolish to assume that a 14-week-old puppy is already a well-rounded dog with a complete set of social skills, full understanding of the world and bomb-proof confidence!

The good news is that young dogs continue to learn about the world through the first few years of their lives. While we sadly cannot reverse time to help you through those first weeks of the socialisation period, there is plenty we can do to help you catch-up on missed socialisation experiences and support your young dog to learn the skills they need for adult life.

Before booking, please contact us to ensure the sessions are suitable for your pup:

The Structured Socialisation Sessions are a collaboration project between Leads in Action Dog Training and Ingenious Dogs that aims to provide affordable science-based dog training to our communities.
Together we make up Genius in Action. It's cheesy, and we own it!