The Importance of An Adolescent Dog’s Socialization and Papillon Training
December 23rd, 2009
A squirrel dog’s adolescence years is a rocky period of learning—or worse, unlearning—that can significantly affect the dog’s adult years. Not heeding your pap’s need for education can lead to an ill-mannered, fearful and hyperactive dog. Check out the following papillon training notes how to take good care of your dog’s socialization needs.
Socialization often turns foggy and seem to require a new level of effort during a dog’s adolescent period, sometimes with the underlying reason of the timing of the dog’s maturing. By this time, puppy classes are a thing of the past, and owners want the dog to get used to daily procedures especially when the dog reaches around six months old. The dog’s waking hours are also devoted to meeting what amount to the same set of people, dogs and pets. This may eventually lead to the dog limiting itself to an inner circle of people with which to spend time with.
If your dog is not helped to disrupt this cycle in a healthy way, the dog’s ability to socialize might just rust away, which is like wasting all the opportunities to interact with people and animals in the neighborhood. Neglecting socialization will result in three months to a dog that has defensive and suspicious tendencies, and has low self esteem. The friendly and open temper has given way to wariness of house guests, with barks, snaps and lunges added now and then.
The socialization of your papillon with other dogs also deserve more discussion. The situation also gets somewhat awry in the case of very small and very large dogs. The reason behind all this is that teaching a dog to get along with every other dog is more complex compared to what most think. First of all, the cousins of our dogs in the wild — wolves, coyotes, jackals — are not used to acting friendly with strangers, but that’s exactly what we expect of Canis familiaris. Second, it may never happen anymore that a dog will be perfectly sociable with every dog. We the masters of dogs also need to accept that our pets also have some people or dogs that they do not particularly like. Third, it is part of the system of dogs to squabble, and more so with the males. If there is a male dog that has never been involved in a physical confrontation, then this dog is among the exception, not the rule. Among adolescent dogs, altercations sometime seem to take on an all too real angle.
A dog midway between puppyhood and adulthood is in a socialization dilemma, as we have said, but in the following case owners are once more the responsible role players. Small dogs may get affected by the fear for their safety of their owners, so their meeting big dogs is curtailed. In the same way, owners of large dogs are similarly concerned that their working breeds may hurt significantly smaller playmates. To end, this indeed is the critical vicious cycle that papillon training need to work on promptly: how to deal with dogs that get less socialization due to (sometimes legitimate) safety concerns, in order to cut down on future behavior issues that arise from even lesser socialization?
If you enjoyed this post, make sure you subscribe to my RSS feed!Related posts:
 |  |