Behavior, Development & Enrichment

New owners ask how far they can walk the puppy. The more useful question is how much of its activity the puppy chooses for itself, while the skeleton is still growing.

Brief, positive separations and a few short car journeys before collection day change the first nights in a new home. The crate as a resting place rather than a container.

House-training is usually described as something new owners do in their first two weeks, which is the wrong end of it. By eight weeks a puppy already has a habit, and you gave it.

A puppy does not start learning when it starts classes at four months. The only question for a breeder is whether the first weeks were arranged on purpose.

A puppy raised where nothing is ever slightly difficult goes home with no experience of persisting. Everything here turns on the difference between a problem it can solve and one it cannot.

The aim is not a puppy that never startles — startling is a functioning nervous system — but a puppy that startles, checks and goes back to what it was doing.

Every dog you breed will spend its life having its feet held and its mouth opened by people it has just met. The weeks in your house are when that becomes unremarkable or frightening.

Socialization is the one part of a puppy’s development that cannot be rescheduled. What it is, what it is not, and why quality decides the outcome rather than volume.

Socialization has a deadline and worming does not, because a puppy’s willingness to accept novelty rises, peaks and declines on a schedule you can plan around but cannot postpone.

A newborn puppy cannot see, hear or walk, which makes the first two weeks look like maintenance. The nervous system doing the learning is already running.

Almost everything a puppy learns most easily about people, surfaces, sounds and other dogs is learned inside a window that is already closing when it leaves you. This area is about using the half you hold.