Puppy Evaluation, Matching & Selection

A puppy’s bite can change between eight weeks and seven months, and some faults are painful as well as cosmetic. How to check bites in the litter, what retained baby teeth and dental interlocks are, when early treatment matters, what…

Sooner or later a litter produces a puppy with something wrong, and how you handle that puppy is the most exposed test of your standards that breeding offers.

Matching is the point where your eight weeks of observation either does some good or goes to waste. It works best on the few dimensions that shape a dog’s daily life.

Assessing a prospective buyer is not a sales filter dressed up as diligence — it is the last piece of welfare work you do for that puppy, and the only part of its fourteen years you still control.

The hard part of keeping a puppy from your own litter is not knowing what to look for — it is making the decision in a way that survives eight weeks of living with them.

Keeping a puppy for your program is the one selection decision you cannot undo quietly. You make it with almost none of the information you will eventually need.

By eight weeks you have had more chances to notice something wrong with a puppy than anyone will have again. The question is whether you looked, had it confirmed, and wrote it down.

A working-bred litter is where breeders make their boldest claims and their least reliable predictions. What you can read at seven weeks is a tendency, not a future.

Some of what you see at eight weeks is the adult dog in miniature and some is a growth stage that will have reversed by Christmas. Telling them apart is most of the job.

Single sessions at seven or eight weeks predict adult behavior poorly; later, repeated assessment predicts distinctly better. An evidence summary.

A puppy aptitude test is a decent instrument aimed at the wrong question. What it is good for, how it gets misused, and where it belongs in an evaluation.

Puppies become easier to place, and far easier to be honest about, once you stop asking which label fits and start asking where each one sits on several separate dimensions.

The most trustworthy picture of a puppy comes from weeks of small dated notes rather than an hour of formal testing — and from knowing how your own expectations bend what you see.

Somewhere around five or six weeks the unit of work changes from the litter to the individual, because each puppy now has to be understood well enough to be placed.