Critical Socialization Window

So, let’s say you come proudly home with a beautiful eight-week-old puppy that has been taught
properly by its birth mother what it means to be a dog. The next eight or nine weeks of its life are
equally as important. That is the time during which you must finish the job its mother began by
socializing your pup to all the things that its mother didn’t have an opportunity to address. 
A lot of dog owners are eager to start training right away with their newly acquired companion. At our
training facility, we try to slow them down, however, and get them to focus instead on socialization,
especially if their pup’s age is within the critical nine-week window of seven weeks to 16 weeks. 
Any socialization you undertake after that time certainly will be helpful, but it is most valuable and
makes the greatest impression on the dog if it occurs between the seventh and 16th week of life.
This is a special time for your puppy that you cannot get back later. Training can take place at any
time, but the prime window for socialization comes and goes quickly, and you should take advantage
of every moment of it. The window starts to close rapidly after 16 weeks, and although your pup still
will be able to process new experiences, it will not do so as readily or as effectively as it did while the
window was open. One might compare it to the early childhood period in humans during which
children are able learn a language – or even multiple languages – almost by osmosis. Once that
window closes – about the age of 14 years in humans – a person still can learn a new language, but
never as easily and as naturally as during the open-window period. 
What are the things to which you want to introduce your dog during this impressionable period?
Everything you can think of. Introduce him to people, to other dogs, to farm animals and wildlife, to
noise and confusion.
Dogs that aren’t properly socialized to people, for example, often grow up to be biters. They may
accept members of their human family but at the same time react to people outside their own pack
with aggression that’s based in fear. To avert this, take him where people gather. Visit parks and
street fairs. See that he’s exposed to different kinds of people; women and men, children of various
ages, various ethnic groups. Children are a particularly important category, especially running,
shouting children. If you have none of your own, borrow some. Utilize nieces and nephews, or
introduce your pup to neighborhood kids or to the Little League team that plays on Saturdays in the
local park.
Your pup doesn’t actually have to meet all the people you expose him to. He just needs to know that
they are out there; that there are lots of people besides the handful who exist inside the security of
his own four walls, and that they don’t pose a threat to him.
If you enjoy riding in your car with your dog, start your pup early. Some dogs get to ride in a car only
once a year, to go to the veterinarian’s office for booster shots. That can be quite an ordeal for all
involved. 
Introduce your pup to loud noises. Take him down to the station to watch the Amtrak come through.
And if you’re rearing a future hunting dog, you’ll want to expose him to the sound of gunshots, of
course.
How should you conduct your dog’s exposure to new things? First, put a collar on your pup and
attach it to a six-foot leather leash. This puts your pup into a controlled environment, and puts you in
control of the environment. Then, think about your own behavior. This is absolutely critical, because
you will tell your animal how to feel about what he’s experiencing, whether it’s fireworks, gunfire or a
screaming ambulance. He will look to you for leadership, and will take his cue from your demeanor.
When you take him down to see the Amtrak train come by, for example, it’s important that your pup
see that its noise doesn’t alarm you or repel you. Don’t pick him up at a critical moment; your dog
has to experience life on his own four feet, whether he’s four pounds or 150 pounds. Your goal,
however, is to redirect his mind while he’s experiencing something new.
Since a dog can focus on only one task at a time, give his mind something to work on while he’s
undergoing the new experience. If your dog has had obedience training, this could be as simple as
holding him in a “sit” position. If he’s busy holding a “sit,” he doesn’t have the ability to focus as much
on a train that may make him feel insecure. If he’s not that far advanced, you can distract him by
attempting to show him how to sit, or by directing his attention to a treat in your pocket or to a toy.
The hours that you invest in proper socialization when your pup is in the open-window period will pay
off in many years of rewarding companionship with a stable, dependable, enjoyable canine
companion. Socialization is the single most important gift you can give him. It is the platform upon
which everything else in his life is built, and if the platform contains serious flaws, everything that you
layer on top of it will be insecure. In a worst-case situation, you may end up with an adult dog that
that will experience mild to severe limitations for the rest of its life.
For example, it may not do well with people it doesn’t know. It may not do well with children and may
not be trustworthy in their presence. It may turn out to be dog-aggressive. Considering that the
average dog lives for about 14 years, that’s a long time for you to have to coexist with such
problems.

If You Miss the Socialization Window

If you do miss the socialization window, all is not lost. You still may be able to moderate the impact
of a poor beginning, although it will take much more effort now on the part of both you and your dog.
Let me tell you about a recent experience of mine.
As chance would have it, I got a call from two people at nearly the same time, each with a similar
problem and each seeking a solution. Each was a woman in her 50s with no small children at home,
and each had a new dog. In one case the dog was a 22-week-old Doberman pinscher. In the other,
it was a 10-month-old border collie cross. The women, who had not met, discovered that whenever a
child approached, their young dogs fired up, barking, displaying a lack of confidence and sometimes
acting aggressively, although they appeared to have no problem with adults. Both women
considered the behavior unacceptable.
I put their dogs together in a class of two, and I, the dogs and their owners set out to address the
problem. We met one weekday at 2 in the afternoon in a shopping center parking lot across a busy
street from an elementary school. I knew that the school let out at 2:10. 
When that moment came, the women and their dogs and I were on the sidewalk across the street
from the school, each dog wearing its training collar with a six-foot leather leash attached. The
school bell rang, and kids poured out of the building like bees out of a damaged hive, shouting and
laughing, waving pieces of art work, clambering aboard school buses and running to meet parents in
the school parking lot. Our dogs immediately hit their alarm buttons, but we kept them on our side of
the street. We walked them calmly up and down the sidewalk across from the school, and worked
with them on heeling, sitting and staying.
For the next 30 minutes, kids came out of the building in waves. Little by little, our dogs returned to a
more normal state of mind as they began to realize that they weren’t about to be attacked. It was a
great half an hour of exposure to little people, none of which we introduced to the dogs, because the
dogs were not ready for that yet. They simply needed to see that there are a lot of children on the
planet and that the kids pose no threat.
By the end of the half an hour we were able to cross the street and walk up and down a little on the
sidewalk closer to the school. A few children still were running up and down outside the school, but
by this time the dogs had had enough exposure from across the street that their comfort level had
grown a bit.
I noticed that the Doberman, at 22 weeks old, was doing much better at adapting to this than was
the 10-month-old border collie cross. Since the Dobie was significantly closer in age to the 7-to-16-
week window of greatest opportunity, this was to be expected.
We ended our 30-minute lesson feeling we’d had a great first day, with a lot of success, although we
still had a long way to go. We were optimistic now that these two canines might at least learn to
tolerate kids. We knew, however, that because of their ages, these two dogs probably never will take
to children the way they might have if they had been socialized to them naturally during the open-
window period.