MOTHER KNOWS BEST - Learning from the Pros

Binky and her pups

My first instructors in the different stages of puppyhood were all professionals—professional canine mothers, that is. I’m proud to say that I learned about raising puppies from the very best—the female working dogs on my grandfather’s farm in Mexico. Mother Nature is all about balance, and it is always to nature that I turn whenever I want to explain about the correct way to bring up puppies. As human beings, we often look at the animal kingdom with a superior eye—after all, the Bible tells us we have dominion over the animals, right? Modern science is even more arrogant about our relationship to animals. The truth is, while human beings can create, design, and build all manner of clever systems, innovations, and shortcuts to try to improve on nature, there is one thing we can never better, and that is a natural animal mother raising her offspring in the wild. This is one case where the original blueprint is still—and always will be—the best. When my clients are having a hard time understanding what leadership truly means to a dog, I refer them back to the experts by asking them to observe the way a mother dog births, rears, and nurtures her young to be good, obedient followers and pack members. In many ways, everything we need to know about raising puppies is right there in front of us, in the miracle of a good mother dog and her offspring.

I can vividly recall my childhood wonder at the everyday phenomena of animal birth, life, and death constantly unfolding before my eyes when I lived on my grandfather’s farm. I could not get enough of observing the intricate rituals by which the mothers raised the pups. The best mothers made it look so effortless. It was as if they were following a program. Imagine a computer program where you input an application, and then the computer shows you “Click to the left and you will find this. Click to the right and you will find that. Click underneath and you will find this…” over and over again, and it’s perfect, every time. The dogs on the farm were running an amazing program; it had a natural flow, and it was very precise. It was gentle but had a feeling of surety and assertiveness behind it. These female dogs that I grew up with usually had their own mothers as role models, but even an inexperienced bitch can be an outstanding mother. That’s because this flawless program for raising puppies lies deep within their DNA.

One such first-time mother who came through with flying colors was Angel’s own mother, a miniature schnauzer named Binky who was just over a year and a half old when she was first bred. Angel’s breeder, Brooke Walker, shared with me some details of Angel’s birth, a tale that illustrates not only the meticulous procedures of a conscientious breeder but also the innate wisdom and calm-assertive energy of an exemplary canine mother.

BINKY’S FIRST LITTER

“The first thing I’ll do when I want to breed a girl is I’ll go to my vet to do a full cytology on her, to make sure there isn’t any blockage to her being able to deliver on her own,” Brooke recounts. “You have to think ahead. So then I have them draw a sample of her blood and test the progesterone levels, so that I know when she’s ready to be bred.” After performing this canine form of the “rhythm method,” Brooke is able to predict accurately when the puppies will arrive. Binky was bred on August 22, 2008. That meant that fifty-eight or sixty-three days later, the puppies are mature enough to be born. Using this formula, Brooke knew that the first day Binky could whelp would be October 18 of that same year … the day that would become Angel’s birthday!

“When a bitch has been pregnant for a month, I go down to my vet, and I have him do an ultrasound. So we see how many puppies there are. The uterus of a dog is very different from a woman’s,” Brooke explains. “It’s like a horn. There are two areas where the whelps, or embryos, grow. And nature just takes care of that so well. There are usually two in one horn and two in the other horn, or three and three, or three and two. With Binky what we had was two in the left horn, two in the right horn, and right in the center was a twin.”

Brooke was very excited by the idea of an identical twin puppy, which was something she as a breeder had not experienced before, but her vet seemed much more reserved about the situation. She would soon learn the very grave reason for his reticence.

As the weeks passed, Brooke prepared her bedroom to be the whelping area.

“I set up the whelping pen in my bedroom, because for the first forty-eight hours I don’t leave the room.” Of course, in nature, a wild canine doesn’t want or need the assistance of a human, or even another pack member, when giving birth—in fact, a pregnant female will wander away from the pack to make a nest, and all the other dogs will respect her signals and give her a lot of space when she is going through the birthing process. A pregnant female in a pack of dogs commands tremendous respect and status. But as a cautious breeder, Brooke wants to be available at all times in case there is an emergency with the puppies or the mother—especially a first-timer such as Binky. “I put the expectant bitch into her whelping pen a couple of days before so that she can feel comfortable in it.” Since bitches select their own nesting areas in the wild, it’s not always a done deal when the human is the one to decide where the birth will take place. This was true of Binky. “She jumped right back out at first. I had to very kindly encourage her, putting her toys and blankets in there, a tempting treat, praising her for spending time in there.” After the first day, Binky felt good enough to settle into her pen, which was a box 3½ by 3½ feet with raised walls, to keep out drafts; a raised area; newspapers, blankets, and a heating pad on the floor; and a railing around the side known as a “pig’s rail,” to prevent any situation where a puppy might get crushed if it happens to crawl behind the mother. Everything was in place for the big day.

Novice or not, Binky rose above and beyond her call of duty. “That’s what is so beautiful about nature. She just instantly knew what to do. Sure, she did cry a little when her vulva was starting to enlarge, and when she was having her first contractions. The first time out, all of those areas are enlarging and the first delivery can be a little bit painful.” But Binky soldiered on. Angel’s sister, Ms. Pink, was the first of the puppies to make an appearance. “I recorded the time that she went into labor and I recorded the time that the puppies were born. I also had a scale waiting nearby. So Binky had her first puppy at noon, and it was a female. She was 5 and ⅜ ounces. I also try to find if there’s a significant something or other about their markings so that you can tell them apart. So you can make sure when you’re weighing every day that you’re seeing a weight increase in the first three days.”

The moment her first puppy was born, Binky proved she was going to be a canine supermom. She appeared both fascinated and thrilled by her new infant, immediately licking her clean and biting off the umbilical cord as if she had done it a thousand times before. Brooke always stands by to help make sure the puppy gets to the nipple and to make sure the placenta comes out. In nature, the mother will usually eat this nutrient-rich afterbirth, but Brooke has discovered that too much of a good thing can cause problems with her schnauzer moms. “I always allow my bitch to have one at least because they’re really nutritional. But it gives them really bad diarrhea. The first litter I had, I didn’t know left from right. I only knew what my books had taught me. I let her eat all five of her afterbirths and, oh my goodness … the mess…”

Once Binky’s first daughter started nursing, the stimulation caused Binky’s body to prepare again for the next birth. Binky’s second puppy, another female, came next, at 12:30 p.m. Then there was a long, long wait. Brooke wasn’t worried at first—unlike dogs that bear big litters, miniature schnauzers can take as much as four hours to deliver completely—but when 4:00 p.m. rolled around and there were no more puppies in sight, she knew something was wrong. “Someone who didn’t take the time or didn’t have the knowledge could have thought the whole thing was over, that she was just resting. But I knew that she was definitely straining. She was having contractions and nothing was coming. She was getting to the point where I felt like she was getting too tired to get the job done.”

Brooke called in her reproductive vet, to give Binky a shot of Pitocin to induce contractions, and a very big puppy began to crown. Now Brooke understood why her vet had been concerned about the twin they had spotted in the ultrasound. “I’ve since done a lot of research on it, and it’s very rare that a situation like that turns out happily. It’s almost always an abnormality.” Binky’s twin was hydrocephalic, which means it had an abnormally large head. “We needed to massage her and help her pull it down. And then, the minute it was out, she started pushing out number four, at 4:30, and number five at 5:00.” That number five was my man, Angel, the last of the siblings to enter the world.

Binky’s first litter-whelping chart

Binky’s hydrocephalic puppy illustrates a fact that I believe humans very much need to understand—motherhood, for a dog, is not an emotional experience, it is an instinctual experience. Her hydrocephalic puppy was born dead, and Binky totally ignored it. She made no attempt to revive it or to clean it. Her only concern was delivering her living puppies and making sure they were safe and healthy. She just knew right away that it was imperative to move on to her viable pups. “It was like, phew, that’s over, now let’s get on with what we’re getting on with,” Brooke observed. “Of course, as a human watching, if she had grieved, I would’ve gone to pieces. Which wouldn’t have helped anyone.”

As humans we are very attached to the process of mourning, even if that means grieving a being we haven’t met yet. I had such a misfortune in my own human family, a younger brother who was born dead, and the heartbreak of that experience still enshrouds my entire family like a thick fog. My mother still feels great sadness and guilt about this tragedy that occurred more than thirty years ago. For dogs it’s all about the greater good, the survival of the whole litter, and, in the bigger picture, the survival of the pack. A mother with a dead or sick puppy may make an attempt to revive it, but she will never linger to mourn. Her immediate concern is for her puppies that are living. In this way, a bitch will never nurture weakness in her offspring. From the moment they are born, the canine mother gently but firmly lets her new offspring know that they must follow her rules if they want to survive. Mother dogs do not “coddle” their young. In fact, if one of the pups in her pack has trouble finding a place to feed, she will help him only up to a point. If he can’t keep up with the rest of the litter, she may even let him die. When it comes to raising puppies, we humans have to remember that this calm-assertive pragmatism is the natural state of mind of their very first pack leader—their mother. We never want to lose the empathy and tenderness within our hearts that make us want to care for puppies in the first place, but we do need to acknowledge the example of the mother dog herself, and keep in mind that puppies naturally respond to this matter-of-fact way of being in their world. Their feelings will not be hurt when you set the kind of firm rules their mother will set. In fact, they are just waiting for those rules, so they can be assured of secure, balanced futures.

EXPERIENCING A DOG’S WORLD FROM DAY ONE

On October 18, 2008, Angel entered his new world with his eyes and ears closed but his nose wide open, already familiar with the first and most important scent, the scent of his mother. During the two-week neonatal period, Angel and his siblings were mostly reactive. Their whole purpose in life was to feed and to sleep. However, even at this phase, there was already a hierarchy forming among the littermates. Brooke describes how Angel’s more dominant brother, Mr. Blue, was always the first to feed, the first to push the others out of the way. This is what I mean when I say that a dog’s basic energy level is inborn. This doesn’t mean that Angel’s big brother will grow up to be a hard-to-control dog. Because of his excellent genes and the socialization exercises that Brooke puts all her puppies through before they are adopted, with the right calm-assertive owner, Mr. Blue will most assuredly mature to be a first-rate, obedient pet. But his inborn energy level does mean that Mr. Blue’s natural tendency in new situations will be to take charge if there isn’t another leader around to give direction. Angel, on the other hand, has an inborn tendency to sit back and see what happens before he steps in to fill a leadership gap. That is the classic response of a medium-energy dog.

The First Two Weeks: The Neonatal Period

Puppies mature much faster than humans. The first two weeks of life for a puppy could be compared with an entire human infancy. But even at this helpless stage, the puppies are showing that they will fight to stay alive. Puppies may seem so tiny and helpless in this first phase of life, some uninformed humans will be reticent to handle them at all or to expose them to any undue stress during this time. The truth is, even in their newborn state, puppies’ brains are developing quickly and beginning to lay out the blueprint of how they will respond to and experience the world around them. Informed breeders like Brooke know that a carefully controlled program of handling at this stage is vital. It prepares puppies to be better problem solvers and to more effectively handle stressors, challenges, and new experiences later in life:

I want my puppies handled, so that having humans around them is a part of what they have always known. One of the first things I do is, I blow very gently on the puppies’ faces. I want them to associate my scent with nurturing, just like they associate their mother’s scent with nurturing. At one week of age, they get their toenails clipped, and again every week after that. I also let them experience the gentle blowing of a hair dryer from week one. Even though they can’t see or hear it yet, I want them familiar with its scent and the feeling of the warm air on them. Many of my puppies become show dogs, and I want grooming to be a part of their life routine right from the beginning, so it is never a foreign or upsetting event for them.

Like most responsible breeders, during the first two weeks, Brooke has a routine in place for handling her puppies a few times a day, for three to five minutes at a time, in order to accelerate their physical and psychological development.

When the puppies are three days old, Brooke brings in her vet to do a series of physical procedures. The first is tail docking, less common in other areas of the world but still standard procedure for show-quality miniature schnauzers in the United States. Brooke explains that this procedure—along with its frequent partner, ear cropping—didn’t originate for aesthetic reasons. These practices actually began as necessary operations for the survival of these working terriers when they were first “designed” 110 years ago.2 “Miniature schnauzers were bred to rid barns in Germany of hordes and hordes of rats—not just one or two rats like we see in houses today, huge armies of them. If rats are together, they will launch a mass attack on a dog. If a dog has a long ear or a long tail, those places are vulnerable to attack. So originally, the ears and tail were taken care of strictly for practical reasons.”

During the same session, Brooke has the vet remove the puppies’ dewclaws. A dewclaw is something like a human thumb in its placement, but it grows a bit higher up on the paw than the rest of the toenails on that paw and never comes in contact with the ground. It’s a vestigial structure that is now nonfunctional or has some function only in some breeds—the sheep-herding Great Pyrenees, for instance, have double dewclaws on their back paws that were thought helpful for stability when herding sheep on rocky mountaintops. The majority of dogs have dewclaws only on their front paws. Dewclaws can hang loose, get caught, or cause minor or, rarely, serious irritations to the foot of a dog, particularly a terrier that is bred to dig. “Dewclaws on schnauzers are nothing but problems. It’s always the nail that they catch. So taking them out right away is something that we just do as part of the course,” says Brooke.

However, vets say that many dogs do just fine without having their dewclaws removed. When we think about removing something like a dewclaw on a puppy, we have to put it in the context of the fact that we have genetically engineered dogs away from their original design. Some features of the original design no longer function within the body of the new breed. Procedures like removing a dewclaw are the direct consequence of our having rearranged Mother Nature in the first place.

The most important thing to understand about your puppy’s first two weeks on the planet is that he is experiencing the world completely differently from the way a human baby would experience it. He knows three things—scent, touch, and energy. His mother is a scent, a warm body that provides comfort and food, but she is also a source of calm-assertive energy. She is gentle but definitely firm and assertive when she pushes a puppy away if she doesn’t want to nurse, or picks him up and moves him to where she wants him to be, or turns him over to clean him and stimulate his digestive system. She does not treat her litter as if they were breakable, and she does not “feel bad” if she needs to tell them in the language of touch and energy, “No, you are nursing a little too hard right now, back off.” Your puppy’s first experiences in life were filled with very clear rules, boundaries, and limitations.

The Transitional Period: Weeks Two to Three

Between twelve and fourteen days, the puppies enter what is known as the transitional period, which lasts another week or so. Compared to human babies, their transition from infant to toddler occurs at lightning speed. The puppies will start standing on their wobbly little legs, jostling for position, and even begin to play dominance games with their siblings. They are more deliberate in their activities. And the bitch becomes noticeably firmer in her discipline and corrections. There is absolutely no time in the puppy’s early development that his mother is not modeling leadership and enforcing distinct rules, boundaries, and limitations.

This is also the phase that begins and ends with the puppy’s acquiring his final two senses. According to Brooke’s chart, Angel was born on October 18 and first opened his eyes on November 1. The landmark end of this stage in the puppy’s life occurs when he opens his ears—for Angel, that day was November 8, twenty-one days after his birth. A conscientious breeder will continue handling the puppies the way she did during the neonatal phase, and will also begin exposing them to different sights and sounds. For Brooke, this is the time when she allows outsiders—including future or prospective owners—to come to see the dogs. “I have ironclad rules about when people come down to visit the puppies. No shoes, and they always have to sanitize their hands. But I want my puppies handled. I want them to hear other human voices. And I want them to hear different sounds, like squeaky toys and the hair dryer. The vacuum is one that I insist on, because the vacuum is so terrifying to most dogs.” Having taken on many Dog Whisperer cases where dogs were terrified of vacuum cleaners and hair dryers, I can personally appreciate the hard work breeders like Brooke put into this early desensitization.

Like Brooke, Diana Foster can’t emphasize enough the importance of exposing puppies at this early stage to some of the different environmental sights, sounds, and smells they will be encountering once they’re out there in the “real world”:

Once the ears are open and they can hear a little bit, we do a lot of handling, picking them up, touching them, but we also start playing sound tapes. We do that at three weeks. We have realistic tapes of the sounds of firecrackers, vacuum cleaners, kids screaming, cars honking, doors slamming—everything you can think of from regular family life—because at that age, there’s no fear in the puppies yet. They have the comfort of their mother. We have the nice heat lamp on. They’re warm. They’re fed. They don’t shake. They don’t jump, and so what happens is, all these sounds get into their subconscious. This prevents the worst things that could happen down the line, like a German shepherd that gets freaked out when a kid yells. When that happens, the dog snaps at somebody. He ends up at the pound or being put to sleep, and it’s not even the dog’s fault.

By the arrival of their three-week milestone, Angel and his siblings were all walking around clumsily and responding to the sound of Brooke’s voice. They were about to enter what is probably the most significant time in a puppy’s early development, the socialization period.

Socialization: Weeks Three to Fourteen

These next six to nine weeks are among the most crucial in your puppy’s life, a time during which he will learn the lessons of how to be a dog among dogs, from his mother, littermates, and any other adult dog with which he is living. From weeks three to six,3 puppies still interact primarily with their siblings and their mother. They will venture a few feet away from the mother or their “den” but quickly come running back. This first phase of the socialization period is the time of “becoming aware”—of their own bodies, their surroundings, their littermates, and the comfort of their mother.

The second phase of the puppy’s socialization, starting at about five weeks, is where the power of the pack comes in. His primary pack at this point consists of his mother and his littermates. Through trial, error, and an abundance of spirited playfulness, he learns from his littermates how to navigate through a social world. They teach him how hard he can bite or pounce, how to dominate, how to submit, and other basic skills of communicating with others of his kind. If your puppy were a canid being raised in the wild, the rest of the adult members of his pack would all jump in at this point and participate in making sure he grew up to be a good canine citizen. Canid societies—whether they be wolf, African hunting dog, or Canis familiaris—are incredibly orderly worlds in which the rules of the pack are established for every member, right from the beginning, with no exceptions. The whole pack adapts when puppies arrive, and they rearrange their lives to participate in the rearing. Even in the Dog Psychology Center, certain dogs in my ever-changing pack take it on themselves to become “nannies” or “schoolmasters” to any new pups or adolescents who happened to join our merry band.

When her pups are about six to seven weeks of age, a mother dog begins to be a little less possessive of them and lets other members of the pack help lessen her workload. Among packs of wild canines, the rearing of the young is truly a family affair. Sometimes adults other than the mother even share the job of feeding the maturing pups, returning from hunts and regurgitating food for them. More important, the whole pack always shares in the education of the pups, including disciplining them. The adult dogs work together to form what amounts to an amazing, comprehensive, and cooperative “public school system,” to build a healthy, productive new generation. If another adult member of the pack feels the pups are getting a little too boisterous in their play, she may use physical touch—a nudge, or even a firm but nonaggressive bite—to communicate. If an adult or adolescent senses a pup doesn’t understand the manners of the dinner table, she may emit a low growl to warn the pups away from her food. Every dog recognizes that having obedient, well-adjusted, socially literate puppies is necessary for the survival of the entire pack.

However, domestic dogs don’t live only with dogs; they live with and must rely on us humans. In a way, your puppy needs to grow up “bilingual”—speaking the languages of both dog and human—before he can go out into the world. Tens, maybe hundreds of thousands, of years of evolving with us side by side have given our dogs an inborn proficiency in understanding our energy and body language, a proficiency that is just as impressive as that of our closest evolutionary cousins, the other primates. Nevertheless, being domesticated doesn’t bring automatic understanding. “Human” is still very much a second language to puppies. To become good pets, puppies need positive interactions with humans on a daily basis during the period between five weeks and nine weeks. They also need to be exposed to the different kinds of stimuli that await them out in the modernized world. That’s why a diligent breeder participates as actively as the canine mother during the socialization period of her puppies’ lives, to expose each puppy to different aspects of human culture and to introduce him to the oddities of the half dog-half human society into which he’s been born.

Diana Foster describes the routine she and her husband, Doug, go through with every German shepherd litter that they raise.

At about five weeks of age, we start bringing the puppies indoors one at a time, so we can get them used to being in the company of humans without their littermates. They’re so dependent on being with each other and being with the mother, when we first bring them in and put them down, they’ll start whining. So we’ll hold them for a little bit, then we put them back with the mother. It’s good to give them a little bit of stress so they learn how to handle it, but a few minutes a day is plenty. We do it in short increments, so the dog gets used to being away from the whelping box, and around people.

The Fosters also make sure their shepherd puppies continue being exposed to a series of new, real-life stimuli and stressors during this time:

We try to have them situated on the property where there’s the most commotion. We have five acres, but we never put them in the back pen or up on the hill where they can’t see everything that’s going on. Instead, we have a huge pen in the front, and that’s where we have a lot of people who pull up to come look at our dogs. The kids get out of the car screaming. There are other dogs barking. There’s music. There are my kennel workers. There’s the trash truck. Since we can’t take them out in public when they’re that young, we bring the environment to them, so when they hear a loud sound, or something scares them, they may go screaming to the back of the pen. I tell my kennel workers, “Do nothing. Don’t go over to them. Don’t talk to them. Don’t pick them up. Allow them to work it out for themselves.” And little by little, they start coming toward whatever made the noise and getting a little braver, and then they realize the big bad thing’s not going to hurt them, and then they’re fine. The less you do, the better. If I were to write a book about raising puppies at this age, I might even call it something like Do Nothing!

Dogs also love routine, which is important for their development, both at this early stage and throughout their lives. Brooke Walker keeps a strict regime around her house when socializing her miniature schnauzer pups.

As soon as the grass dries if there’s morning dew, I’ll take them out in the yard. They all potty instantly. They get their breakfast. They stay out, they play. They go back for their nap. They come out. They get their lunch, they potty, they play. They go back in. It’s such a routine. I feed three times a day once the mother has stopped feeding. Normally, mothers feed for four weeks. Binky was an exceptionally involved mother; she fed and cleaned those babies straight through five weeks.

Brooke told me that I was the only person she ever let adopt one of her puppies before ten weeks. Usually, she likes to have the house-breaking and crate-training process completed by the time her puppies leave her home.

Housebreaking is easy. They come outside in the mornings and I praise them when they pee and poo outside. They come out, I praise. They go potty, I praise. Lots and lots of praise. My owners are always calling me to say that they are amazed their puppy came to them already housebroken. I also always have older dogs around, and they are just wonderful teachers; my puppies are so much wiser about the world by eight to ten weeks old because of the older dogs’ being such great examples for them to follow.

Diana Foster and Brooke Walker both crate-train during the socialization period, starting at about six weeks, after the puppies are weaned. That’s a very smart thing to do because, as we’ll see in PUPPY COMES HOME - Easing the Transition from Litter to Family, the most difficult, most unnatural thing you’ll ever need to teach your dog is the skill of being alone without you or without his pack. By training a puppy to be alone for short periods of time in his crate while he’s still in the phase when the most basic blueprints of living are being etched into his brain, he learns that “alone time” is a part of his pack’s behavior—even though it is absolutely, totally foreign to a dog’s DNA.

“As they get a little older—more like seven or eight weeks—what I like to do is mix it up,” Diana explains.

Sometimes I’ll have them together as a litter. They’ll run around and play and sleep together, and then I like to separate them all. I’ll put each puppy in a little crate by himself, and I’ll put each one in a pen by himself. I start to get them used to that because I know once they go to a home, they’re not going to have each other to keep them company. We start with very short increments, like maybe half an hour. I’ll put them in the crates, and they’re all screaming. After ten or fifteen minutes, they all just go to sleep.

“There’s not a dog that leaves my house that doesn’t love a crate,” Brooke boasts. “I throw a treat into the back of the crate and say, ‘Do you want a cookie? Okay, it’s in your crate.’ So the crate becomes ‘Oh wow, this is my favorite spot anyhow, ‘cause I get a cookie when I go in there.’ I let them take their naps in there, then I let them out. I start with short periods of time, gradually getting longer. And so crate training is the easiest thing in the world to do.”

Exploring a Brave New World

During the “behavioral refinement” phase, the puppies become bolder and strike out on their own into new areas. They want to investigate and explore absolutely everything. This is the time when serious breeders start exposing the puppies to as many new stimuli as possible. Brooke takes behavioral-enrichment play seriously—she wants to raise curious, intelligent, adaptable schnauzers, so she provides them with a huge selection of interesting toys and games to choose from.

My backyard is like Disneyland. I just love introducing them to this yard. They play on the patio, they play in the dirt; when they get courageous enough, they’ll explore the high grass I have growing in my garden, or they’ll explore inside my hedges. I teach them a lot of skills in their exercise area. Since they are terriers, they love to go into holes, so I provide carpeted cat tunnels for them to climb inside and run through. They love that, and when they get big enough, they climb to the top of them. I provide lots of different toys: pull toys so that they can pull against one another, toys with sounds or bells in them, different types of balls for them to chase, different things to stimulate them. I cycle between different toy combinations every single day.

Says Diana Foster of her German shepherd pups,

At this point, they don’t need the mother for survival anymore, but we like to keep them with her as long as possible, because of the natural way she disciplines them. For instance, she tells them not to touch her bone or stops them if they start getting too rough with her. Her correction is quick. The puppy may yelp and run away with his tail tucked. And what does the average person do? Pick them up. “Oh, you poor thing. Come here!” Everyone wants to rescue them and feel sorry for them when anything new happens. What they’re doing is reinforcing the fact that something bad just happened. But in their world, what happened wasn’t bad! It was just a learning experience. Their real mother couldn’t care less. She allows the puppy to work out the situation on his own. That’s how he grows, that’s how he learns. He may run away whimpering, but after just a couple of seconds, he’s back playing with his friends. It’s not a big deal. It’s only a big deal to the humans. I’m like Cesar. I sit for hours and I just watch the dogs. And you can learn so much just by observing what they do, especially a really good mother.

Angel’s mom, Binky, was such a good mother that she remained involved with the disciplining of her pups right up until the day each one was adopted out. That’s an important part of the reason Angel was so alert and open to accepting rules and structure once he came to live with my family.

Early Socialization: The Cautious Phase (Eight or Nine Weeks)

At around eight or nine weeks of age, a puppy usually hits a phase where he goes from being outgoing and recklessly curious to becoming extremely cautious again. This is to be expected, and in nature it’s a stage that passes quickly. The best breeders take special care at this age not to overprotect their puppies but instead help them to develop real self-confidence on their own. “I make sure my puppies are safe and not being bullied or harmed in any way by the rest of the pack,” says Brooke. “But to rescue a puppy every time will only lead to a very fearful dog. I want to prepare all my puppies for being gone from me, their siblings, and their mother. At eight weeks, I take my puppies to Fashion Island here in Newport, California. There are many colors, noises, and smells that they haven’t experienced before. There is a special fountain that pops up water from the ground in irregular sequences. Although schnauzers are not supposed to be water dogs, I have yet to have a puppy that didn’t get into that fountain and enjoy trying to catch the bubbles!”

This cautious period can sometimes coincide with the time a breeder releases a puppy to his new home. New owners often interpret a puppy’s understandable reticence as something that must instantly be comforted. When they don’t permit him the honor of overcoming his own insecurities in his own way, they can actually undo some of the meticulous hard work that his natural mother and his breeder have put into his education up to this point. “I am currently trying to teach a friend this lesson,” Brooke confides. “Her dog falls apart the minute she is around and curls up and hides from other dogs. But when he is here on his own, he is playful, eats well, and walks properly on his leash. I use a firm voice for his commands and restrain myself from the high-pitched baby talk that I use when they are newborns. The long and short of it is, keep the puppy safe, but never rescue.” To prevent a puppy from developing fear or anxiety issues, owners shouldn’t interfere with the nature of the learning process, which includes feeling uncomfortable and also making mistakes. For puppies, this means we must let them investigate every new situation in the order of nose-eyes-ears, while allowing them to work through their own strategies for meeting new challenges… even frightening ones. We’ll discuss this more in PUPPY COMES HOME - Easing the Transition from Litter to Family.

Follow Mom’s Example

No reputable breeder will permit you to bring a puppy home with you before it is eight weeks of age, but I believe it’s important for people to understand all the different influences that go into making your dog who he is before the day he finally becomes yours. That’s because, if a puppy is raised by an instinctual, thorough mother like Angel’s mom, Binky, you will already have a great head start on your job. Your dog will already have instilled in him the concept of rules, boundaries, and limitations and will come to you armed with a freshman-level understanding of the most important canine social dos and don’ts. There’s no question that Binky gave her all in caring for Angel and his litter-mates, but she didn’t let her emotions get in the way of imposing the natural laws and structure every dog needs if he is going to grow up to be a good canine citizen and a model member of another pack. If your puppy has had a top-notch breeder like Brooke or Diana, he’ll have the added advantage of having passed a beginner course in the peculiarities of the human world, including the feeding ritual, the concept of indoor-outdoor borders, and even a little crate training or house-breaking thrown in for extra credit.

Your primary job as his new pack leader is to continue furthering his education, using the same natural common sense.

Cesar Millan