Socialization - Part 1: What does it really mean?

The word socialization tends to come up a lot in the dog world. New puppy owners often hear from their veterinarian, breeder or rescue organization how important it is to socialize their new dog or puppy as much as possible. But what does that really mean?

Let’s begin by looking at the definition of the word. The portion of the definition of socialization that pertains to animal socialization, as given by the Merriam-Webster Dictionary, is as follows:

“: exposure of a young domestic animal (such as a kitten or puppy) to a variety of people, animals, and situations to minimize fear and aggression and promote friendliness”.

This is a fair general definition of the word. More specifically though, our job as dog-owners in regards to socialization, is not only to expose our dogs to “people, animals, and situations”, but to teach them what the proper response is to those new encounters. Our job is to guide them into offering the appropriate behaviors in each different situation.

When your puppy meets a new person, do you have him sit politely for attention or allow him to jump all over his new best friend with the excited hands and high-pitched voice? When your dog over-reacts to meeting a new, calm dog, how do you respond? Do you give a calm correction, or frantically remove her from the situation out of fear that she is reactive or aggressive and never attempt it again? When your dog is scared of something new, do you allow them to explore the scary thing and help work them through their fear, or do you coddle them, tell them it’s okay and avoid exposing them to the scary thing from that point forward? Hopefully, in all of those scenarios you are responding with the prior, not the later option. If not, your are setting your dog up to fail.

Look, at some point all of us have been scared of something. Whether it was riding a bike for the first time, speaking in front of a group of people, or trying something new, we have all had to overcome fears and learn the appropriate way to respond to new experiences and situations. Your dog is no different. They don’t know that it is not polite behavior to jump for attention, or that the calm dog is not a threat, or that the drainage grate in the road isn’t going to swallow you both up when you walk over it… unless you TEACH them.

If you have a puppy, this socialization thing should be pretty straight forward because you generally have a clean slate to build upon and shape. With an older dog or a rescue, this may be a bit more challenging, requiring a lot of time, effort and patience on your part, and sometimes the help of a good trainer to guide you in the right direction. Either way, your job is to make all of these experiences positive ones and to help your dog or puppy work through the ones that might be uncomfortable.

From the examples given above, you can see that there are many different aspects of socialization. Now that you have a better idea of what the word means, we can delve into some of the more specific parts - people, dogs and places. Since this is such a broad topic, I am going to make this a multi-part blog so that we have the opportunity to explore and discuss these different aspects more in depth.

Stay tuned for Part 2.

~ Heather Pope