is at about four weeks of age. Up until then, everything that it needs and wants has been supplied by its mother. Warmth, food in the form of milk, protection, even going to the toilet is prompted by mum – who licks the puppies’ bellies to stimulate them to urinate and defecate. Then, gradually, the puppies begin to grow teeth. These are small and sharp and now when they latch on to their mother to feed, they hurt her! This produces an important reaction – mum starts to say no. For the first time in their lives, the puppies are denied something they want. Every time they see her, they clamour to feed, but while she will still allow some feeding, on other occasions she will turn around and walk away from them. Soon, she will also walk off during feeding, leaving puppies to drop off her teats unceremoniously as she goes. As time goes by and the puppies start to develop more muscular co-ordination and the ability to move more quickly and determinedly, mum may have to step up her rejection techniques. She might fix them with a direct stare followed by a deep growl or even a snap or nose-butt if the hungry pups don’t back away. In this way, the puppy learns what hard stares mean. Here we should also explode the myth that mother dogs shake puppies by the back of the neck to discipline them. Picking up and shaking only has one purpose in the canine world: it’s a killing mechanism (and one that nearly every dog owner is familiar with, as dogs play at ‘killing’ their toys as part of an enjoyable game). It’s clearly not a maternal gesture.
Over time, puppies learn to control their own impulses to rush at their mother and mob her in an attempt to get a feed. In a wild situation, the mother and other adults would bring solid food to the pups via regurgitation, thus successfully redirecting their attention from teats to mouth. For this reason pups still want to lick at our faces and mouths. Domestic dogs rarely regurgitate for their puppies – yet another link with their wild cousins which has been diluted by social evolution. However, it’s at this stage that humans start to take over the parental role and supply solid food in a dish to take over from where mum left off.
The whole weaning process is the pups’ very first lesson in how to cope with that most difficult of emotions – frustration. Of course, it won’t be the last time that puppies experience this. Living with humans exposes them to frustration every single day. In order to get used to it, puppies between eight and eighteen weeks should get out and about to meet and mix with as many other dogs, people, sights, sounds and smells as possible. This builds confidence and reduces anxiety, but it also buffers the puppy for the fact that not everything is going to go their way, not everyone they meet is going to be lovely, and not every dog is going to want to play. Getting this in perspective is basically a numbers game. Venture out for the first time at fourteen weeks old and bump straight into a grumpy adult female Dobermann, and the pup might be forgiven for believing that all other dogs are like this – and learn to avoid them. Meet fifty dogs – males and females, young and old, some lively and playful, some snappy and irritable and some indifferent, and the pup’s view of the world will be far more balanced.
A local vet gave me a call to say she wanted to refer a client for behavioural help. The client had been in that morning for her dog’s first vaccination, but it had not gone well – indeed, the vet was now sporting a plaster on her wrist where she had been bitten. The bite was quite nasty, and unexpected – primarily because the dog was only fifteen weeks old!
Amber’s owner, Tina, called me soon after. She said that she was shocked, not because her beautiful puppy had bitten the vet but because the vet thought she needed behavioural help. In her view, the vet must have really hurt the puppy to make her bite. We arranged to meet.
Amber was indeed a beautiful puppy. The Cocker Spaniel lay cradled in her owner’s arms as I was led into the hallway of her new home. I put up a hand to touch her but she turned her face into the crook of her owner’s arm and trembled with fear. At fifteen weeks of age, this was not a good response to the careful hand of a stranger. Puppies should be outgoing, curious and friendly, not fearful and withdrawn.
We went into the lounge and Amber’s owner placed the puppy carefully on a fleece blanket next to her on the sofa. The puppy glanced at me over her shoulder then slunk down, tucking herself behind her owner’s back, clearly hoping that if she couldn’t see me, I wouldn’t be able to see her.
Amber had come home only a few days before. Her new owner had chosen the breeder carefully and she showed me her puppy’s pedigree forms with reverence.
‘She has bred Cocker Spaniels for years,’ Tina told me proudly. ‘I saw Amber’s mother and grandmother – they were all stunning. Her grandmother was a champion, you know.’
The puppy had crawled round behind her back and was now heading towards the edge of the sofa. Tina jumped up and scooped it up in her arms, lest the puppy should get too close to the edge. ‘The breeder told me how fragile puppies are at this age,’ she said. ‘She kept them on their own in a warm, padded box, and wouldn’t even let other people handle them. They’re just too precious.’
Indeed, I thought.
‘I think she might need to go to the bathroom,’ Tina said suddenly, and carried the puppy towards the kitchen. Following, I expected to see Tina heading towards the back door but instead she turned off down the hallway, and then – to my surprise – took her into the downstairs loo.
There she placed the puppy on a special ‘housetraining mat’ to do her business. Now, while these ‘flat nappies’ have become very popular with new puppy owners because they mean that the pup doesn’t have to go outside, they effectively condone indoor toileting. This means that owners often need to housetrain their puppy twice: first to the mat, second to the garden. Worse, in my opinion, is that using puppy pads may limit a dog’s experiences and mean that it risks being under-exposed to the world at large.
Some years ago, I appeared on a national TV chat show where the topic of discussion was whether people who live in apartments or flats should ever have dogs as pets. Most of the experts on the show condemned the idea of keeping dogs in high-rise accommodation, saying that they need space both indoors and out. I stood out as a lone voice. As someone who had been one of those city-dwelling owners who lived happily and responsibly with a dog in an upstairs flat, I felt I could speak from experience. There are actually some positive behavioural advantages to raising a pup in an urban jungle. Not least of these is the fact that when you don’t have a garden or yard, you are forced to take the puppy out and about to meet the world a minimum of eight times a day just for him or her to go to the toilet – potentially seven times more than a puppy living a country existence.
Poor Amber. With so little in the way of life experience and such a sheltered start, she had no coping strategies to fall back on when life threw a minor glitch in her path – in the form of having an injection – and she had over-reacted horribly as a result. The harsh fact is that dogs of all ages need to learn how to cope with being examined, having their teeth cleaned, their nails clipped, their ears inspected, their tails held. They need to put up with minor discomfort in the form of injections, anal gland emptying, temperature-taking and a multitude of other common procedures. All of these trivial little annoyances need to be accepted, not fought over or fussed about, and it is only through extensive amounts of handling, exposure and repetition at an early age that dogs learn to take them in their stride.
At fifteen weeks old, Amber’s reactions to other people already represented a behavioural emergency – but getting Amber’s doting owner to see that she needed to loosen the apron strings and let her little dog stand on her own four feet was going to be tough. Knowing that the best understanding always comes from experience rather than explanation, I invited Amber and her owner to attend a ‘puppy nursery class’ that my practice colleagues and I were running during the evenings in a nearby school. I told her it was an ideal opportunity to meet other puppy owners in a gentle social environment. It was also a dramatic eye-opener. On Amber’s first session, she sat on her owner’s lap
