E7: Socialisation and the world our dogs grew up in

Listen to episode 7. Available wherever you listen to your podcasts.

The three dogs did not grow up in the same world, and this turns out to matter more than any of us had thought to say out loud before we started recording.

Judge was a pre-pandemic puppy in the United States, raised in a house with a yard, introduced to other dogs through dog parks and through a friend's Rottweiler named Trigger, who was large enough to clarify the social order early. He later moved to London with Bruce and Tatiana, and after 2 years there back to the US again. Bowie was a lockdown puppy in Canada, going to the park every day because the park was the only place anyone could go freely. Ben noted something counterintuitive: Bowie was probably better socialized than most pandemic puppies, because during lockdown the parks were full of people and their dogs. The world shrank. The park expanded. Makenzie grew up in Seattle during COVID, then moved to London at eleven months. Her first time outside there, she stopped in the middle of the pavement and pointed her nose at the Canary Wharf wind tunnel. She had been prepared for Seattle. London was a different specification.

Max is seven months old now, growing up in the US, and he has not moved anywhere. He came into a household where Judge had already returned from London, already experienced, already settled. And yet when they go out together, it is Max who barks first, afraid of most of what he encounters, and Judge who hears him and joins in, not always knowing what he is reacting to. The more experienced dog following the anxious one. The data Max is laying down is real, and some of it is fear.

Three dogs moved into environments their early socialization had not covered. What the conversation kept returning to was not the checklist, the things each dog had or hadn't encountered before 20 weeks. It kept returning to a different question. What does early socialization actually build?

The standard answer is familiarity. You expose a puppy to things so they are not afraid of those things. Vacuum cleaners, sirens, other dogs, men in hats, the texture of concrete under their feet. The logic is sound as far as it goes. But it assumes something that is rarely true: that the world a puppy is prepared for is more or less the world they will live in.

Research on early-age socialization practices and adult dog behaviour points somewhere more interesting. What the sensitive period builds, when it works, is not a list of safe things. It is a dog's relationship with novelty itself: the accumulated evidence, repeated enough times in the first months of life, that new things tend to resolve. That the startling thing can be investigated, sat with, and moved past. That the world, encountered freshly, is usually survivable.

That is the quality that traveled with Judge across the Atlantic and back, with Bowie from Canada to a farmhouse in England full of dogs he had never met, with Makenzie through the Canary Wharf wind. Not a map of a specific world. But a posture toward the unknown.

Max is still building his. He is only seven months old, and much of what he encounters still seems to alarm him. What he collects now, repeated enough times, will shape in some lasting way how he moves through the world as an adult. Bruce knows this, and is working on it. The window is not closed.

What we call socialization, when it works, is not a catalogue of familiar things. It is a particular relationship with the unfamiliar: the evidence, held in a dog's body, that new things are worth investigating rather than defending against. That confidence, built early, is what travels. Everything else is local knowledge.

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