Drinking from a Firehose: Puppy Enrichment Weeks 5 to 8

Dr. Marty Greer joins host Laura Reeves for a continuation of their conversation about puppies and neonates. Puppies raised properly are given the best possible start to their future. Today’s topic is enrichment, all of the things that we can do in the five to eight week period between “their eyes are open, they’re eating solid food, they’re probably weaned or close to it” and go-home day.

Laura asks, “What’s happening in those little tiny puppy brains in that five to eight week period?”

Marty’s response is, “They’re taking in the world so fast, it’s like drinking from a fire hose.

“There’s a lot of people who talk about this and a lot of people who pontificate about it. I think Sophia Yin talked about a hundred experiences in a hundred days. That gives you basically three months to get all kinds of information into their little brains.

“Even when you don’t think you’re teaching your puppy something, you’re teaching your puppy something. And so I think we have to be ultra aware of even the things that we do when we have our back turned that if we’re making dinner or there’s a puppy jumping on the other puppy or there’s puppy going potty on the floor because they didn’t get our attention to take them outside. We just taught them something.

“You have to be ultra aware of everything you do. Not paying attention to them doesn’t mean that they’re not learning something. I think we really have to pay attention to that and there’s lots of really fun things we can do to teach them cool stuff, but be careful, because they’re learning every second.

“If they learn that they put their feet on the breadboard and pull something off (the counter), even if you weren’t looking, they just learned they can put their feet on the breadboard. And if it takes them 100 tries to get one thing the next time, it’s like winning the lottery.

“We think about our little tiny puppies and there’s all this stuff going on. They’ve got littermates, they’ve got other dogs in the house, they’ve got smells, they’ve got sounds, they’ve got all this stuff. You don’t want them to hear the ketchup bottle make that funny, squirty noise when it’s almost empty when they’re in their new home for the first time and it freaks them out.

“So you have to really think about all the input that we want to have for our dogs. How do we set them up for success? How do we provide them those things? So I do smell, I do touch, so I give different surfaces, we do different visual things, we do different toys, there’s different tastes, so there’s so much we can do.”