12/08/2026
What should your priorities be for Puppy Culture (bit.ly/PCVOD) training and socializing a 12-14 week old puppy? For a normal puppy still in the critical socialization period (under 12-14 weeks old) here is how we proceed:
First, take on the “ignore at your peril” protocols. These are the protocols that are easy to do now, but will be a disaster later if you skip them:
1. Socialization - your puppy should be in the car and going somewhere every day, or at least have a new experience each day, following the guidelines we give in the film and the workbook.
2. Body Handling – as we show in the film
3. Resource Guarding – as we show in the film. Pay attention to all four areas we address, and I would add that you should interrupt your puppy frequently when playing, pick him up, treat, and place him right back down again. Especially important if you have a small dog as people tend to control small dogs by picking them up, which causes the smaller breeds to scoot away as soon as you lean over. I have also noticed that many small dogs will growl or snap when picked up. Not desirable, but so easy to modify if you do it now.
4. Crate/confinement/anti-separation anxiety training - not completion of this training, just commencing and following along with the guidelines in our puppy-led crate and house training system, found in our puppy course (bit.ly/PCPUPPYCOURSE) .
These four things are what I consider “hard stop” items to introduce before the puppy leaves the critical socialization period.
This assumes that your puppy is under about 12-14 weeks old and has a good foundation and no issues. If your puppy is older or has issues, this list may change, but that’s a much longer discussion.
Your next priority is to teach your puppy to offer behaviors (become operant). The goal here is to teach your puppy to be creative, not teach any particular behavior. That creativity will become the gas in the tank that you can use to shape any behavior. So spend time on the box game, getting your puppy to offer anything, not any particular behavior. The puppy course and also our book, When Pigs Fly, (https://bit.ly/WhenPigsFlyDogs) are the best guides for this.
Note that you can certainly teach your puppy to become operant while training behaviors – the loose leash walking training that we give you in Puppy Culture is a perfect example of this – but sometimes it’s easier for the human to sit back and stop luring if the ultimate behavior is not a “practical” one.
For practical behaviors, recall is by far the most important thing to teach to young puppies, and it literally takes no extra time to teach it. Just use your recall word (refer back to the original Puppy Culture film for details) and feed your puppy every time he comes to you.
Leash walking is the other practical behavior that I always get in as early as possible. I would not expect my puppy under 12 weeks old to be well trained enough to take walks on leash – socialization excursions generally involve a lot of rambling and carrying of the puppy than leash walking. But it’s so exquisitely simple and fun to teach if you begin now, and such a long, cold slog up a steep hill if you wait until later to begin teaching it.
If you can find the time, I recommend beginning Attention is the Mother (bit.ly/PCATTENTION). Yes, it’s always better to start earlier and I really do want you to do at least the first steps of teaching attention as a behavior when your puppy is under 12 weeks old. But if you have to defer something, then defer this rather than anything else on the list.
So the “core curriculum” list for puppies still in the CSP is:
Socialization
Body Handling
Resource Guarding
Crate/Confinement/Separation Anxiety
Offer Behaviors
Recall
Leash walking
Attention is the Mother
I know it sounds like I threw a lot of stuff in as “must dos” but really you are talking about seconds a day to do each thing, and most of them are things you just do in your daily flow and you don’t need to allocate any extra time for a formal training session. And the things that do require a formal session are fantastic to tire puppies out. A free shaping session and a meal is usually enough to knock out the most persistently not-nap-taking puppy lol.
The socialization trips are the only things that will take serious time and scheduling and it so happens they are they are at the top of the list, so the more you can plan out those trips and playdates in advance, the better!
Here's Velvet, checking off the "big black hairy dog" demographic on her socialization list.
