Puppy Party 2019 Edition
We hit up Elephant Butte Lake State Park again for a puppy party with our Blockbuster Puppies. 🙂 This is something we try to do with every litter when they are around 7-8 weeks (after first shots) and ready to start socializing a little bit more out in the world.
This is a concept we’ve adopted from Puppy Culture, although our parties tend to be quite a bit less structured than the ones outlined in the Puppy Culture DVDs. Because of our distance from friends (most of our dog-savvy friends are 2.5+ hours away from us), we’ve adapted our puppy parties to basically be a Nice Day Out.
We take along exercise pens and shade, along with familiar water and toys so that the puppies have a comfy place for naps and can interact or not as they choose to for most of the day, and do individual socialization sessions in short bursts throughout the day, experiencing both new people and new environments.
Before we can do this one big day, we do a lot of smaller things to make this possible. The puppies have experienced riding in a car- as a group and individually, and both in someone’s lap and in a crate. Although this trip is typically longer than any they’ve experienced before, it’s still not a fully new experience.
For this trip, we had three familiar adults, two novel adults, and a large group of new children (who were our neighbors at our site on the beach for the day and were VERY pleased to help pet and interact with puppies.)
In a perfect world, we’d be able to get this degree of socialization for each puppy on an individual trip as well, but logistics make it very difficult. Instead, once puppies have had their first shot, we begin socializing them in town, in places they are unlikely to encounter too many other dogs, and carrying them rather than letting them walk in places where we can’t control the cleanliness.