How We Raise Puppies

The first weeks of a puppy's life are an extraordinary period of development. Their brains and bodies are changing almost from day to day, with rapid synaptogenesis creating and refining the neural connections involved in movement, sensory processing, learning and emotional responses. Experiences during this period can become surprisingly durable parts of how a dog responds to the world.

I consider having those weeks in my hands both an extraordinary privilege and a serious responsibility. These puppies will eventually spend ten or fifteen years as somebody's companion; I have a relatively short period in which I can give their developing minds and bodies as good a foundation as possible.

That starts with their mother. Maternal care, the prenatal environment and the quality of the bitch's interactions with her puppies all contribute to early development. It is one of the reasons I think so carefully about whether I want to breed a bitch in the first place, rather than treating the mother simply as half of a genetic pairing.

From the whelping box onwards, the puppies' environment changes as they do. We introduce scents, different surfaces and very simple opportunities to solve physical problems early, then gradually add more space, movement, sounds, objects, people and environments as their sensory and motor abilities develop. There is plenty of sleep and quiet time too. Development needs both experience and the opportunity to recover from it.

Sound is one area where we put quite a lot of thought into those early experiences. Puppies encounter household noises as well as recordings and other unfamiliar sounds while they are still very young. The aim is not to make them oblivious to noise, but to give their developing brains plenty of experience of sounds occurring in an otherwise safe and ordinary environment.

Our first litter produced a rather peculiar illustration of how persistent an early association can be. I bought a children's phonics desk from a second-hand shop and put it in with the puppies as another object to climb over and investigate. Pressing its buttons produced words, noises and little songs. The puppies showed no particular reaction to the music at the time.

Three years later, those songs still do something very odd. Several of the dogs will stop what they are doing when they hear them on a video, sometimes waking from sleep, and howl along, even though they never otherwise howl. We have absolutely no idea why, but whatever association they formed with those sounds as tiny puppies has proved remarkably persistent. A more constructive example is a video of one of our puppies sleeping through spectacularly loud New Year's Eve fireworks that kept his humans wide awake. These anecdotes are fascinating glimpses of how much may be happening during a period when a puppy can appear simply to be pottering around a pen.

Physical development gets the same attention. As the puppies become mobile, they have increasing amounts of space in which to move freely, first around their puppy areas and then through our living space, terrace and garden. Different surfaces, small obstacles, changes in height and plenty of unrestricted movement give them opportunities to develop balance, coordination, proprioception and confidence in using their bodies. As they become old enough, their world expands further through outings to different environments.

The puppies live in the middle of our lives throughout this period. For the weeks they are here, raising them is a 24-hour job. We are with them almost continuously and they are rarely without one of us for more than ten or fifteen minutes. That means a great deal of cleaning, feeding, carrying, watching and reorganising our lives around six small animals, but it also means we get to know them exceptionally well.

By the time they are old enough for more complicated experiences, they are already becoming very different individuals. One puppy may investigate something immediately; another may want more time. One may solve a physical problem by persistence, another by stopping and looking for another route. Their development sets the pace. I am interested in what each puppy does with an experience, rather than in getting every puppy through the same list of experiences on the same timetable.

As they grow, we introduce more of ordinary life: people, dogs, travelling, unfamiliar places, different footing, weather, traffic and the countless other things that will eventually make up their human family's world. Some of that happens at home and some on outings. There is far more of it than is useful to catalogue here; our Instagram from the first litter probably gives a better impression of what those weeks actually look like than a checklist ever could.

I cannot decide what kind of adult dog each puppy will become in twelve weeks. Genetics, later development and everything that happens after they leave us will continue to shape them. What I do have is an unusually valuable developmental window in which I can give them safety, movement, sensory experience, problems worth solving and a great deal of individual attention before the rest of their lives begin.

I also review the research before each litter rather than assuming that what I did last time remains best practice. Puppy development research continues to evolve, and I update what we do when the evidence gives me a good reason to. That includes less obvious aspects of early development as well as socialisation and enrichment. The puppies are introduced to a diverse range of foods, including raw meaty bones, from an early age, for example, partly to support the development of a diverse gut microbiome.