One of the mistakes I think that dog trainers make when talking about regulation is supposing that it’s only an internal process. So much about regulation for companion animals relates to external, social processes. It’s about time we acknowledged this.

Today, we explore the concept of co-regulation. Co-regulation is a social process. In the relationship between dogs and their guardians, co-regulation could be described as the social process between the dog and the guardian. The process is a fluctuating one of give and take. We alter our actions with respect to our dogs’ actions. They alter theirs with respect to ours.

For instance, if I can see one of my dogs struggling to cope with an oncoming dog, instead of doing nothing but continuing with my walk, I might change my actions. I might step aside and give my dog some treats to help them cope.

If you think about it, walking on a lead should be a process of co-regulation, where the dog slows their pace with respect to ours, and we alter our normally flat pace to stop when the dog sniffs or needs more lead. We’re moving together, and that requires both of us modify our behaviour in respect to the other.

Walking on a lead also gives us examples of more egocentric walking. Sometimes, it is the dog leading the walk where they make no attempt to regulate their own pace with respect to their guardian and we see dogs pulling their guardian over as they try to get to a chip packet or another dog.

Other times, it is the human who entirely controls the pace of the walk, where the dog is drilled to subjugate their needs completely to that of their guardian.

Instead of walking with the dog or walking with the human, co-regulation would involve walking together.

It is the ballet of interactions.

Most of the time, when we talk of co-regulation, we actually mean emotional co-regulation, where we work to support our dogs. Occasionally, as guardians, we may need to do more to support them. Other times, we may choose to co-regulate by giving the dog less support and structure and letting them make decisions for themselves.

Ideally, we’d like our dogs to be able to self-regulate behaviourally and emotionally, but the reality is that given dogs’ cognitive capacities and development, this can be a struggle. To assume that they’ll magically just learn to self-regulate at 9 weeks of age is a huge mistake, and yet this is what many guardians do.

The idea of co-regulation also poses problems to some dog trainers.

On the one hand, many modern dog trainers do not like the idea of imposing structures on dogs. They may not even like the word trainer. They definitely don’t like the notion of external rule structures. The idea that you might ask a dog to sit and wait while their food is prepared is an anathema to them. Teaching dogs to cope with frustration, to control their bodies and impulses… pffft.

The problem with this view is that it is based on a faulty understanding of the structures within which social mammals live. It is often accompanied by an idealised view of canine cognitive capacities too. It overestimates what dogs are capable of being.

I’ve had this dogmatically explained to me by grown-up human beings who seem to have zero awareness of the fact they’ve really not understood the social mores of their own species very well. Worse, they’re also not that able to modulate their own behaviour accordingly.

What hope is there if actual grown-up human beings, firehosing others on the regulatory skills of dogs, are unable to modulate their own behaviour?

If you, oh delicious and delightful human being, can’t open up your own rigid and dogmatic beliefs in order to entertain the possibility that there may be more to regulation than you imagined and that dogs may struggle with it just as you are, then it’s a case in point.

I love dogs *very* much and I appreciate them in all their splendid dog-ness but idealising their ability to control themselves and forgetting that they are social beings doesn’t help us live with them much and also places huge expectations upon their ability to restrain themselves and fit in to a group.

Understanding the social rules in play and moderating your behaviour accordingly is a very important part of development.

Whenever we put dogs in situations where they need to moderate their behaviour with other animals, that requires social regulation. When we interact with others, we need competencies in social behaviour. If we expect dogs to confidently and appropriately deal with intraspecies conflict, to regulate their own emotions and behaviour around other dogs or humans, or to even cooperate in joint activities like play or walking on lead, then it requires they exercise a high level of cognitive control over themselves.

Dogs are not born with these skills.

They don’t magically occur.

Neither is regulation simply an internal process. Dogs, like humans, are social beings. Regulation is also a social-emotional process.

Caregivers contribute hugely to this process as puppies develop.

As always, it’s important to remind ourselves that these skills are developmental. That’s to say that puppies are not born with them. They emerge at certain points as they age.

These skills are also about our ability to generalise and understand that these rules are important on this occasion, but that other rules are in place at other times. You know, like we play ball outside, but we don’t have quite such big behaviours inside. We run outside, but we walk on the left in corridors… Ironically, we help children remember these rules all the time, but many of us just expect dogs to have been magically born with them and remember them even on snow days and windy days and birthdays.

Understanding rules requires us to be able to generalise and understand our social group. It also requires us to understand context. These are tough skills for dogs!

I often hear that dogs don’t generalise well. Generalisation is simply the ability to understand both abstract and concrete rules and infer that they may be applicable in other circumstances.

Puppy trainers often remind puppy guardians, for instance, that what their puppy learns in class will also need to be practised at home because dogs don’t generalise well.

I’d like to offer a refinement rooted in comparative psychology.

Dogs don’t generalise as well as humans can.

When we say dogs don’t generalise well, we often forget to add ‘in comparison to us’.

Dogs generalise very well compared to other species.

Also, it might be better to say that dogs are more contextual than humans.

This reframing allows us to remember that the ability to generalise is more developed in humans without denigrating animals whose cognitive processes are more context-dependent than ours. We’re the outliers, not dogs. The situation matters more to dogs. Ironically, play outside and not inside will make MUCH more sense to them than it will to a five-year-old. On the flip side, if we’re trying to teach them they can actually also play in the dog park as well as the garden, it might not make much sense at first. It’s hard for dogs to think like that.

Most trainers understand that the ability to apply old rules in new contexts is a key stumbling block for our teaching. I’m not entirely sure we truly understand what it must feel like to be more contextual in our thinking. It can only be akin to trying to imagine what it is like to be dyslexic when you are not. That is a significant cognitive hindrance for us. We forget that dogs are more dependent on context in learning than we are because we simply can’t imagine it.

This is very important when it comes to rules and regulation, especially where these may differ.

HERE but not THERE rules can be tough for humans and easier for dogs.

No ball play in the house. It’s fine in the yard.

NOW but not THEN rules are also tough for humans but easier for dogs because of the contextual nature of their experience.

Walk to heel when we’re going past the neighbours’ dogs but sniff later.

Dogs are actually better at that than we are.

I speak as someone who struggled with the seemingly abitrary application of rules growing up. Like why can’t you wear make-up in school if you wear it out of the home? Why was it okay to wear mascara and blusher when I was on stage but not when I was in French class? Why was it appropriate for grown men to gawk at me in a leotard but not to wear fitted clothes in public where men may gawk at me? Why did it matter if a boy was in my room at night compared to the daytime? Why did it matter if I came in at 10:45 compared to 11pm?

I was an obstreperous teenager, according to my Nana.

I’m now an obstreperous adult.

For those of you who’ve seen The Breakfast Club, you’re probably seeing me as a John Bender character right now. You know… How come Andrew gets to get up? If he gets up, we’ll all get up. It’ll be anarchy.

I understand rules that are there for social cohesion, public health, the good of the community. I bag up and bin dog poo. I’m quiet after 8pm. I don’t use power tools on Sundays. I don’t speed. I stop at traffic lights. I wear my mask. I am also in favour of rules that stop people exploiting others. I like these rules. These structures are important.

I do not understand whimsical rules. No. That’s not true. I understand them very well. I do not like them. There is a difference.

Ironically, whimsical rules, as long as they are consistent, make more sense to dogs once they’ve learned them.

What we can never do is forget that dogs are a social mammal, just as we are.

Learning to be a social mammal is part of developing regulatory skills.

Sometimes, we regulate things from the inside; other times, regulation occurs as a result of social structures.

At first, those social structures are small. Our parents, grandparents, and, to some extent, our siblings, support us as we move from being egocentric individuals to social beings. Our extended family may be involved in that growth.

As we grow, we become part of a wider network of individuals. Non-familial relationships become more important.

In the wild, wolves do not often make that leap other than in choosing a mate. Their mate may be the only non-familial bond they ever form. In glorifying wolves, we often forget that they have very clear rule structures about interactions with non-familial conspecifics. A wolf out of territory encountering another wolf risks an enormous amount. Wolf researcher Rick McIntyre documents that the most common cause for death in adult wolves is to be killed by a rival pack. Even the fact that wolves form long-term pair bonds is unusual. Only 3-5% of mammalian species do that. Dogs don’t, usually, when left to live unrestricted lives.

Dogs, then, are more ‘human’ in their management of encounters with other dogs but don’t have some of the tight family-driven social codes of wolves.

We also forget that life within a family group may not be perfect for wolves and also for street dogs. McIntyre documents life for three sisters in a wolf pack in Yellowstone National Park. The ranking female terrorised her sisters. He documents that in Yellowstone, no son had forced their father out of the social group, but that it was not infrequent that daughters would either force out or kill their mothers. He says that the ranking females ‘set the agenda for the pack: where to den, when to go out on hunts and when to travel.’

What we in the writing and studies of many wolf scholars and conservationists is a description of life where family structures determine life.

That dogs are more gregarious than wolves is perhaps a story written into their biology. Dogs don’t form a family group as other canids do. The whole reproductive biology of the dog is deregulated compared to the wolf’s. The structure of social groups is different.

Nevertheless, to live in social groups, you need rules.

I’m reminded of the John Wick films. ‘Rules, John. They are the only thing that separate us from the animals.’

As if animals do not have social rules of their own!

I think this human superiority that we are the only species with codified social rules is perhaps why so many people seem unwilling to see that social factors also help our dogs understand that rules apply in certain situations.

We also have ridiculously high expectations of dogs to be able to manage these things themselves.

For instance, expecting a 10-week-old puppy to regulate their own need to play compared to the need of an older dog to sleep…. or expecting an adolescent dog to cope with the social intricacies of interaction with unfamiliar dogs… As a colleague said beautifully this week, guardians overestimate puppies’ skills in many respects, and underestimate them in others.

Being more gregarious is not just biology. It is the very important work of socialisation. Neuroscientist and primatologist Robert Sapolsky describes biology as giving us the ‘how’ of behaviour, where socialisation gives us the ‘when’ and ‘where’. Socialisation also tells us the magnitude of behaviour we’d need. It’s a vital part of the canine experience, just as it is the human experience.

Leaving it all to the dogs is to misunderstand what helps dogs thrive.

I have lived with dogs who didn’t like each other much. Amigo had a terse relationship with all my dogs other than Tobby. He guarded toys and he needed help around food bowls as well as beds. The beauceron Effel who I had in foster for 18 months (and would have adopted) had many issues with Heston.

Anyone looking at what happened in our home probably would not have seen the small things that made a difference. Meal times were not regimented in terms of behavioural expectations, but I did make small tweaks to make it easier on my dogs. Heston ate last because he had the best manners and was the most patient. Amigo ate first because he struggled.

Effel struggled with excitement and energy levels. He struggled to regulate his own behaviour around Heston at such times. For instance, if Heston ran out of the door, Effel would chase after him. I didn’t even walk them together because if Heston was off-lead, Effel was unable to break his visual fixation on Heston. If Effel was also off-lead, he would chase Heston. A few times, Effel nipped Heston’s face.

Effel also struggled with small, animated dogs. He would chase them compulsively and struggle not to bite if he caught up to them.

What did I do?

I set up the situation so these things couldn’t happen. I walked Heston separately from Effel. I made sure my small fosters had a safe space to play.

All this is just simple management that I’m sure you’re already conscious that you do yourself.

I also set up scenarios in which Effel could learn how to regulate himself with intervention where necessary. At first, that meant restorative socialisation with staid, large, calm adult dogs. Then we included large, lively adult dogs. Then we included smaller dogs with great social skills.

The truth is that some dogs are masters in coaching others.

Heston is my master on this score.

You saw him already with a small puppy who was struggling not to bite her littermates really hard. Here he is with a Newfoundland who’d not been socialised. He struggled to cope with other dogs and he was incredibly shy when he arrived. Beyond any play he’d had with his litter, he’d had nothing for a year.

Watch how he coaxes the Newfie into a game of chase. This was the first time this big dog had played. Look at how Heston speeds up and slows down, keeping an eye on him.

This may seem like very one-sided play, and it is *here*. What is he doing though? He’s leading the play by taking the role of the chasee. He decides. He speeds up, he slows down.

You can also see my lovely Amigo who did not understand dog play at all and struggled to cope.

Who’s regulating him?

I am.

Why? Because managing him (shutting him away) would not have exposed him to play. He’s learning that he doesn’t have to go and put an end to it.

Should I have left him?

Well, there’d have been a fight if I did.

Should I have put him away?

Well, I’d be completely removing his skills to learn to do this without me calling him or telling him to go.

A short clip but one that supports a couple of points…

Social dogs can be amazing at teaching others through play. They are quite literally coaching other dogs when this happens well.

Some dogs need us to help support them. It doesn’t happen by accident. It can also go very badly wrong when we don’t take this role seriously. Regulatory skills don’t happen in some fluffy, wonderful ‘Ain’t Nature Grand?’ kind of event.

Some people consider the way in which dogs lead captive lives to be a problem, as if street dogs, village dogs and strays all co-exist in a divine and happy world. This is not the case. Unrestrained dogs are particularly territorial. Their behaviour is also hugely shaped by the environment and the people in that space.

More and more studies emerge year on year looking at the ranges of street dogs. There is also evidence of forced dispersal, where street dogs will force a hanger-on to disperse through violence or even death. Most truly unrestrained dogs in urban settings do not live long enough to reach social maturity and so it’s very hard to take lessons from what is essentially an idealised group of dogs in different cultures from our own most of whom don’t reach sexual maturity let alone social maturity.

Where restricted lifestyles do count is as we have seen in the pandemic with lockdown dogs, dogs like the Newfie above who had no social contact with his own species for 11 months after he went to his permanent home.

Regulatory skills involve social skills when they involve turn-taking too. Watching Effel was to watch a dog who did not understand turn-taking in play. In my opinion, this can be exacerbated by breed, age and hormones. He chased. He tried to manage the excitement levels of other animals, just as a good beauceron is bred to do with errant sheep. He never offered to be the chasee, as Heston does.

Heston is also a good example because his greeting skills are rubbish. I mean they’ve got better but he really, really struggled with greetings. Shepherds do when they have careless guardians. *Cough*.

He also had his moments. Considering he is intact, he’s not much of a one for typically “male” behaviours but there have been times when he was far too interested in young females. Just because you can be a great Uncle with sharky puppies and a great Older Brother to shy dogs and wonderful with flirty old ladies does not mean you’re great at it all.

Turn-taking is tough.

Many of us think this is innate. It’s not. It’s taught. Whether a dog learns to wait their turn might be the result of great and largely unconscious social processes with humans and dogs, or it may be more structured than that.

My girl Lidy, for instance, struggles when there is petting available and she is not the recipient. Learning not to come and shove her fine shepherdy nose into our petting is part of her social education. She struggles and so it is my job to support her in kind, nurturing and consistent ways.

Understanding turns also requires a lot of executive functioning skills – which aren’t always onboard until we reach social maturity. Even then, as a populous social species who mostly manage to be harmonious in incredibly densely populated areas, we human beings can struggle. As an English person in French queues, let me tell you, I feel that Gallic impatience seething out of every pore. Let’s not even talk about Italians and queues or those hideous Black Friday videos from malls in the USA…

We learn to take turns through the patience, consistency, understanding, and thoughtfulness of adults. This is one reason I think the most important dogs that puppies can meet are adult ones. Whether our dogs are learning from human adults or canine adults is kind of moot. To learn to take turns, we need to know how to handle our frustration when our needs are temporarily thwarted. We need to know how to control our bodies. We need to understand social rule structures and to know how to generalise. Just because we queue to hang our coats up and we take turns asking questions in story time does not mean we automatically understand why we should not push in at the buffet table. We also need executive functioning skills to coordinate all this complex thinking.

In reality, regulation of all sorts is scaffolded. We support early attempts to self-regulate and we help puppies grow by supporting them in emotionally challenging situations. This is what good caregivers do.

We are not doing that if we put the onus on the puppy. We are not doing that if we put the onus on a dog having a very large emotional response to a situation they aren’t adequately prepared to cope with.

Passing from co-regulation to self-regulation is a gradual process. It is also an unstable process, where sometimes we will help our dogs more than others.

So when do we co-regulate our dogs?

When we offer distraction if they are struggling.

When we set up situations to help them reappraise and reconsolidate their learning.

When we help them learn to soothe themselves, or when we soothe them.

When we help modulate their responses.

If I see another dog approaching us and I know my dog will struggle, the most scaffolded thing I can do is to distract them. I’ll take them to one side and we’ll eat biscuits. That’s distraction. We don’t look at the dog. We don’t think about the dog. We just do something else.

As we progress, we will remove that immediate layer of support and help them reappraise. Oh, look! There’s a dog! Isn’t that great? Just a dog, going on their daily business!

We may also add in prompted soothing. Good girl! Well done! Great stuff! Can you look away? Can you look at me? Can you take a breath? Can we play here? Can you eat?

As we move into self-regulation, we will also prompt our dogs through cues. Leslie McDevitt’s perenially excellent ‘Look at That!’ does exactly this. Look at the dog! Now you need to disengage and look back to me when mark your behaviour. Here, we’re helping our dogs modulate their behaviour.

Finally, we’ll move to dogs who will look and then disengage without the need for a prompt. That’s self-regulation.

My two dogs are a great example of where we’re at on this scale.

We’re surrounded by sheep where we are now. Heston spent 8 years with cows. I don’t think he’d actually ever seen a sheep. Even so, he made that transition from cows to sheep admirably. I didn’t overestimate his contextual skills and I did go slowly, but he self-regulates around sheep and he has from Day 1 of seeing them.

This is not by accident!

At 12 weeks or so, he barked at cows and tried to chase them. By 4 months, we’d ironed out the problem. We moved from reappraisal at a distance to prompts to self-regulation. The one or two times cows did something unexpected, I helped him cope by prompting him.

Lidy is incredibly predatory of all moving things. She’s also hypersensitive to environmental change. Yesterday she was eyeing up an unexpected soil bag, for goodness sake! I may still need to distract her from time to time if the sheep are particularly lively and giddy. Getting stuck in an escaped flock was *much* fun! But most of the time, I’m helping her reappraise by giving her distance, supporting her decisions, occasionally prompting her to move away if she gets into struggles. We’re not, and we probably never will be, at a point where she’ll self-regulate completely even in giddy-escaped-flock situations, but we walked past at 20m today and she exhibited THE MOST self-regulation. I mean she looked at them, then looked away.

It’s important to understand that self-regulation is the end-product, if we’re lucky. We’re not being overly prescriptive if we occasionally support our dogs when they need it. We are being good caregivers.

We also need to stop overestimating dogs’ cognitive abilities and coping capacity. The *whole* point of being a social species, as Bill Withers would say, is having someone to lean on.

That’s our job.

In next week’s post, I’ll look at practical ways we can scaffold regulation so that we can act supportively as our dogs move to independence.

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If you want to support me further or you want to know more about supporting the human end of the lead, you can also pick up a copy of my Dog Trainers’ guide to Client-Centred training. I’ll let you into a secret; a lot of it is about that same support and scaffolding for our clients. Whenever we are emotionally overwhelmed, we definitely need someone to lean on. If you’ve read it already, could you do me a huge favour and leave a review? It helps people decide if it’s for them! Big thanks!

As you will have read in the previous post, regulation is not a unitary, singular thing. There are many separate aspects of what we think of as regulation and they are usually dependent on developmental processes.

This week, a few people have shared their thoughts on the previous post and it’s clear that their view of regulation is lots more narrow than regulatoray skills probably are.

Being able to control your behaviour is one facet of regulation, but using your own body to control the behaviour of others is another. We can’t say regulation is simply this or that, and anyone trying to give a 50-word explanation on social media really hasn’t got a very thorough understanding of just how complicated it can be.

Another reason I wanted to write this series of posts is that a lot of trainers talk about regulation in adult dogs, forgetting that we don’t know enough yet about it in adult dogs, let alone the processes involved as puppies develop. Trainers who talk this way, as if dogs are born adults and all have adult levels of regulatory skills, are missing the point.

These skills are developmental.

That’s to say puppies are not born with these skills; they acquire them through life just as children do.

Also, as you’ll see, that process is long and can be complicated. Some trainers in the dog training world seem to see puppy development as complete at 12 weeks, as if to say there aren’t complex, connected biological and social processes at work through adolescence as dogs reach sexual maturity and move on to social maturity.

As you’ll see today, even one single developmental aspect of behaviour underpinning regulation can be much longer than we consider.

Even though the single developmental process we’ll look at might not seem to be very connected to regulation at first glance, the ability that dogs have to regulate certain aspects of their physiology, emotions and behaviour very much depends on their age; understanding the processes behind this one single behaviour help us understand how other regulatory processes might also develop.

Let’s take a look at one simple developmental process, that of object permanence.

What is object permanence?

Object permanence is the idea that a physical object still exists even if you can’t see it. For instance, I know my mum still exists even though I can’t see her. I know the coffee in my fridge exists even if I can’t see it. I know that nail in my car tyre threatening to become a puncture still exists even though I’m not looking at it right now and I can’t see my car.

Object permanence sounds like a really, really trivial thing that we just take for granted, but it’s actually a fairly complex cognitive process that has some clear developmental stages. Also, as you can see, it can tie in to anxiety. I’m worrying about my car tyre even though I can’t see it. It would be quite nice if I could come away from the tyre and forget all about it.

Understanding how dogs acquire a sense of object permanence is especially vital if you train or live with working dogs. It’s also vital if you do any kind of enrichment activities with dogs, from scentwork to using food toys. It’s essential for understanding issues of stranger anxiety and separation anxiety too, so it’s a useful thing for trainers, breeders, puppy fosterers and guardians to understand.

Object permanence is a developmental process. It’s not something that puppies (or babies!) are born with. In humans, object permanence occurs for some learners by the age of 3 months, and in others by around the age of 2. As with all developmental processes, there are norms that define how likely it is that the population will have acquired that skill by a certain age, but these norms shouldn’t imply that these skills are ‘normal’. All individuals are different. It’s the same with puppies as it is with humans.

Object permanence is actually a critical developmental skill in human infants. What’s interesting about it is that it often happens around about the same time that children typically develop anxieties related to separation from their caregivers and also anxieties related to strangers.

The same three behaviours develop in puppies in the same developmental windows.

Why is it important to understand object permanence?

If we understand that puppies develop a sense of object permanence, we can understand other behaviours better, like why and when young puppies might whine or howl if separated from their mother or from human caregivers, and why they might struggle to be left with strangers.

When we understand when these are likely to occur, we can take steps to mitigate the potential damage they might cause.

Sadly, these are developmental problems that we often just expect puppies to get over.

I know, for instance, when Heston was small, I didn’t even really consider how challenging it might have been for him as a 7-week-old puppy to be left without me or why he might panic if he couldn’t see me. As it is, we managed just fine, but it was more by accident than on purpose.

When we understand when puppies develop object permanence and when they might therefore be likely to develop separation anxiety and stranger anxiety, it helps us understand why some puppies really struggle in their first few weeks as they move from their first home with their breeder or foster carer.

It also helps us understand why it’s so important to help structure puppies’ experiences with strangers.

We can also understand ways we can help them cope better with these experiences during this developmental window.

In other words, it’s normal for puppies to struggle with anxiety when left alone and it’s normal for puppies to struggle to cope with strangers. We need to understand ways that we can help puppies cope with these very normal experiences other than leaving them to cry it out which can cause lasting trauma. When I read “trainers” recommending guardians leave 8-week-old puppies to “cry it out” or crating puppies for long periods, this is nothing short of abuse. This is a critical developmental period for object permanence and separation anxiety, and it is likely to cause lasting damage if you do this. It reveals nothing more than wilful ignorance about canine development.

How do we know when puppies are developing object permanence?

To develop a sense of object permanence, you need to be able to see things. That goes without saying. So object permanence can’t truly develop when the puppy’s sensory system is not developed. However, what we know about object permanence isn’t always really understood in other species, as most of the work done on it is with humans. We don’t know, for example, about the way odour works to affect puppies’ sense of object permanence.

We do know that dogs don’t adapt to smells as humans do. For instance, if there’s a bad smell (or a good one!) you get used to it. Your nose adapts until you can’t smell it anymore. I used to wear a lot of perfume. Now, because of my dogs, I don’t wear perfume at all. Even the smell of fabric freshener or washing powder can be really strong to me these days. I’m no longer habituated to the perfumes I wear.

Dogs don’t adapt to odours. Their nose works differently than ours does. For our noses, it’s almost as if smelly things cease to exist over time. That’s not true for dogs. They don’t adapt to odours in the same way because of the way their nose is designed.

Thus, just because they can’t see an object doesn’t mean they think it’s ceased to exist. Indeed, one theory of separation anxiety in dogs is that as the humans’ smell fades over time, the dog becomes increasingly panicked or distressed. This is evidenced by the fact that some dogs seem to find things that smell very strongly of us like our beds or couches or clothes to be comforting during prolonged absence. Some dogs collect socks, underwear or shoes belonging to us and make a nest of the things that smell most strongly of us. This behaviour might be explained by the fact these things smell strongly of us as the rest of our residual odour fades.

Of course, work with dogs and young puppies has often focused on visual object permanence, not olfactory object permanence. We still have a way to go in order to truly understand developmental processes in dogs.

Why is this important?

Young puppies (less than eight weeks) might not be able to find things that are covered up or out of view, for example.

That has implications for how we raise them in the home and also for what kind of enrichment activities we give them. Unless, for instance, we give them very strongly smelling food, we may find that they’re not interested in finding hidden objects before they’ve developed a sense of object permanence. Hiding biscuits in ball pits may not be an easy thing for young puppies to find because what we know about when puppies develop skills to know that things are still there even if they can’t see them hasn’t fully developed yet.

It may also mean they might panic if they are separated from their mother or from caregivers even by a blanket covering a whelping pen or a puppy pen, for example.

The importance of object permanence

We shouldn’t expect puppies to be able to cope if their mother, siblings or caregivers go out of view, especially if the odour of those individuals is also blocked off. It’s perhaps one reason why breeders and fosterers find it useful to include a cloth item that smells of their family as the puppies move to their new home. Even so, separating puppies from their caregivers and their mother too early may cause the puppy to suffer lasting damage if it’s not handled properly.

Understanding object permanence can also help us understand what is difficult for puppies and what might cause them to panic.

One form of recall training I’ve seen is where the guardian goes out of view when on a walk. This causes the young dog to panic. When they find their human or their human reappears, it causes relief. Some trainers use this method to teach the dog to keep their eye on their guardian at all times and keep following the guardian.

If we don’t understand that our puppies aren’t developmentally mature enough not to panic when we go out of view, we may be causing them a high degree of emotional panic and causing long-lasting trauma. It may absolutely work to keep dogs close to us on walks but the consequences to our relationship and also to our wider life can be devastating. Do we really want our dogs to panic every time we go out of view?

Forgetting, attention and object permanence

Losing things is not related to object permanence. Not being able to pay attention to objects or tasks for long periods of time is also unrelated to object permanence.

There’s a myth out there that people with ADHD don’t have a sense of object permanence. This really is a huge myth. It’s really important as we begin to understand canine cognition and how dogs’ attention works that we don’t confuse all these terms, labelling a dog as an ADHD dog because items don’t keep their attention for very long or they are easily distracted.

Object permanence and forgetting are two entirely different things.

Just because a dog forgets where they left their favourite toy does not mean they think their toy ceased to exist. You’ll see shortly a video in which my spaniel Tilly shows she has object permanence. She forgot where the object was for a while (3 days!), but even though she couldn’t see it, she still knew it existed.

It sounds completely trivial to us humans who don’t even really think about what a complex cognitive skill object permanence is, but we should remember it’s actually pretty amazing.

It takes a lot of brain stuff to happen to even have a sense that things still exist even if you can’t smell, hear or see them. It involves having symbolic thoughts and all kinds of complex cognitive processes that are pretty mindblowing when you really think about it. We couldn’t have search and rescue dogs or detection dogs without dogs having a sense of object permanence and understanding that intensity of odour relates to the closeness of the object, for example. That’s some heavy duty cognition.

Just to be able to understand that objects that have historically been hidden in one place and compensate for that is a complex skill. Sometimes, we have literally no idea how hard the things we are asking of our dogs actually are. To be able to compensate for the various different places in which objects have previously been hidden and overcome your past learning history, ignoring where you previously had success, is a high level skill and one we ask of all dogs in detection and rescue work, for example.

When does object permanence develop?

As you’ve read, object permanence in children develops anywhere between 3 months and 2 years.

Here’s a man torturing his young child in the name of science.

As you can see, the baby has no idea where the cucumber is, and will probably grow up with some trauma about his cruel father who has made a YouTube video instead of helping him get his needs met. I’m only kidding. Luckily young children’s brains are inoculated to traumas such as these and we can certainly appreciate the child’s surprise that the cucumber appears as if by magic.

Object permanence is difficult to truly understand in dogs because of the fact humans don’t have particularly good olfactory skills. However, you can understand why it’d be important for a wolf to know that a deer that’s just hiding is still there, or a beaver that’s gone into his den is still there. It’s not magically disappeared because it’s out of view. Literally all your dinner would be able to trick you simply by disappearing out of sight.

Kind of, ‘Oh no! I was chasing a deer and now it’s gone! No dinner for me tonight!’

Of course, wolves, like dogs, can still smell prey so they know it’s still there. That makes it harder for humans to understand object permanence in dogs and when it truly develops. We need to make our science experiments harder because even very young dogs are are more skilled than the baby simply because of their more complex olfactory skills. You couldn’t fake out a dog in the same way because the dog can still smell the cucumber even though its hidden under the coconut. Even so, unless we understand canine cognition better, we still might be giving frustrating and even impossible ‘enrichment’ tasks to our puppies who don’t understand that the food or toy is still there.

I’ve seen a lot of videos on social media where puppies are given food enrichment tasks, for example, that requires them to understand that hidden things still exist. Of course, the puppies aren’t very interested in the task then. They also don’t know what to do. We need to be careful even with tasks like this that we are not making it too hard and that we scaffold such activities to support development.

When does object permanence develop in dogs?

Object permanence develops in stages.

Visual tracking of objects is one part of this. Search skills are also a part of it.

Visual tracking develops first and there is some evidence that this differs between different breeds and also between wolves and dogs.

After a puppy learns to visually track an item, they will then be able to begin searching for it as their bodies develop.

Next, they’ll learn to track partially hidden objects when they’d begun the tracking before the object was hidden.

For instance, if you’d begun to move away from a very young puppy, the next stage of development of object permanence would be that they could find you as long as they had already begun tracking you before you disappeared and hid.

The next developmental stage of object permanence is when the dog could find you even though you’d disappeared from view when they weren’t tracking you in the first place.

The next stage of development is in being able to find you when they expect to find you where you left.

You can see that a lot of dogs in this video are at that stage. It violates their expectations that their guardian is not in the same place they were when they left. Perhaps they understand their guardian didn’t cease to exist, so they understand that objects are permanent. Even so, not all of them have reached the next developmental milestone of going to investigate other places their guardian might be. I did this to my dogs. They didn’t care a single bit. Perhaps this is simply because they have a sense that I’m permanent even if I disappeared.

The Frenchie at a minute in has object permanence but hasn’t moved on developmentally, where the Golden retriever at 1.15 isn’t that surprised and goes to check out where their guardian has gone. In fact, the Frenchie actually investigates the blanket, not the doorway. The Golden is surprised but then investigates alternatives.

Sometimes, when I’m at the park and Lidy is on the far side, she’ll look up and look for me. If I stand really still, I know she can’t see me especially if I’m upwind of her. 600m is a stretch when things aren’t moving and the air currents are not in your favour. However, I can see her looking for me. That she’s even looking for me when she can’t see me depends on her skills of understanding that there’s something permanent about me even if she can’t see or hear me. I bet most of us haven’t even thought about what a big chunk of advanced cognition that is. We might expect, though, that a younger dog would panic if they couldn’t see us.

The Golden in the video is a good example of the development of object permanence. Looking for the guardian is a step up from simple object permanence. That’s also understanding that the human hasn’t simply disappeared and they’re not hidden under the blanket, but that they might actually be somewhere else you can’t see. Clever golden retriever!

You’ll also see a bemused cat in the video too. This actually highlights an interesting finding in Gagnon and Doré (1994) which is that dogs may have slightly more developed cognitive processes than cats where object permanence is concerned.

However, no research exists exploring heritability of object permanence as a trait, comparing it to behaviour of wolves and studying behaviour across breeds.

It may be that understanding things you can’t see are still there and that they might not be where you last saw them, able to make a cognitive leap and predict where they now might reasonably be may have had importance in human selection for canine behaviour in certain types of dog.

This is not an unreasonable thing to think since puppies’ eyes open at different points on average.

Of the five breeds studied by Scott and Fuller, 94% of the beagles and the cocker spaniels had their eyes open at 14 days, compared to only 31% of shelties and 11% of terriers.

They found the day on which eyes opened was heritable, meaning that some spaniels and beagles had their eyes open a full week longer than terriers. The opening of the eyes is the first developmental change as puppies move into the critical development period, and clearly that it earlier in some breeds than in others, giving them a developmental head-start.

I’m sure it seems completely trivial to most of us that dogs have this skill. Every morning, I hide one of Heston’s toys and ask him to find it while I get dressed and prepare to take him out. The fact that he can do this shows he has the cognitive ability to understand object permanence: just because he can’t see it doesn’t mean that it has ceased to exist. The fact that he continues looking for his toy shows a high level of skill, not just in the development of his object permanence processes. It also shows other regulatory processes including resilience, persistence and an ability to work productively through frustration.

These are all critical developmental skills.

If you’re interested, by the way, in your dog’s cognitive skills, if you find Triana and Pasnak (1981), you can easily follow their simple tests and find out what level of development your dog’s object permanence is at.

Gagnon and Doré (1994) looked at when these skills emerged, since earlier research had simply looked at skills in adult dogs. What they found was that between eyes opening and 28 days, puppies behaved like the baby with the cucumber: out of sight meant the object had ceased to exist. Objects were not permanent for 4-week-old puppies.

At 5 weeks, puppies could track and find partially hidden items though if something distracted them in that process, they couldn’t find the item.

Puppies could only find completely hidden items at 6 weeks, but only if they started looking before the item was completely hidden.

By 8 weeks, puppies could find completely hidden items that had been hidden while they were distracted. From here, their development was relatively stable and most dogs, like the ones in the video where people disappear from behind the sheet, don’t understand that an item or person hidden in one place might actually be somewhere else.

However, at 12 months, research showed that dogs could manage to find hidden items that were in unexpectedly surprising locations (ie they weren’t using odour to track it) as long as they’d had experience doing so. Maybe the golden retriever in the video has just had an environment where he’d been asked to solve problems and work things out?

What the research showed about the way that object permanence develops in dogs is that there wasn’t much change between what they knew at 8 weeks and what they knew at 7 months. Around 8 months to a year, in the right environment, dogs began to pick up more complex cognitive skills.

It’s as if a final block of development comes online during adolescence. The foundations were established by 8 weeks, but the final blocks came into play much later. This has profound implications about the complexity of tasks we ask young dogs to complete.

The significance of these skills

The significance of these skills is simply to serve as a great example of just how much we expect of young puppies; I was hiding relatively odourless things for Heston and asking him to find them way before he hit a year old and really that was too complex for him. I could have caused him a lot of frustration. I was expecting a 10-week-old puppy to do things that were beyond the grasp of 10-month-old human babies with their enormous cognitive brains.

We ask a lot of young dogs.

We also see that there is a hiatus between 8 weeks, when they’ve got the rudimentary big blocks of learning and their understanding by a year. Wolves, of course, stay with the family group to this age and this makes sense because they perhaps wouldn’t yet have the cognitive skills to help them survive and thrive where predation is concerned. Puppies, of course, generally rely on humans to feed them.

This has very important implications for the kind of food enrichment tasks we give to dogs younger than a year. Of course, food is smelly and we make it easy enough, but if you’re putting biscuits that don’t smell much of anything in a ball pit that smells hugely of plastic, don’t expect the puppy to be able to cope easily.

It also has implications for why we shouldn’t be teaching recall by hiding from our young dogs.

Object permanence also has relevance for puppies in terms of separation anxiety and also stranger anxiety. From 5 weeks onwards, puppies understand that you are absent when they can’t see you and may struggle to cope with that. Since the evidence about the development of object permanence in puppies suggests they’re fully ‘online’ by a year, it may be that we need to approach our puppy programmes for separation much more cautiously. Any trainer that tells you to leave a crying puppy simply does not understand that you are likely to cause permanent trauma. We need to be working on helping young dogs cope with separation on a gradual, safe and progressive programme, not freaking them out. Expecting them to cope is to completely misunderstand puppy development and capacity.

This is also going to be true from 5 weeks onwards to a year where puppies are going to need support to help them cope with their anxiety about strangers. Since object permanence is linked to separation and stranger anxiety in human infants, and since object permanence in puppies develops in the same way as it does in human infants, we should expect that, since dogs are also social mammals, these three regulatory processes no doubt echo each other. However, Gagnon and Doré’s work suggests that development is quicker for puppies at the beginning, as they reach milestones at 8 weeks that human infants only reach at 8 months, and then it is slower, where puppies only reach milestones at a year that human children reach proportionately more quickly. Perhaps the most important stage in which puppies develop coping skills to handle both separation and strangers will be the 5-8 week one. This, of course, has profound implications for breeders and puppy fosterers.

It’s also important to point out that these processes of object permanence are also tied up in attention, salience and motivation. It’s delicately and finely nuanced, beautifully complex in its finesse.

We fail to appreciate just how complex puppy development of regulatory skills can be. The information we have on puppy development is clear evidence of that. The first developmental period of object permanence in puppies between 5 and 8 weeks coincides with the emergence of the first fear period, and then the second developmental period of these skills between 9-12 months coincides with what tentative evidence we have about the emergence of the secondary fear period.

This supports the notion that we need to approach canine adolescence more thoughtfully as well as being gentler with our young puppies. We need to be more realistic in our expectations and more careful in how we scaffold activities to help puppies cope with the absence of their social group.

Expecting young dogs to have the skills to cope with what you’re asking may well go against their cognitive capacity for their age and developmental stage.

It also gives us a good insight into just how smart some of our dogs are. This my little cocker Tilly, a dog I’d always considered to be of very little brain.

She would quite often guard bones and the likes. I would distract her and hide the offending item, often putting it on the mantlepiece and then moving it when she wasn’t looking. Sometimes, she would see me put it on the mantlepiece. Here, I’d put something on the mantlepiece days before and then thrown it away. There can’t have been much residual smell, if any.

Yet not only is she telling me quite categorically that she’s recalled after 3 days where her bone went to, but she also enlists my help in getting it because she can’t. That’s some advanced cognition! At 0.58 and 1.01, she looks right to where she thinks the hidden object is (3 days after it had been removed and forgotten about!)

Worse still is her anxious glances towards the bigger dogs who a big part of me thinks she suspects might steal it. Sometimes, when we’re working with dogs who guard resources, as Tilly did before she arrived with me, it can be tempting to think there was ‘nothing there’ – what if there *had* been something there, just days earlier?! Our beliefs that dogs don’t have the cognitive skills to do this may very well get in the way of understanding the problem. What if, when dogs seem to be guarding the invisible, they’re really guarding what they think is a hidden item obscured from view?

We write off canine cognitive processes as more simple than ours, but Tilly clearly believed the missing bone really was on the mantlepiece. If that’s not object permanence at work, I don’t know what is. I always had to lift her up and physically put her on the mantlepiece. Even so, Tilly is no Lassie: her behaviour is still egocentric. That’s her bone up there she wants. I’m not sure she’d come and tell me a boy was down a well. That’s a cognitive leap too far. Also, she hadn’t got the next level of development that humans often go on to reach but dogs usually do not: the idea that things that disappear in one place might be somewhere else instead.

We’re only at the beginning of our journey to understand when and how and why these skills develop in humans, let alone in dogs. What we do know is that they’re intricately entwined in other developmental processes and we need to remember that our young dogs might not have the cognitive capacity to do what we’re asking yet.

As their caregivers, we need to support our puppy’s development in a consistent, calm, kind and gentle way, understanding what they are capable of, what they need support to learn and what is beyond their grasp.

We also need to support them and scaffold their learning, understanding their limitations and their capabilities, remembering that cognitive development is taught not caught. Dogs don’t learn by accident or genes: they learn because they’re in the right environment with the right support to do so.

In the next post, I’ll be looking at other aspects of physiological, behavioural, emotional, social and cognitive regulation in dogs as we work towards considering ways in which we can support dogs in their development.

In short, given what studies like that of Gagnon and Doré tell us, a little bit of consideration of what puppies and juvenile dogs are actually capable of wouldn’t go amiss. Dialling back our expectations and being realistic about dogs’ learning will certainly help. If you wouldn’t expect a toddler to help you solve mysteries fit for Sherlock Holmes, don’t expect your young dog to either.

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In the last six months or so, there’s been an increasing amount of talk in the dog world about emotional regulation in dogs.

It’s not a term that many people have really sat down and thought about. As a result, it runs the risk of being just another buzzword. Some trainers have already started using it as a synonym for impulse control. This seems to be because they don’t like to use the word ‘control’, perhaps because it smacks of coercion and force. This is sad because they’re just dressing up fairly coercive practice in buzzwords, hoping that they’ll somehow magically become more positive.

Other trainers have jumped on this trendy buzzword and taken it to mean things like dogs learning rule structures and complying with human requests or commands. Sitting nicely and being calm or coping in a crate for hours on end are sometimes erroneously taken to be examples of how dog trainers are ‘teaching’ dogs self-regulation strategies. This is not teaching puppies how to regulate their emotions: it is using control to manage developing animals and ignoring their needs.

If you’re a dog trainer starting to throw this term into your work, have a read of this before you go any further. If you’re a guardian, this article should help you understand this crucial skill for dogs.

Emotional regulation in animals is actually not that well defined. It’s been relatively well defined in children in recent years and it’s no doubt the fact that it is the latest buzzword in Early Years education in the UK that’s driving dog trainers to pick up on the trend. For that reason, I’ve been picking the brains of my former colleagues in Early Years training in the UK to help me get my head around it. We were ably assisted by a post-doc educator who teaches through opening up her students’ eyes to the world around us and who could help translate a concept meant for human development into more general principles about other species. I have to say that as a result of these weekly conversations, my mind has well and truly been blown. Humans are such a young species: we could do with watching and listening the world around us a little more, that’s for sure!

So what is regulation? Self-regulation is an individual’s ability to moderate their own energy levels, emotions, behaviours and attention in ways that are socially acceptable.

What might that look like in dogs?

Managing energy levels

One thing is knowing when you’re tired and you need to put yourself to bed. My boy Heston has always been very good at putting himself to bed in the bedroom when he’s had enough. Around about 7pm, he wanders off to the bedroom and puts himself to bed.

Another way might be a dog who interrupts play. We can’t know that dogs consciously interrupt play because things are getting too much. But we do see dogs self-interrupting when things get a little too arousing.

I’m going to share here one of my favourite videos of Heston with a young puppy. She was 8 weeks old. I’d had to separate her from her siblings because she was not able to interrupt her play and manage her energy levels. She was biting her siblings very hard. They were squealing and it was becoming more and more intense. Here, she’s playing with Heston who knows how to help her manage her energy levels without letting her get too over-aroused:

What you can see is that as she gets more intense, Heston stops play politely, gets up and disengages.

What he’s doing, in other words, is managing his own energy levels. In fact, I’d argue that just like any good uncle, he’s helping her learn to manage her emotions as well. It is one of his most magnificent skills.

Managing emotions

Self-regulation is also about managing our own emotions. This is where it gets complex for dogs because the first step of managing your emotions is recognising that you’re having them and then taking steps to acknowledge them, accept them and decide whether or not to behave as they’re directing you to.

Let’s just be clear: humans are not very good at this all the time. Young children are not very good at this. Tantrums are a perfectly normal example of how difficult it can be to manage your emotions. Teenagers are also not particularly good at this. I’m reminded of that scene in The Lost Boys where, when Jason Patric sees Jami Gertz and starts following her through the fair, Corey Haim playing his younger brother badgers him into admitting he’s chasing her: ‘I’m at the mercy of your sex glands, bud!’

Also, given the current state of social media, adult humans are also not particularly good at managing their emotions either. Recognising what’s pushing your buttons, what’s driving you and then managing it seems to be beyond a whole heap of people.

Is now a good time to admit I’m on a 12-hour temporary Twitter ban for calling an MP a made-up rude word?

None of us are angels on that score, I bet.

It’s tough to know whether dogs recognise their own emotions. As ethologist Frans de Waal might remind us, it’s very hard to test whether they do.

As my educator friend would say, though: What Do You See?

Well, I see dogs who moderate their bites in anger ALL the time.

Not a day goes by when I don’t work with dogs who have bitten. That’s my speciality. One of the hardest things for guardians to accept is that there was actually a whole heap of emotional management in the bite. Even dogs who fight usually exhibit a whole heap of restraint. That restraint is my evidence of emotional management. Inhibition is a very good indicator that animals are regulating their emotions. Whenever you see a dog inhibit their response, that for me is evidence that they can and do regulate their emotions.

Just as an example, Lidy doesn’t particularly like it if she’s resting and I touch her foot by accident or I move a bit. She usually hops off the couch, jumps back on again and repositions herself further away. For me, what I see is a dog who is irritated by my clumsy behaviour and who, instead of biting me in the face and killing me, chooses to get up, reposition herself and de-escalate the situation. My emotional dog handling her emotions a whole lot better than many of us on social media….

Managing behaviour

Physiology, emotions and behaviour are a big, tangled knot. They are each other. Physiology is behaviour and behaviour is physiology. It’s a bit difficult to separate out those three concepts from each other.

That’s why in managing her irritation, my dog Lidy then manages her own behaviour.

We see this all the time in restraint and behavioural inhibition.

A fairly regular occurrence in my house is that Heston will spend 7pm onwards stretched out on my bed. When Lidy and I go to bed, he’ll often get off the bed and go in his own bed. Sometimes, however, he stays on the bed. He’s a pretty big dog and my bed is small. Lidy alters her behaviour around him. Usually, if he’s not on the bed, she’ll jump right up and lie down. There’s plenty of energy in her jump and she usually does it the moment we go into the bedroom.

Yet if Heston is on the bed, she’ll usually sit and wait. She’ll look at him patiently, look at the space left, look again, stand up, put her front paws up tentatively, sit back down again, maybe stand up and turn in a circle. Only when she can see that a) he isn’t going to move and give her the whole bed and b) he’s not going to have any issue letting her up will she then hop onto the bed. It’s a beautiful, communicative dance.

He does the same back to her if she is on the couch and he wants to get up. He’s so tentative and restrained. Whenever dogs manage themselves in turn-taking, they are regulating their behaviour.

When my friend asks What Do You See? I see dogs modulating and modifying the intensity of their behaviour.

Managing attention

Another feature of self-regulation is managing your attention. One thing that is fairly common in Early Years scenarios is that young children find it hard to focus their attention in distracting environments. As we grow up, we sometimes get better at doing this, but it very much depends on the intensity of those distractions. I find it very hard, for instance, when there are significant events happening around the world not to check in on news sites regularly. I find it hard to manage where my attention goes if I’m hungry or if I’m tired. If the topic hasn’t truly grabbed me, I find it hard to keep paying attention to it. I’m supposed to be writing some stuff about learning and memory right now but it’s not as interesting as this regulation butterfly I’m chasing, so here I am.

We ask dogs to manage their attention all the time. That can be hard as it involves complex cognitive processes such as executive function and working memory. Have you ever thought for a single second how hard it is for assistance dogs and service dogs and working dogs to *not* go off and do this:

Managing our attention means being able to prioritise. It means being able to manage multiple tasks and do a number of things at the same time. It means decision making. It also means being able to ignore things and turn off distractions.

About emotional regulation

So far, I’ve been writing about self-regulation, something that Early Years educators expect young children to be in the process of acquiring if they fit average human age + stage developmental milestones. It’s not something we’re born with. Nor is it one-size-fits-all.

A very large number of humans do not fit this ‘average’ mould as children or as grown-ups.

What’s hard is seeing just how many humans expect dogs to be able to manage their energy levels, emotions, behaviour and attention to higher standards than we expect of our own species. You know, the species with the large bits of the brain dedicated to helping us regulate ourselves.

It’s also really, really hard to see just how many humans expect very young dogs to simply know how to self-regulate.

We’re not born with the ability to regulate ourselves. Neither are puppies. Regulation is a developmental process if our bodies conform to some kind of average. It’s frequently thrown off course by hormonal changes and neurodevelopmental changes. It’s even thrown off course if we’re tired, stressed or hungry. If you’ve ever clenched your fists because someone was going slowly or you’ve ever thought to yourself, ‘Come on!’ when someone is taking too long at the checkout, you know how very easy it is for our ability to self-regulate to be thrown off course. Yesterday, I spent the day a bit agitated because my socks were too tight and I had a fat hair bobble in because I couldn’t find my skinny hair bobbles and it didn’t hold my hair in place satisfactorily and there may have been hormonal influences at work as well and it was also a bit windy and my couch just didn’t seem comfortable like normal and…

You get the picture.

Dogs’ ability to regulate is developmental as ours is. It is also subject to neurobiological changes, hormonal changes and the effect of the environment around us.

For humans, learning to self-regulate is important. It helps us learn to be resilient, to be tenacious, to cope with frustration, to be patient. It stops us all ending up in prison. It helps us manage stress and protects us from chronic long-term stress. It allows us to make friends, to form attachments, to be empathetic and compassionate.

The same things are true for dogs. Like young children, dogs are natural explorers. They are movers. Their learning is embodied. What that means is that learning things like ‘sit’ aren’t simply cognitive concepts, they are physical. They involve the body. Dogs are active learners. This is especially true of young dogs, whom we often expect to regulate their bladders, their bowels, their vocalisations, their actions, their needs to an incredibly high level at an incredibly young age.

What we need to remember is that babies of all species rely on their parents to regulate for them. Puppies can’t even regulate their own body temperature. As they develop, social mammalian species rely on adults to assist them. This process is called co-regulation and it has much more relevance for our dogs.

Co-regulation occurs as individuals move from dependence to independence. We get support from the social group in order to help manage our energy levels, our emotions, our behaviour and our attention.

How many parents out there are furious at the grandparents for sending home a child hopped up on sugar, a child who hasn’t had their afternoon nap? Young children rely on adults to help them manage their energy levels. Pre-schoolers don’t put themselves to bed when they’re tired, do they? They don’t help themselves from the fridge when they’re hungry? Even if you’re a parent who used structures like baby-led weaning to help your child move to independent food choices, it’s not entirely baby-led, is it? I mean, you don’t let your baby pick out everything they’d like in the supermarket? Which parent lets their child do the shopping? I know some of my friends don’t let their husband do the food shopping! If you give someone a shopping list, that is in itself a form of regulation.

Like young children, young dogs are still learning about their bodies, their likes, their dislikes, things that scare them, things that are fun. They’re learning how to behave.

What we can’t do as responsible, social beings, is leave this entirely up to the puppy. The development of social individuals is a social process. It’s the whole point of parenting for the first few developmental points and then it requires wider social structures. Developing individuals of any social species learn how to make friends, how to accept others, how to resolve conflict successfully. They learn coping strategies that help them deal with disappointment, with frustration or with anger. They learn about their bodies and how to use them. They learn how to care for others and how to enjoy life. They learn to laugh, to relax, to play.

To assume that these just happen is to misunderstand the whole point of being a social species; these skills do not develop in isolation and they are all highly individual. We all have individual developmental needs where the guidance of adults helps make up for our personal deficits and our weaknesses, scaffolding our attempts to become a functioning individual.

As with everything in life, it’s always a fine balance: the balance between prescriptive and permissive guidance, the balance between individual needs and societal expectations, the balance between immediate and delayed gratification. It’s our job as trainers and as guardians to help our dogs with this, not expect them as if by some universal magic to develop these skills without familial and social support.

In the next few posts, we’ll be looking at puppy development and behaviour. We’ll look at developmental transitions. We’ll consider what happens when regulation fails. We’ll alsco consider ways in which we can help our dogs learn the skills they need to be members of their own species as well as members of interspecies social groups. We’ll explore the importance of predictable, consistent routines and clear boundaries for emotional security and safety, as well as ways we can create environments in which our dogs can flourish. All this will mean listening to our dogs’ needs, acknowledging their feelings and valuing them as individuals as well as creating a supportive environment in which they can flourish.

Don’t forget to sign up for emails if you want these delivered to your inbox, and follow Woof Like To Meet on Facebook. I’m in the process of pre-launching (is this a thing??) Lighten Up Dog Training, focused on helping dogs with the practicalities of regulation. It won’t be fully live in all its facets until September, but we depend on you to help us grow.

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Some of the hardest cases to resolve are those that involve fights between dogs in the home. Just to be clear, I’m not talking about the occasional growl or appropriate discussions between dogs here; today, I’m discussing the kind of fights that end up with dogs being taken to the vet. These cases often have the worst prognosis simply because the dogs may need to be heavily managed and also because, unfortunately, many guardians wait until it’s too late to get in touch with a qualified professional. 

This is worsened by the old-fashioned view that dogs need to have a fight to sort things out. This is simply wrong. For some dogs I’ve worked with, the single fight has been the fight that killed them. So let’s not continue to perpetuate myths that dogs need to have a fight. This view is often tied up with ideas about pecking orders and hierarchies. I’m not going to go into detail about how complex, nuanced and complicated canine relationships are, suffice to say that what we know suggests that rank and status are given, not taken. That’s to say where a pair of dogs do show unidirectional behaviours which are typically understood to be those of dominance or submission, status is not earned by thrashing your subordinates. Status is given because you’re affiliative. Anyone telling you within five minutes that your dogs are fighting to sort out a pecking order and it’s all about rank isn’t qualified to work with your dogs. Please do not take their advice if they recommend you support one dog or another, or that you punish behaviours. These usually increase aggression, not decrease it. 

All this said, surprisingly little is actually known about fights in the home. There have been two studies that cover this. The first is Sherman, Reisner, Taliaferro and Houpt (1996). They looked at 99 case studies from 1983 – 1993. While they didn’t discriminate between dogs who’d just been put together and dogs who’d lived longer together, most of their findings will resonate with what I’m going to discuss further – particularly one trigger which they categorised as ‘excitement’ where 51 of the 78 dogs who’d fought in the home did so in whatever we might unpick from that label. I think that’s my most significant take away from this paper.

The other study is a 2011 study from Wrubel, Moon-Fanelli, Mananda and Dodman. They looked at 38 cases that came to the behaviour clinic in a year. 

Because of the sparsity of studies or any academic literature whatsoever, I decided to look at my own case history for the last eight years and to identify key features of the situations. I picked out 100 cases where the dogs had lived together for more than 6 months. I don’t think it’s fair to say that dogs who fight the first time they meet or in the first few days are really familiar with each other. Most of the dogs I work with where there is very severe injury or where one dog has killed another have actually lived with each other for a relatively long period of time. 

Both of the published papers are very interesting, but I didn’t feel like they gave us the whole picture. It certainly gave me numbers to confirm or question. Sherman et al. found breed links in their 78 cases, where toy breeds and gundogs were less likely to engage in household conflict, and herding and working breeds more likely. This certainly isn’t replicated in my work, where some of the worst injuries I’ve seen have been between Asiatic breeds and spaniels, as well as terriers of all sizes. No dog breeds were exempt from causing injury and no dog breeds were frequently targeted. 

There were other aspects of their paper that I did find to be true in my own case histories, though. They found same-sex pairings much more likely, with females more likely to be involved in in-home fighting. In my 100 cases, I only had two cases of intersex aggression where the fights had ended with one dog going to the vet. They also found that 42 of the 73 instigators were younger, the average age was 4.2 – so these are not babies squabbling –  and 43 of the 73 were more recent arrivals in the home. That’s not to say they’d just arrived, but that they’d had less time in the home. My own case studies were more nuanced than this. 

Wrubel et al. really consolidated these early findings, bar one or two points, just as my own case history does. They differentiated helpfully between date of onset and date of arrival at the behaviour clinic. The average onset was 36 months – so right on the cusp of social maturity for many dogs – and that the younger dog was often the instigator. The late onset of fighting may suggest then that social maturity is a key factor rather than sexual maturity.

I found there were two age clusters in same-sex injurious fighting. The first cluster happened where an older dog significantly harms a younger dog. The older dog is usually older than 2 years; the younger dog is between 7-11 months. In these situations, the older dog can’t necessarily be said to be the instigator. The younger dog has been engaged in ebullient or exuberant behaviour at times of high energy, such as when guardians return home, when it’s mealtime, when guests arrive. The older dog will often, and with little apparent warning to the guardians, rush over and attack the younger dog. This happens when the younger dog is coming to sexual maturity, and it didn’t matter if the dogs were sterilised or not. There’s often a similar history: a fairly relaxed home where the younger dog hasn’t had much by way of obedience training, and the relationship between the two dogs has been left to them to manage. The older dog has usually been engaged in ‘policing’ or ‘schooling’ the younger dog for some time, often using their bodies to corral or block the younger dog, in the absence of guardian intervention. There haven’t been any fights because the younger dog has always acquiesced, but even so, the behaviour has not decreased. Then, in a hotspot or at a flashpoint, the older dog seems to lose all inhibition and escalates. Many of the wounds are to the head and neck. 

The second cluster happens nearer to the two published studies’ average age, when the dogs reach social maturity. In wolves, sexual maturity is often the point at which adult wolves will disperse, or be forced to disperse, from the family group. They reach social maturity long before that. For dogs, the big changes relate to reproduction: they reach sexual maturity when they are still socially immature (kind of a bit like humans!) and it seems to be as the younger dog reaches social maturity that the major problems occur. In these cases, it’s often the older dog that is sent to the vet, and it is also the older dog who instigates the fight. Again, there is a history where the younger dog has been repeatedly ‘policed’ or ‘schooled’ by the older dog, where the older dog has used their body to cut off the younger dog, to block the younger dog or to manage the younger dog. What’s different is that even though these fights also tend to happen in hotspots at flashpoints in the day, the younger dog is relatively well-mannered. Remember, free-ranging dogs and wolves might naturally disperse if they were being threatened by another individual, and dogs in the home can’t do that, so there are issues here about how we manage that. That said, anyone who tells you that free-ranging dogs don’t fight within their group probably hasn’t looked at a lot of footage. Fights do happen, and we have no data to say how that compares to dogs who live their lives fully restrained by fences, gates, walls and doors. If I had to assign any kind of motivation to these fights, it’d be a younger dog who has tolerated antisocial or harassing behaviours from an older dog for a long period of time and then just gets to the end of their tether. 

A third common factor often relates to the health and role of peacekeepers. In France, it’s not unusual for many people to have more than one dog, unlike the UK. We should always ask about dogs who were not involved in the fight and what their role is. It’s not unusual, although it’s not very common, to find that an older dog has been playing peacekeeper between two dogs who really don’t seem to have a smooth relationship, but when their health changes and they aren’t keeping the peace, fights break out. You can see why people might interpret this as something to do with a pecking order and make up fictions about how the two younger dogs are fighting to be top dog. It’s not the case, but we do need to realise that sex hormones are important, otherwise the fights would be random between sexes and they are not, and that age is also important, otherwise we wouldn’t be seeing these repeated patterns of behaviour across families. In my opinion, these two factors are much more important than breed. 

While we may think that dogs who guard resources like food or toys, or who have trouble accepting other dogs in their space when they are resting or being petted, are probably the issue, this isn’t often the case. These situations can often be managed relatively easily in my experience, as long as we know what’s causing it. Sensible dogs who have good canine codes will always be aware of the situation. Just as an example, my two current dogs have never, ever fought. There are occasional growls both ways, but Heston has such wonderful understanding of other dogs that he is always respectful. For example, if Lidy is on his preferred couch and not on her own, and he wants to get up there, he stands looking at her for a couple of minutes and then gingerly, with such care and caution, he gets up very slowly when he can see she is watching him. One of my DoGenius students sent me a wonderful video of an elderly female dog who had a bone and a younger male terrier who wanted it. He let her know he’d really like it, without being obnoxious (okay, a little, as only socially immature individuals can be!) and she relinquished it. My favourite moment was just how slowly she relinquished it and just how slowly the terrier went in to get it. Both are examples of how dogs are aware of what the other will find offensive and how they moderate their own behaviour so as not to cross the line. I always feed my two in different rooms if possible, and if Lidy hasn’t quite finished, or Heston hasn’t quite finished, both will wait patiently until the other has got up and moved away.

We can always manage our dogs by teaching them moderation around other dogs or by giving them clearly defined spaces. Never, ever have I let a dog go and stick their face in the bowl of another, for example. Never expect dogs to just be naturally polite. I grew up with siblings and, out of the view of our parents, any goodies on our plates were fair game unless we protected them. My brother still has the scars from where I stabbed him with a fork. There’s a lot of talk about ‘self-regulation’ in the dog world at the moment, mostly from people who don’t really understand it and use it as a more politically correct version of ‘impulse control’. For reasons I don’t quite understand, teaching dogs to control themselves seems to be going out of fashion, mainly for the same reasons that I don’t like leaving dogs to police the behaviour of younger, more exuberant dogs, I guess. Because teaching impulse control perhaps smacks of coercion, it’s fading out of fashion and some dog trainers are now calling it ‘self-regulation’. It’s not, and they’re different, and we’ll get into that in the next post, but co-regulation is a thing and we perhaps need to be remembering that we don’t expect human children to self-regulate without scaffolding their attempts through co-regulation first. More on that to follow, I promise! Needless to say, since I know Lidy finds it hard to let Heston jump into the car after her and she’ll often growl at him perhaps because he’s exuberant and excited by the car, and it takes a bit of energy for him to hop up these days, she goes in second. He gets in first because he has no problem with her hopping in after him, and she goes second. If I had to explain it, I’d say she probably is afraid he’ll bounce her. He won’t, but her growl reminds him not to. I’m sure someone else would explain it as her guarding her space, so you can see why I’m not a fan of explanatory fictions. I don’t know why she growls if she goes in first: she just does. This is resolved by her going in second. Whatever the cause, the solution is the same. 

Resources, space and access to human attention were three relatively common triggers across the two published studies and my own case history, but all were trumped by what Sherman et al. called ‘excitement’. For me, we need to unpick this a little. In my own case histories, fights often happened in predictable spaces. These spaces were small and narrow, like doorways, windows, under tables, behind chairs, in corridors, on landings, in hallways, at gates, in cars or at fence-lines. I know it feels a bit ridiculous to think that a fence-line if it opens onto a 4-acre garden is a ‘small and narrow’ space, but the fence acts as an invisible magnet in many cases. I call these places hotspots.

Coupled with these hotspots, a flashpoint is a change of energy or emotion, or the introduction of an environmental change. For some dogs, that could be someone walking past outside the window, or their guardian returning home. It could be guests arriving, or doorbells ringing. It could be cars going past or the excitement of going on a walk. Sometimes, it’s something as trivial as a guardian standing up. I’ve worked with dogs who were sleeping peaceably in their beds until the guardian stood up and then they attacked each other. Managing these flashpoints and hotspots is a key factor in facilitating healthy relationships within the home. 

Working with dogs who are fighting in the home is far too complex to discuss in a short article such as this, and it’s incredibly individualised. It’s about the dynamic between the dogs and the relationship they have with their guardian. It’s fuelled by hormones and social bonds. That said, good management and support from the humans can avoid dogs having to sort it out for themselves, particularly where the stakes are high. It’s not a solution, but it can be preventative. We need to be mindful of those hotspots and flashpoints, as well as resources, space and human attention. 

You may have noticed my absence over the past couple of months… I’ve been working on two things and I’m so very thrilled to be getting to the point where I can share them.

The first has been working with a team of Early Years specialists in the UK, colleagues from another lifetime, on understanding what we know about regulation in young children. We had the privilege of working with an educator whose work defies categorisation and labelling but she works with young children to help them learn from the world around them, from fungi and plants to other human beings. I’ll be posting some things about that work on emotional co-regulation and how it might relate to dogs over the coming weeks.  

I’ve also started work on a project I’ll be launching in August that builds on this. I’m hugely excited by this, I have to say. It started off as a book but it got too big and too readerly, so it’ll be an ongoing blended project that I hope will bring a joyful, energising and inspiring twist to our work with dogs who are struggling to adapt to our modern world. Lighten Up Dog Training feels like the beginning of something very fresh and also very important. I work so often with dogs who are struggling to cope emotionally. Be it predatory impulses, lack of behavioural inhibition, poor social skills, fractured or fraught relationships, anxiety, fearfulness or frustration that often culminate in all kinds of maladaptive behaviour, having spent eight years specialising in improving the lives of dogs like these, I feel ready to share. Or, at least, I will be by September. I’m in the final stages of putting everything together, but it will be truly multimodal with dedicated troll-free chat groups, live sessions, coaching, technical guides, vidoes, How To sheets and case studies. Yes, it’s massive. Yes, it scares me! Yes, it’ll be HIGH quality and cheap as chips. Some bits and pieces will be going out before the big launch in September, so feel free to share if you see them and you value them!

It also means that I’ll be able to keep Woof Like To Meet open to support rescue dogs and rehomed dogs as I originally intended it.

I’ll be sharing stuff over the next five months in anticipation of the big launch so keep your eyes open!

Don’t forget you can also buy a copy of my book Client-Centred Dog Training if you’re a dog trainer looking to improve your relationship with your clients and improve your results. I have it on good authority that it’s not too bad at all.