Episode 24 - Puppy Play Groups: Benefits and Realities

10/7/2024

This week’s conversation is the result of an interview that I did with Jean Donaldson a few weeks ago.

In it, Jean mentioned that it’s now a “thing” not to offer puppy play groups for puppies. The thought is that allowing puppies to play will make them less likely to pay attention to their owners.

This raised a big discussion in the Puppy Culture Discussion Group, with many pet owners, breeders, and trainers coming down hard on the side of not taking puppies to puppy play groups. What I found through this exchange is that the theoretical truth and the practical truth do not always align…

In this episode, I discuss:

The benefits and parameters for puppy play groups.
Why there is a perception that puppy play will diminish attention to the owner and/or create hyper focus on other dogs.
The practical limitations and realities of puppy play groups and thoughts for the future

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To read the transcript for this episode, click the link below.

EPISODE 24 - Transcript

I'm Jane Messineo Lindquist, and this is a Puppy Culture potluck podcast. You bring the topics, we bring the conversation.

This week's conversation is the result of a post that I made in response to something that was said by Jean Donaldson when I interviewed her a few weeks ago. So let me play this little clip from that interview first.

The other thing I would just add, what if they're hunting for puppy classes to find puppy classes that allow free play?

Jean Donaldson
That's a mystery. Perfectly important. There was a trend a couple of years ago where just somebody in a, you know, kind of clickbait fashion were trying to say, you know what, in puppy classes we should be teaching puppies to calm and do down stays and lie down and be calm and control, you know? Yeah. Yeah. Rather than engaging in species, normal interact actions and learning to become social.

Jean Donaldson
And I think that luckily that fad has passed and it flies in the face of everything we know about sensitive periods and socialization. So I would I would caution people away from puppy classes that the free play is somehow dangerous. Who teaches dogs to be excited or teachers don't sleep over, socialize, etc. There's just no such thing. I mean that that is dangerous malpractice.

Jane Messineo Lindquist
Interesting. I have not seen that, but that's a good point.

(Back to Jane Messineo Lindquist)
So as a result of that interview I wrote into the Puppy Culture Discussion group on Facebook, and this is what I said.

I just interviewed Jean Donaldson for a podcast and it came up that it's a thing now for some puppy classes not to allow puppy playtime. I guess the thought is that puppies should be paying attention and learning to be controlled, not learning that other dogs are fun and good.

I do not agree with this and would not recommend a class for young puppies that does not include playtime. But some points. Number one, as I mentioned in the Be Your Puppies Advocate booklet, group play should be only for puppies under 12 weeks old, possibly a bit older for neotenous breeds. Puppies older than that should play only in pairs and the pairs should be selected for compatibility.

There's little risk of real aggression with puppies under 12 weeks old, but that changes rapidly as the puppies exit the critical socialization period. As Dr. Brite talks about in Puppy Culture, one of the big benefits of a puppy play and learn class is that the puppy learns transitions. Now we do this, now we do that. We ramp up and play.

We ramp down and relax. Dr. Brite talks about how it's these transitions that can get adult dogs into trouble and how important it is to shape the ability to transition between different modes while the puppies are still very young and malleable. Number three, no one ever returned a dog to a breeder or shelter because the dog liked other dogs too much.

But dogs get returned or relinquished all the time because of dog aggression. So absolutely find a puppy class that includes puppy playtime for puppies under 12 weeks old. Play in pairs for older puppies.

So. Wow. Did I get some amazing feedback from this? And a lot of people really took me down pretty hard about saying that I wouldn't recommend a puppy class that didn't have puppy play.

I'm just going to cut to the chase here and say I do think everything I said is right. And every person that told me why they didn't think puppy play classes were good. I'm going to go through them and tell you why I think they're wrong. But the reality is, what this opened my eyes to is that it's almost impossible to find a good puppy play and learn.

So my focus maybe is going to switch from encouraging people to find a good puppy play and learn to educating people on how to set up their own good play sessions. So that's the ‘too long didn't read’ version of this podcast. Now let's go through these amazing comments that everybody made.

I'm not going to read verbatim this comment because some version of it was made several times and it was show breeders that said they do not want to take their puppies to puppy class and teach them to play with other puppies because they need them to focus on them.

And they felt that taking puppies to puppy class teaches them to be hyper interested in other dogs and not ignore them. And this is the easiest comment for me to address, because this is the one that I'm going to say I don't agree with you on this.

For my breed, that can be a bit mistrustful of novel breeds, it's super important for them to have experiences and good experiences with a variety of different breeds. They're really not a breed that's just going to ignore. They're not neutral on this either. They're going to it's going to be in their book as okay or not okay. And as I mention in all my educational materials, space, space, they need space and the freedom to control the temperature of their interactions.

So my dogs really do learn a lot by going to good play groups. There, there is no comparison. The puppies that I have not been able to take to play groups and the puppies that I have been able to take to play groups. Much better result when I can take them to play groups. Now, obviously I show my dogs, so at the same time that I'm taking them to puppy class, I'm taking them to show handling class.

And not only do I think handling class is great for my puppies, I think anybody would do well to start with handling class with their puppy, especially anyone that wants to do any kind of dog sport or performance. Teaching the dog just to stand at a lineup of other dogs and ignore other dogs. Priceless. But the two things being in a playgroup and learning to ignore other dogs are not mutually exclusive.

To me, saying that you're not going to let your puppy play with other puppies because you're afraid that your puppy will have too much interest in the other puppies and not pay attention in the show ring is the equivalent of saying, I'm not going to teach my show dog to sit because then he won't stack in the show ring.

It's just not true. And in fact, if anything, the opposite is true, at least in my experience. The benefits that my puppies pick up from having play experiences with a variety of breeds is priceless and translates into them being more comfortable in the dog show ring and having less of that sort of forbidden fruit thing about the other dogs.

It's like, Yeah, I know these dogs. I've played with them. They've assimilated already what other dogs are through good play groups and they get the context that this is where we just stand here and pay attention. If my puppies don't get that early experience and I, I definitely have had puppies that have not had that early experience either because I bought them from someone else or it was during pandemic.

And it's just such a long slog up, a steep hill to get them to pay attention because they're there's so much emotional overload from just this “Woah, what are all these other dogs?” So I just I just don't agree. I think that it makes better show dogs when they understand other dogs and they've played with them.

Now, all that having been said, for sure, there's got to be some training involved here. And it goes down to that same question of some people say, well, you should never teacher show dog to sit because then they'll sit in the ring. And sure, that's true if you're really not going to train them to stand.

Okay, well, here's another woman that has an interesting comment.

This is always an interesting discussion. I do puppy play groups professionally, but for my own dogs I do not. They are a dog aggression prone breed, but I do not have any trouble with them at all in the many sports venues that we compete in. In fact, because of their being prone to dog aggression as well as reactivity, and because they are sport and show dogs, I teach them from puppy hood that dogs must be tolerated and ignored, not interacted with in general. I find the incessant need to have puppies and dogs in general involved in playgroups and dog parks so interesting and often very counterproductive due to the fact that dogs raised like this and constantly brought around other dogs to play often have very little interest in their humans and are way too dog focused and often develop reactivity due to frustration at not being able to run and play with every single dog they meet.

However, obviously you are talking about well-structured playgroups and using them to teach impulse control and how to switch on and off, etc. This is great and how I run my groups as well. And I am definitely not saying puppy play groups are wrong and that you shouldn't let your dog play with other dogs in general. But I don't find puppy play groups necessary and I definitely think when handled badly, playgroups can do more harm than good.

Okay, fair enough. But we have to differentiate between a playgroup for puppies under 12 weeks old where they're learning appropriate, conspecific play with a variety of breeds and the incessant need for stimulation that some dogs develop because of the dog park nation? Meaning to say owners feeling that constant stimulation, daycare, out all the time, playing with as many dogs as possible and we're talking about adult dogs that somehow that's beneficial and in 99.9% of those situations, those are also people who are not going to attend a class where they shape a tension, teach modulation, ramping up, ramping down.

The people aren't interested in that. They just want to see their dogs play. But, you know, the fact that some people use play between dogs and stimulation to a fault and inappropriately - inappropriate playgroups, inappropriate amounts of play, inappropriate lack of training, in no way diminishes the immense value of puppy play groups for puppies between eight and 12 weeks old. I mean, the two just it's apples and oranges. They have nothing to do with each other.

Okay. Apropos of the need to teach ramping up and ramping down and transitions, here's another one. Here's another comment.

So I have mixed feelings with my experience. The puppy playtime was solely for the purpose of interrupting, then returning to play in order to teach the puppies to be tolerant with interruption, and that it did not mean the end of fun. It was not for the purpose of interacting, behaviors between playing puppies were observed and discussed.

This is me interjecting here. Sounds like a great class, right? Perfect. But what could go wrong? Well, let's read on.

It was simply too short of time. It was also late in the evening, so the session overall was brief because of over tiring and overstimulation. However, my dog struggled in those moments when she did get confident and was having fun, the other puppy owner was slow to grab hold on their dog, like just not taking initiative. Even the instructors having to be the ones to grab, things happened like other dogs jumping on her head because I had control, but they didn't. That's a dangerous scenario.

It would shut her down significantly. She would be proactive and go up and nip the chins of other dogs even when they weren't coming close to her. As she got older, I discovered that she needed a lot of time to acclimate to another dog, though when she's tired, she communicates, and if she's lying down, she'll still go up to the other dog if they're within a large bubble and nip the chin to get them away.

Okay. Me again, it's such an important lesson. It's such an important lesson to engage, disengage, pay attention to the owner, play, come back, call off. But in execution, unfortunately, it's really hard to get it right. I get it. I get it that it can go really bad in real life.

Okay, so a lot of people wrote in responding to my comment that no dog ever got relinquished for being too friendly and said, indeed, they do. Here's one.

I like your points, but my dog loves people and other dogs so much that it's taking a lot of work. He's excessively friendly.

Another commenter says, We have had dogs relinquished because they like other dogs too much, unfortunately. Over friendly Labradors dragging owners to greet other dogs, refusing to recall jumping on people, injuring people either, knocking them over or pulling them off their feet. Frustration, barking because they can't greet the other dogs across the road. I do agree with everything else you've said. I just think it's important to allow those relinquished friendly dogs to be recognized.

And then someone responded, I agree. I think dogs that are encouraged to be hyper external can get frustrated when they can't visit who they want, when they want, and in some cases that turns into reactivity. Dogs get surrendered for various forms of reactivity, often sadly.

Someone else responded. Agreed. We have a lot of Labs and Goldie's that are reactive because of frustration. Once the frustration element is removed, they are often absolutely fine with other dogs and people, but the frustration element is significant.

Well, look, I think there's a few different things going on with the various dogs in these comments. I mean, some is just the dogs are not trained. I would bet a lot of money on two things with in these cases with this kind of dog, number one, whatever they're doing, this is not an issue where they were taken to four weeks of puppy class between eight and 12 weeks old and allowed to play with puppies.

If it is a hyper arousal situation, it's because they've been flooded for their entire lives. Every time they went out, it was to play, stimulation, that the owners never trained them otherwise, that the owners never worked on attention is the mother work. The owners didn't go to any kind of other training class and try and teach the dog how to walk on leash.

And to be fair, I'm not sure that those posters are saying otherwise. In other words, there was some negligence in the home that these puppies came from that created this behavior and it wasn't going to a puppy class and having playtime. But their point is that there is such a thing as a dog that is quote unquote too friendly.

But I don't think that reflects in any way on the advisability of a puppy playgroup for puppies under 12 weeks old, because there is no way that whatever behavior they're seeing here was created because these dogs went to a playgroup under 12 weeks old. It's similar to what I said about the show dogs like it's not that you absolutely don't want to ever let the dog see other dogs and learn that other dogs are good, and that's somehow going to keep them from pulling people around.

I mean, I think whether those dogs played with other dogs or not, they probably would still be that way. It's a training it's a training issue. It's not it's not really a problem with the dog being too friendly. It's a problem with the dog just not being trained. And I also have to say that I have definitely bred dogs that were hyper focused on other dogs, but in every case where that was, so it was a dog that I placed in an only dog home.

So go figure. When dogs really don't get a lot of chance to interact with other dogs, they sometimes can be hyper focused on other dogs and agreed they can get frustrated and sometimes it can look like reactivity when really the dog is just starved for conspecific interaction. I don't pretend to have all the answers to those problems for the shelter dogs, for the people that wrote in.

But I think it would be a really interesting experiment to try giving those dogs a companion to play with on a more regular basis and see if that didn't improve the situation with the dog being hyper focused on other dogs.

I'm going to kind of summarize the other comments because there was a lot of them and they all kind of fell in certain categories.

There was maybe 25% of the people that wrote in thanking me for saying this because they still do puppy play classes and they were thanking me for getting out how important it is for puppies to play. But another, let's say, 50% of the people that wrote in had just horror stories of having been to a puppy class that was poorly managed, understaffed.

A lot of instructors wrote in that they have trouble with puppy playtime, putting them together because so many vets are still recommending that puppies not be allowed to go to play class at all until they've had all their vaccines. Absolutely not true. UC Davis study. If they have one vaccine once they're over eight weeks old, statistically they are protected.

They can go to puppy class in a safe environment of a puppy class. I wouldn't take them to a dog park or rest area refresher recollection with the socialization versus vaccination and puppy culture. All that being said, unfortunately, there still is in the veterinary community a subset of vets that are just way behind the times and still recommend that puppies not be socialized until they have their entire series of vaccinations.

That creates problems both because now you've got older puppies trying to be socialized once the window is really closed and because it makes it hard to put classes together because you just you don't have the puppies to put in them. A lot of people also we're talking about situations where inappropriate puppies were put together, puppies that were over 12 weeks old, which I definitely limit my recommendation for puppy play groups to puppies under 12 weeks old.

So, you know, if you wrote in and you said you took your puppy to class and there was a six month old puppy that jumped on it or you took your year old puppy to a class and it got in some bad situation, I mean, that wasn't the right thing for you to be doing to start out with.

Puppy play groups are for very young puppies. But, you know, as I was reading all of these responses and in my mind saying, well, no, that's not well, that's not right, well of course not, if that, well, no and na, ah, I started having the realization that there's a bigger problem going on here. And I think this response encapsulates the whole thing;

I think that it is nearly impossible for most trainers to create the experience you are proposing here. We are still, still running up against vets recommending that puppies do not start socializing until they have more vaccinations on board. There are also plenty of puppy owners who don't even get their puppies until around 10 to 12 weeks old. There's also still a veterinarian shortage, and many puppy owners have to wait 1 to 2 weeks to get their puppy in for their first appointment.

I personally will not take a puppy for training if they have not been seen by ‘their’ vet. A vet the owner has a relationship with not the breeder or shelter or rescues vet. So we're already drastically narrowing down the pool with those factors. Now you need to have, number one, a safe space to hold the puppy classes. There are plenty of suitable locations for adult dog classes that are not suitable for puppies.

Two, a trainer available to hold the class who's skilled in off leash play behavior and new puppy owner coaching. Three trainer availability that overlaps with client availability. Four a large enough client base of people geographically close to this trainer and this class location with healthy puppies between 8 to 12 weeks of age. Five, a registration system that allows for puppies in this tiny four week age bracket to come for only however many weeks they are in the critical socialization period. Whether that is one, two, three or four. Six, if you've managed all of the above, you still need to have puppies that are compatible. The 12 week old Great Dane is too large to safely play with the eight week old Chihuahua ages be darned. The ten week old Sheltie that's hiding under its chair is absolutely useless to the nine week old Labrador puppy who wants to learn about dogs.

If you can't offer all of the above, how do you market a puppy class that does or does not include play? If you have only two students and the puppies are incompatible, you're going to have disappointed or angry clients. Heck, you can be in that situation with four or five students. This is why I pivoted my business model to a combination of daycare plus training, which allows me to do small groups, pairs and or matching with compatible adult dogs.

My pool of dogs is large enough that I can consistently make this work, but I do not fault trainers at all for running puppy classes with no off leash play component because in many areas it's like trying to thread a needle. Lack of off leash puppy play is disappointing. Bad off leash puppy play can be permanently damaging.

Okay, I'm just going to say if you have not listened to the three part series that we started all of our podcasts with called The Wrong Series, now would be a good time for you to listen to this because this is an epic example of a situation where I got new information that really fundamentally changed the way that I look at things.

As an educator, what I realized through this is that my focus going forward is going to be teaching puppy owners how to set up their own socialization sessions, because in reality it's very rare that you're going to find a really good puppy playgroup for your puppy. If you can find that puppy class, and usually those puppy classes are going to be in more urban areas where they just have a supply of puppies.

When we went to see Dr. Bright's class, that's right, in Boston, she has tremendous access to a number of puppies and it's through a shelter where there's a steady supply of puppies coming through. They have independent funding. They're not necessarily trying to make a business out of this. So they have a support network that most private trainers just don't have.

I still disagree with the concept that allowing your puppies to play with other puppies is going to somehow diminish their focus and attention on you. I still am very much for setting up play sessions with appropriate other dogs, but I do realize my eyes are opened to the fact that it's really the exception more than the rule to find a good puppy, play and learn.

And puppy owners really do need more resources for setting up their own play sessions.

If you liked this podcast, you'll love our Puppy owner course available at www.madcapuniversity.com. If you're a breeder, check out our breeder course also available at www.madcapuniversity.com breeders.

If you want to get your puppy owners started the right way, check out our bulk discounts for multiple copies of our puppy course at www.puppyculture.com.

Well that's it for this time. Thanks for listening. Bye bye.