Associations like the American Veterinary Medical Association and the American Veterinary Society of Animal Behavior agree: the first three months of a puppy’s life are perhaps the most critical and impactful on everything that comes afterward – and socialization is paramount during this time.
Puppy daycare can help young dogs get a head start in life by providing this socialization. Interaction with new animals, people, sights, and sounds ultimately helps them sidestep all too familiar learned behaviors, such as fear, aggression, and anxiety that can disrupt a family’s day-to-day life.
Puppy daycare is significantly different than enrolling your pet in a basic obedience class, however. Introducing the idea of socialization and camaraderie is the key here.
With that in mind, here are just three important lessons that puppy daycare can deliver:
- It’s A-OK to Play: Pets and their parents love the playtime aspect of puppy daycare. And, sure, it may look like a bunch of adorable balls of fur and frenetic energy clamoring atop one another into a literal dogpile, but it’s more than that. For one thing, puppy playtime is closely supervised by trained professionals – ensuring that the cute chaos is highly controlled. From there, pups can learn how to behave appropriately in a social setting, including how to properly greet a fellow dog, how to control one’s teeth (even when tussling for a toy or a ball), and even how to recognize social cues in other dogs.
- The world is filled with sights, sounds, and sensations: While your pup is being acclimated to new pals, it also helps to introduce them to a bigger, broader world – physical and aural – that could potentially be startling should they be left to discover them on their own. Puppy daycare helps introduce dogs to new objects to interact with and different surfaces to navigate. Sounds are gradually introduced so that they become familiar, not frightening.
- The right people rock: Puppy daycare is also a great step toward helping your pet learn to trust their human friends. This ultimately sets them up for a healthy, happy future, and is a great precursor to everything from trips to the groomer to routine veterinary check-ups to simply visiting grandma and grandpa.
DogsWorld Resort’s puppy daycare program, including our voluntary puppy kindergarten, allows pets to meet and play with other young dogs under the watchful eye of professional animal caregivers. Discover the benefits a fun day of play and camaraderie can provide your pup. Contact us today to learn more.