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Writer's pictureHannah Parrett

Socialisation, so what is it?

Imagine you are an English speaker, dropped off in Russia in the night, into a family environment and put in a room alone, with the door closed.

What do you do? You'll probably be alright for a bit, until you need something. The first thing you'll need is probably the toilet.

You might be a bit frightened, so what you do next might be a bit different to what you would normally do at home, in English speaking England.

You're already ahead of dogs because you are in the house of another human, same species. So you can probably make yourself understood fairly easily and if you do something wrong, hopefully the family that live here will be forgiving and not aggressive! You call out HELLO? and someone appears eventually - you make a toilet signal and they point to a door.

So you find a toilet and make it through the first night OK, with a bit of sleep, but then everyone goes out early in the morning and you're left alone.

You try and open the front door everyone went out of, but you can't, so you go to the window and look outside to see where you are. You're in a city, but can see green space up on a hill. You can smell food, but don't know where it is.

You're just beginning to get hungry, so you go and find the kitchen. It's alright, there's bread, so you help yourself to half a loaf and feel a bit better.

You sit down and think about your situation, perhaps feel sad about your family at home and wonder how the kahell you ended up here. As you're human, you can consider all the things you have no idea what to do with in your new environment, you have no idea how to reliably get food, or money, how to communicate with anyone, who is friendly or who is not, where is safe and where is not.

What you need more than anything, is a mentor that speaks English to show you around and teach you where to go and what to do when you get there. A translator who speaks both English and Russian, who if you're very lucky, understands the cultural differences enough to prevent you from getting into trouble by making an epic booboo, and tell you when what you're doing isn't appropriate.

Really, you're unlikely to do a poo on the floor in the living room, but still, the similarities between what you would need from your Russian guide, and what a dog needs in human society are pretty similar.

Now imagine your translator, guide and mentor, whom you have come to trust over three days or so, has to go away for two weeks. How would you feel? A little bit nervous? Probably, unless he or she had fully prepared you and briefed you about what would happen when, when they would be back and what to do whilst they were gone. If that was the case, you'd probably manage without them admirably.

Then imagine it's not Russia, but Alpha Centauri and you are SO far out of your depth culturally that you cannot possibly understand a single thing that's happening without your mentor. You can't even tell whether the beings you live with are cross, happy or sad...

A great deal of dogs have to muddle through in human society because their mentor doesn't have a set of keys they can give the dog that readily and sensibly, access human society.

Socialisation in dogs is exactly that, giving the dog the keys that tell him or her where to be, when to be and what to do when they get there.

Often dogs are put in situations and expected to work out what to do alone, it's far better to spend at home early puppy days giving them some essential communication to enable them to understand at least the word 'no' so you can prevent booboos ahead of time.

For example - it's never going to be ok for dogs to rush up to kids and put their front feet on them, EVER! Young puppies will naturally not want to do that anyway if well raised, but if we have, 'no' and 'sit' in communication, we can tell our baby dog how to greet people and what not to do.

That's socialisation in a nutshell, how to behave in human society: what never to touch, where never to go alone (into roads etc), what to do if a car comes on a country lane, what to do with approaching dogs on leads, what to do with approaching dogs on leads in a tight space, how to greet strange people, how to engage with people that want to engage and ignore people that don't. For me, dogs also need to know without a shadow of a doubt, that ALL people are friendly. A truly tame dog won't have stranger danger radar. I would rather teach my dog all people are good, but to ignore the majority of them, than to have any sort of fear for them. If he runs into someone who hates dogs, hopefully he'll have the good sense to stay clear. He should as he grows, get really good at reading people, and may well protect you if his spidey sense spies bogies on your six. My wise old dog has put himself offensively between me and things he might think are a worry on countless occasions. he makes me feel 100% safe and I trust him implicitly, but as he was growing I had to let him know if he was protecting needlessly (How? By greeting whoever or whatever it was in a friendly manner and displaying no fear - what to fear is acquired from a mentor).

What socialisation is not, is putting dogs (young or old) in situations beyond their control and leaving them to work out what to do. They will do what a dog would do, which isn't always appropriate in human society.

Although sometimes is very, very funny!

A Mosque in Russia.

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