# "Already socialised puppies": what it really means > The sensitive window runs from the third to the twelfth week: what a puppy can really meet at the kennel, what it cannot, and what is left for the family to do. What a kennel can do, what it cannot, and what is left to the family “Socialised puppies” is one of the most common phrases in adverts, and like “parents on site” it means nothing until somebody specifies **with what**. In dogs the sensitive period for socialisation runs from the third to the twelfth week of life: by the time a Staffordshire Bull Terrier puppy leaves the kennel, at the 60 to 70 days Italian law and good practice allow, five or six of those ten weeks are gone. The more important half of the work is still to come, and the family will do it. A serious breeder does not only tell you what they have done: they also tell you what they could not do — traffic, children if there are none at the kennel, other species, and being left alone, which a puppy among its littermates has never experienced. ## The window: what ethology says This is not my opinion, it is settled literature. The **sensitive period for socialisation** in dogs runs roughly from the third to the twelfth week of life, with the core between the fourth and the eighth. During those weeks the puppy builds the category “normal”. Whatever it meets — people, noises, surfaces, other animals — goes in effortlessly. Whatever it does not meet will forever be something to assess, and as an adult it will assess it with an adult's tools: caution, alertness, sometimes reactivity. The consequence is arithmetic. Italian law forbids rehoming before **sixty days**: at that age a puppy has spent five of the ten weeks that count at the kennel, and the better half of the work is still ahead. Every extra week changes the sum. Our puppies stay until **seventy days** — ten more, which within the sensitive window is no detail: it is a seventh of the useful period, spent somewhere new things arrive in measured doses rather than all at once on day one in an unfamiliar house. ## What it can really have met before leaving Far less than the word “socialised” suggests, and almost all of it within a narrow perimeter — which widens a little with every extra week. It may have met **the people of the house** and a few visitors. **Household noises**: television, radio, vacuum cleaner, doorbell, dishwasher. **Different surfaces** underfoot — and here it matters a great deal whether the kennel has a real courtyard or only a pen. **The other dogs of the kennel**, who are balanced adults of its own breed. **Handling**: being picked up, turned over, touched on paws and ears. And, if the kennel sits on a road rather than isolated in the countryside, **the noises of the outside world heard from a distance**: traffic, passing voices, church bells. It is not crossing a city on a lead, but it is a great deal more than silence. Then there is one element almost nobody names, and at this stage it counts for more than many stimuli: **the dam**. A settled bitch, in an environment she knows, raises steadier puppies. A stressed one raises more reactive puppies, and no protocol fixes that. ## What it cannot have met, and why This is the part adverts leave out. **Traffic, towns, public transport.** The basic vaccination course is completed at around **three months**, depending on the vet's protocol, and until then a puppy should not be taken where unknown dogs go. That is a health precaution, and it necessarily limits the range. Puppies destined for another country also need the rabies vaccination, which cannot be given before twelve weeks and becomes valid twenty-one days later. **Children, if there are none at the kennel.** A puppy raised among adults has seen adults. Children move differently, sound different, are a different height: to a dog they are another category. **Dogs of other breeds and sizes.** Knowing six adult Staffies is not the same as knowing a great dane, a chihuahua, a dog that communicates differently. **Cats, horses, poultry**, if there are none. **Lifts, the lead in the street, the vet for an actual consultation** — not the first vaccination given at the kennel. This applies to us too, and it is right to say so: **there are no other animals here**, apart from a neighbour's cat crossing the courtyard now and then. A puppy leaving us has never seen a hen or a horse, and if the new family has them, that work is done there. **Being left alone.** A puppy at a kennel is never alone: there are the littermates, the mother, the people. Solitude is learned afterwards, in the new home, and it is one of the things that most often goes wrong. ## And what about Bio Sensor? Whenever early stimulation comes up, so does **Bio Sensor**, or ENS: five exercises of a few seconds each, once a day, from the third to the sixteenth day of life. In litter announcements it is quoted as though it were a guarantee of good temperament. Two things are worth knowing. First, those benefits — stress tolerance, a more efficient heart, greater disease resistance — come from a 1970s military programme, not from independent studies verified by other researchers. Second, the period it acts on, the first sixteen days, **is not the sensitive period for socialisation**: that starts later, from the third week. That does not mean ENS does harm. It means that anyone presenting it as the reason their puppy will be well balanced is promising more than is known. We have written about it at length in our guide to [what the research actually says about Bio Sensor](/en/bio-sensor-early-stimulation-puppies/). And there is a practical consequence for this article: **a kennel that only tells you about the first sixteen days is telling you about the least important part.** The question to ask is what happened from the third week onwards. ## So what does “socialised” actually mean That the puppy is **started**, not finished. That it has a base to build on rather than a blank sheet. That the weeks spent at the kennel — five or six of them — were not wasted. But if an advert just says “socialised”, there is one question to ask: **with what, exactly?** A breeder who knows what they are doing answers with a list, not with an adjective. And if the list is short, that is fine too — as long as it is said. ## What we do, and what we do not Our puppies are born indoors and stay there for the first month, in the whelping box, which is not in a silent room: it sits near the television and the radio, because the noise of a lived-in house is the first thing a puppy has to get used to. At around **thirty days** they move to the protected puppy pen: a space where they can move safely while their legs are still unsteady, and where weaning begins. The step that really counts comes at about **forty days**, when I let them loose in the courtyard. And the courtyard is not a concrete run: it is grass, earth, plants, flowers — different surfaces and smells at every step. They stay out all day when the weather allows, with sun, wind and shade. But the part that weighs most is not what is inside the courtyard: it is what goes past outside. Cars, mopeds, bicycles, people walking by, horns, the church bells. A puppy that hears the bells at forty days while playing on the grass will never notice those bells again for the rest of its life. One that hears them for the first time at six months in a city will have to process them. In the courtyard they also meet **the adult dogs**, always under close supervision. I do not leave them together because “they know each other”: I leave them together while watching, and separate them when needed. And the courtyard does not replace the house. Between **forty and fifty days** they start coming back inside in turns, **in groups of two or three**, for a few hours. Not all together: in a small group, so each one lives the experience instead of watching it while the pack acts as a shield. That is where they learn the rest — the television on, people coming and going, the smooth floor, the kitchen. **Most of the people who come through are new faces.** Families who have reserved a puppy come to see it several times as it grows, except those travelling from very far: for the puppies that means different hands, different voices, different gaits, repeated over time. It is also when the occasional child turns up, because my own children are grown and there are none living here: when a couple brings one along, I see it as a bonus and say so gladly. **The vet comes to us.** Always for large litters, sometimes I go for small ones — but the rule is that he comes: taking unvaccinated puppies into a clinic, where sick dogs pass through, is not ideal. The flip side is that the puppy does not experience a car journey before leaving, and that is something it will learn later. What we **do not** do is promise that the work is finished by the time a puppy leaves. It is not, at sixty days or at seventy. When a puppy goes, it still has several weeks of open sensitive window ahead, and it will spend them with its family. ## The ones who stay longer get socialised properly There is a category of puppies that follows a different path: the ones that for some reason stay longer — often those destined abroad, who must wait for the rabies vaccination and do not leave before four months. Those puppies **I socialise myself**. After the second vaccination I start taking them on a lead around the village, and not on their own: **with their mother alongside**. A puppy on its first outing is almost always a little hesitant — the road is wide, noises come from every direction, the lead is new. But if its mother is walking ahead of it, and she knows that road and is not bothered by it, the puppy follows her willingly. What the mother teaches in three walks, no protocol teaches at all. That is why a puppy that stays until four months leaves with an advantage: it has finished the sensitive window here, guided by someone who speaks its language. ## The first four weeks at home: the ones that decide This is the part of the path the breeder does not control, and it weighs as much as theirs. **Quantity is not quality.** Ten short, positive experiences are worth more than one long one in which the puppy gets frightened. If it stiffens, freezes or tries to move away, the experience is not working: increase the distance and try again tomorrow. **A great deal can be done before the course is complete.** You do not go to the dog park, but you can carry the puppy to new places, let it sit in the car, let it meet people at home, walk on different surfaces, hear new noises. **Solitude is taught from day one**, with very short absences, extended little by little, with no drama on leaving or returning. **If something goes wrong, call somebody.** A puppy that is afraid to go out at four months will not “grow out of it”: that is the moment to get help, not a year later. ## In short - The window runs from the **third to the twelfth week**; at rehoming five or six of those ten are gone, depending on how long the puppy stays - At a kennel a puppy meets **the house, the people, the other dogs of its breed**: not the town, not traffic, often not children - “Socialised” without a list is an empty word: **ask with what** - The work that remains is the heavier half, and the family does it - A serious breeder also tells you **what they could not do** [ How a litter is born and raised From the season to the whelping, and what happens in the weeks that follow. ](/en/puppies-staffordshire-bull-terrier/) ### Related articles - [Bio Sensor: what the research actually says](/en/bio-sensor-early-stimulation-puppies/) - [“Parents on site”: what it really means](/en/parents-on-site-what-it-means/) - [Socialisation at home: the first weeks](/en/puppy-home-socialization/) - [How to recognise a serious breeder](/en/how-to-choose-a-staffordshire-bull-terrier-breeder/) ## Would you like to see where they grow up? We receive by appointment in Ostellato, province of Ferrara. You see the house, the courtyard and the mothers. [Arrange a visit](https://wa.me/393924635584?text=Hello%20Paolo%2C%20I%20would%20like%20to%20see%20where%20the%20puppies%20grow%20up) --- Fonte: https://delpiccolodiavolo.it/en/socialised-puppies-what-it-means/