Fostering Independence Through Separation. When you bring your littermates home they will be bonded to each other, this can help to lessen the effects of regular new puppy transition stress. This a popular reasons families choose littermates, because they want to spare them the stress and sadness of being separated from their first family. However, transition stress (but not distress) is a normal part of a puppy’s development, and just like when we stress our muscles by working out, a puppy also grows stronger after experiencing a small amount of appropriate stress. While it’s great that our littermates will comfort each other and lessen the impact of being separated from the litter, we will have work to do in the coming weeks to help our individual puppies experience the important transition weeks, while also preparing them to develop as individual dogs. As you go forward in this plan you will be learning many new skills and ways of thinking about your puppies. The first is:Every puppy is an individual with it’s own needs, likes, and desires. Our work with each puppy will be Puppy Led. What is Puppy Led? Puppy Led means that we will be observing our puppy carefully for information about how the puppy is handling the current level of learning or challenge, so we can plan what to do next based on each puppy’s need. We will not be using hard timelines based on how fast or slow we think a puppy should move through the exercises, that is a human led process that misses the mark as often as it hits it. Since we don’t want to waste any of our efforts, we will be careful observers and plan our work based on what our puppy has shown us they are ready for. Getting Started:Goal 1: Creating a solid sense of self and independence. Most of the problems we see with puppies raised together focus around, or stem from, hyper bonding. Hyper bonding is when two dogs form an unhealthy attachment to each other so that any separation becomes traumatic. Because separation is necessary for dogs to develop a sense of self, bond with humans, and to resolve conflicts with each other, the lack of independence is a risk factor for anxiety and aggression between the dogs later. Hyper bonded dogs are much harder to train due to a weak bond with their human caregiver, often do not “share” resources (such as owner attention, resting areas, food, toys, and etc) without conflict, and (ironically) can struggle with good dog-to-dog social skills. Fo those reasons fostering a strong sense of self and confident independence is our first goal. Puppy Led Separation:Because we are using Puppy Led Separation protocols, there is not a hard timetable to our work in this area. You may notice one puppy moving through this work faster and another slower, and that is just as it should be. For puppies newly introduced to your home, you can “co sleep” the puppies in the same nighttime crate until they are through transition week, are sleeping well at night, and are showing you they have adapted to your home. Signs your newly introduced puppies are ready for separation training to start.1. Puppies are both eating.2. Puppies appear happy, are curious about your home and family.3. Puppies are soliciting attention from family members.4. Puppies have been examined by your vet and are completely healthy.Puppies and dogs who have been in your home for long enough they are not experiencing any transition stress can start straight away. Separation Training will be done incrementally to avoid causing distress to the puppies. It’s important to realize that stress is ok and healthy for dogs, but distress is undesirable, and the difference between stress and distress is the amount or timing. So we will be using an incremental approach to our separation training, observing puppies for signs of confidence at the current level before progressing. This applies to all work in this class. When we are using an incremental approach correctly the work should feel effortless. There should not be huge emotional meltdowns, the puppy should not seem to notice the small changes, and when they do they are appropriately stressed but not distressed, and we should see easy progression through the steps. Separation will foster independence and will focus on key areas.Sleeping/RestingEating/ChewingTraining/Socialization

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