How science can help you train your puppy

A puppy’s thinking ability may indicate how responsive the dog will be to training and whether it’ll grow up to be well-behaved.

Traits such as impulsivity, ability to follow gestures and reaction to unsolvable tasks in 3- to 7-month-old puppies were linked with desirable behaviors in those dogs in adulthood, researchers report in the May Applied Animal Behaviour Science. The findings from these cognitive tests could help pet owners determine the best way to train their dogs and what kinds of activities the animals may enjoy as they age, the team says.

Dog cognition researcher Saara Junttila of the University of Helsinki and colleagues previously identified links between such traits and behaviors in adult dogs and wondered whether the traits appeared in puppyhood. The team recruited participants through smartDOG, Ltd., a company founded by study coauthor Katriina Tiira, who is also a dog cognition researcher at the University of Helsinki. SmartDOG conducts canine cognition tests for people curious about the behaviors of their pets, show dogs or working animals.

More than 1,400 dogs between the ages of 3 months and 7 months were directed to do things like follow gestures pointing at a bowl with treats, attempt unsolvable tasks or access treats placed in a clear cylinder with an opening in the back, which measured things like impulsivity and ability to understand commands. Ninety-nine of those dogs repeated the tests as adults, between ages 1 and 8. Many traits remained stable from puppyhood to adulthood, the team found, especially in puppies that were tested at 6 months or 7 months old.

Researchers then surveyed some owners about their now-adult animals’ impulsivity, behavior and trainability, and compared that data with puppy test results for 227 dogs.

They found that the better puppies were at understanding simple pointing gestures, the more likely they were to be trainable and obedient as they matured. Puppies that had high levels of impulse control tended to be calm adults. And puppies that reacted fearfully when testers first greeted them, or that seemingly looked to testers for help with tasks, tended to be more averse to human strangers as adults.

Knowledge of these links can help owners better predict what kind of personalities their pets may have as they get older. “This can form the basis of how to train the dog,” Junttila says.

For example, Tiira suggests that dogs that tend to be more averse to strangers might have lower self-confidence. “What I would do with these kinds of puppies, is that I would give them a lot of experiences and feelings of success in all training,” she says, adding that encouraging their own initiatives — as long as they are well-behaved — and creating positive experiences in new situations might help as well.

Evolutionary anthropologist Hannah Salomons would like to see more research with a larger sample size. The study also mainly focused on breeds known for their trainability, such as border collies, Labrador retrievers and German shepherds. What’s more, researchers said that a high proportion of the animals came from breeders. She would also be interested to know whether rescue dogs have similar results.

Still, the findings emphasize the importance of the human-canine relationship and how owners can better adapt to their pet’s needs. “It can help us figure out what’s going to be best for the dogs that are in our lives,” says Salomons, of Duke University’s Canine Cognition Center. “We can help dogs live their best lives.”