Should your puppy play to exhaustion? Should you let them get completely worn out or should you be careful and have them play for a few minutes and see if they can control themselves? I think both of those are right some of the time. It seems to make some sense early on in development that you let puppies play to exhaustion.
Something I learned
I heard something interesting today that really led to this piece of content. I was listening to a dog training podcast. These are people that I don’t typically follow but I know that if I listen, maybe I’ll learn some things that I just don’t know yet.
One of the things I learned was when puppies are very young, about 4-6 weeks old, they’re constantly playing with each other. What they end up doing is play with each other to exhaustion. In that exhaustion period, I learned that the brain has a tremendous amount of growing activity going on during that time.
I haven’t verified this information yet, but the person that was speaking does have a Ph.D. He has also been involved in dog training for a very long time.
The answer
So, should you let your puppy play to exhaustion? I think so.
There are a lot of things that the puppy is doing during play. One thing is, if you do a training session, maybe something like socialization, the brain has the potential to hardwire those things in a way that maybe I hadn’t considered before.
This isn’t necessarily advice that I’m telling you that you absolutely should do. This is something that I just kind of discovered and I’m going to investigate it now by training dogs and seeing if this plays out to even better-behaved dogs.
Please remember for more dog training tips like this you can go to my YouTube channel.
Good Luck and Happy Training!
