Stop Letting Your Dog Say Hi To Everybody, MotherF*****
Okay, this article isn't just about dogs, but dogs are where I learned the concept of socialization. I'll just dive in and say socialization is the act of social creatures engaging with their environment. Proper (active) socialization is introducing animals to their environment in a way that allows them to engage and interact with the environment in a "successful" way. Full stop. Article (could be) Done.
Why Socialization Isn't About Greetings
You want to set my wife on a 3 hour diatribe about dogs? Just tell her that you let your goldendoodle greet other dogs on the street to socialize them. (Please just don't do it while I am around so that I can work on other things ;)). The reason for this is that people "hypersocialize" their dogs by allowing them to interact with people who "hype them up" in very unnatural ways. Our dogs aren't meant to think everyone and everything should love on them, give them food, and say "how such a great boi they are". Many people don't like dogs, many dogs don't like dogs, many people who like dogs have dogs that don't like dogs, and these interactions create unhealthy behaviors that you see all of the time: pulling towards people, barking at other dogs, demand barking at people, the heavy breathing pull to get to anyone who puts their hand out, and so on.
Interact is a key word when we discuss socialization because we always tend to think "social" inherently means something to do with community, being around people, and engaging with people. Because of this, we think properly socialized things should want to engage and interact with all of the communal/social things in their environment (people, dogs, etc.). But really, socialization is about the interaction and engagement of a social being with its environment (something which people are a part of). Sometimes this interaction is a direct engagement (talking, fighting, hugging, eating with, etc), but sometimes this interaction is avoidance (a refusal to engage). A proper social interaction depends on the scenario of the social situation.
Proper socialization whether it be with kids, dogs, people, or what have you, is to know the proper engagement with the environment
in the proper social context.
Let's consider this: a person walks in your house...
should your dog bite them?
Maybe...
It depends on the social context: Is this an intruder? Is this a neighbor kid looking for your kid who
forgot to knock and just ran in while your German Shepherd was laying by the door? Is this a guest you just opened the door for?
Proper Socialization of your dog will prevent a bite in 2 of those 3 scenarios, and may (probably should) lead to a bite in one of those.
Proper socialization may also keep your kid from getting bit, if you're tracking.
So let's sum it up with this: the socialization I mean when I say socialization anyhwere in The Dream Lab is this:
good socialization is interaction with the environment in a way that is proper to the nature of the animal (including
us human animals) for the situation it is in.