Welcome to the Absolute Dog Sex and a Squirrel podcast. I'm Lauren Langman. I'm one of the world's leading dog trainers and it's my mission to help owners become their dog's top priority. In each episode, you'll discover how to gain trust and

communicate with your dog like never before, creating unbreakable bonds that make you the most

exciting part of their world. So a long time ago, I remember having conversations about

socialisation and I think we should tell our stories about our dogs and how their socialisation

journey was different. So tell us about Rupert's upbringing in terms of meeting other dogs and actually

how he feels about dogs today. Okay. So when I first got Rupert, I was given all the traditional

advice, take him to puppy class, meet lots of dogs, socialize

him, take him to new places, do all of those things, check off the list of things.

He was actually quite a nervous puppy.

I wasn't massively savvy, but it was really obvious from the day I picked him up.

He was hiding at the back of the pen. He didn't really want to be picked up. We seemed to have had a personality transplant from the time before when I'd met him. He was not a confident dog. So putting him in lots of situations was probably the worst thing I could do for him, but that's not what I knew at the time. So when he was old enough, we did go to public classes,

and they were kind of probably quite traditional public classes in a church hall. And I imagine that was after having multi-vaccinations, going to visit a vet who was possibly a bad experience for him, and then possibly trying to put the dog on a harness in a lead and didn't really like that experience either and maybe drag him around a bit. Yep. Yep. And then it was the kind of class where you would learn to walk in circles around a hall with lots of dogs in a big circle and recalls.

Two dogs had to head down the middle of a church hall.

It was a lovely class and we did kind of little bits of agility foundations and little bits of tricks.

And it's where he first learned to ring a bell with his poor and all the things he still loves doing.

But a lot of what he learned there was dogs are quite overwhelming.

People are quite overwhelming.

Environments like this are a bit too much.

Dogs might look at me funny.

I might need to bark back at them. I'm not quite sure I like

dogs or people or going out stall. Now, there's a lot there, right, to unpack. And I'm thinking

of my gorgeous dog, Tokyo and his early days. He was born at my house. He was raised by ourselves

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