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give them a ton of human contact.
    From when a puppy is three days old until he is twenty-one days old, we do something with him called “biosensor stressing.” It sounds a lot more complicated than it is. Simply put, biosensor stressing is playing around with a puppy, but with a structured routine. When you pick the puppy up, you want to do a couple of things. One, you want to tickle his feet. Usually I’ll take a Q-tip and stick it between a puppy’s pads and his toes, making sure to stimulate each one of his paws. Along with that, I’ll hold the puppy completely upright, with his head directly above his tail. I’ll place him next to my face to let him smell me. I’ll breathe on him, and I’ll talk to him, too.
    A puppy’s sight, sense of smell, and hearing are not yet fully developed when he is born. That means, early on, neither my smell nor my physical presence is as fully recognizable to him as it will eventually be, but I want him to have that early sensory experience as soon as possible. That way, as the puppy is developing those senses more fully, he’ll already have that early experience of what I smell like, what I sound like, and what I look like solidly in place. I want the dog to be comfortable with me. I also have multiple people do this so the puppy gets exposure to as many people as possible and therefore establishes a general comfort level with humans. I want a lot of different adults and children to be around puppies we’re training. As you can probably figure out, it’s not all that hard to get people to hold and play with puppies.
    In the morning and at night I’ll also usually take a cold, wet washcloth in my hand and set a puppy belly down on it for just a couple of seconds. Then I’ll put him back in with the litter and take the next one out and do the same thing until I’ve done it with every one of them. Throughout the day I’ll also constantly be picking up the puppies and just playing with them and holding them.
    I also start to play CDs of random noises even though a puppy really doesn’t hear much for the first three weeks of his life. Several different companies make these noise CDs that are typically used to expose police horses in training to a variety of different sounds. Essentially, these are “antispooking” noise CDs. They include train engines, whistles, firecrackers, thunder, machine guns, different farm animals, creaky doors, car and other engines, mufflers backfiring, sirens blaring, cars honking, and more. I play these CDs repeatedly to get the puppies accustomed to what is and will always be a very large part of their environment—sound.
    Dogs have very sensitive hearing, and our selective breeding of them has enhanced that ability. Also, because of the structure of dogs’ ears, they can hear sounds that are coming from a great distance. Pointed, erect ears are the most effective at capturing sound waves. Dogs can also hear sounds at higher frequencies than people can.
    Anyone who has had a dog knows that certain sounds, such as the whine of a vacuum cleaner, can really irritate him. We play these CDs to such young puppies because, over the life of the dogs, we want them to have minimal, if any, reactions to unexpected sounds. We don’t want to overstress the pups, but we do have to get them accustomed to hearing a variety of noises at various volumes. Later, when we do helicopter training with the K-9 candidates, that early exposure to sounds almost always pays off. All you can ever do in training is simulate how the real world of the dogs’ working lives will be. There is, of course, no guarantee to how any given dog will respond in those real-world circumstances. Training is all about enhancing the likelihood of a good outcome down the road. According to a study conducted by the U.S. military, mildly stressing puppies helps their immune systems develop and helps them mature more