Puppies are usually separated from the rest of the litter between 8 and 16 weeks of age, just as they begin to socialize. During this stage, they acquire basic motor skills, learn to control the force of their bite, and train their problem-solving abilities. An early separation can cause some aggression, anxiety and discouragement in puppies. But, after sharing this time, do the dogs miss their mother and her siblings?
The truth is that your pet's emotions do not work exactly the same as those of humans. In fact, dogs do not have the capacity to miss their fellow dogs and sometimes even find it difficult to remember them after a certain time. In any case, the best way for your puppy to overcome attachment to the litter is to strengthen the bond between him and you, establishing the walks, games and rules that will govern his new life from now on.
Once your dog has reached adulthood, you may wonder if he could recognize members of his litter and you may even have the opportunity to prove it. In this sense, the specialized pet blog The Dog People compiles a study that examined, based on scent tests, the ability of some dogs to remember their siblings two years after abandoning the litter. The experiment determined that, at the end of that time, the dogs were only able to recognize the brother who lived with them at that time, unlike the rest of their brothers.
The study revealed, however, that the same dogs could recognize their mother two years after separating from her. This is because dogs are an altricial species, that is, in which the role of mothers is essential for the development of offspring. Learning to recognize it is, in their case, a mere matter of survival, and it is because of this attachment that they feel insecure when leaving the litter until they adapt to their new home.
Research has focused on dogs' capacity for olfactory recognition, since these animals use this sense above sight to remember people and other animals. In fact, it has been proven in previous studies that dogs spend time exploring familiar smells. In this way, another study tested several puppies from the same litter, who reacted more intensely to the smell of their mother than to that of another dog.
The same study recorded the behavior of nine dogs separated from their former owners, who responded when confronted with the smell of their former owners for longer than when confronted with the smell of another person of the same sex who lived with a dog of the same breed. .
