Most handlers agree the early weeks matter disproportionately, and most will also tell you the popular version of that idea is oversimplified. A puppy does not need a checklist of a thousand experiences. It needs enough variety to learn that variety is normal, and enough safety to learn that unfamiliar does not mean dangerous.

The distinction matters because it changes what you do on a Tuesday. Instead of chasing an experience, you are managing a baseline.

A confident puppy is not one that has met everything. It is one that has met something unfamiliar, paused, and then carried on.

That pause is the whole event. A handler who lets the puppy look, waits, and then moves on has taught something. A handler who picks the puppy up and carries it past has taught something else — that the unfamiliar is a thing to be rescued from.

It is tempting, with a working-bred puppy, to go looking for the fire early. Everyone wants to know what the dog has. The problem is that drive without rules becomes a behaviour problem that looks like a training problem.

Start with the boring architecture: a name that means attention, a recall that means now, a settle that means off. Those are the tools you will need the first time a puppy gets genuinely excited, which will be sooner than you think.

Puppies need more sleep than their owners expect, and a tired puppy is often mistaken for a difficult one. Much of what looks like stubbornness at eight in the evening is exhaustion.

The other half of this is the handler. Raising a working dog well requires a tolerance for slow progress and an ability to be uninteresting on cue. Dogs learn fastest from people who are calm, consistent and slightly boring.