Do Puppies Forget Mom, Siblings & Owners? (10 Curious Facts)
Your puppy will learn so much: how to walk on a leash, interact with others, and obey commands.
But how does your puppy remember things?
Does your puppy remember you, its mother, and what it had for breakfast?
Or does your puppy truly live in the moment?
1. What is Memory? (In Dog Term)
You can remember people, events, random facts, and how to drive a car. Human memory is a marvelous combination of short- and long-term memory, associations, automatic routines, lists, and episodes.
Does your puppy have anything similar going on in its ability to recall people, dogs, and favorite walks?
Does your puppy remember anything?
Puppies Store Scent Files
You have associative memories tagged to scents.
You smell bacon and know that it is bacon – you associate the memory of delicious bacon with the smell. The scent provides a fast track to emotional recall, both good and bad.
Your puppy’s relationship with scent is more intense than yours.
Scent is the primary sense your puppy uses to navigate, explore new things, and remember people and places.
All dogs and people have a unique scent profile, and your puppy locks this profile away in its brain, available for instant recall when it next encounters that individual.
Puppies Remember Commands
You can train your puppy to perform actions in response to verbal or visual cues or a combination of both. This ability means the puppy learns the commands and recalls them.
It is like how a human knows language, and dogs respond to and remember between 100 and 160 words.
But as far as anyone knows, these are associative memories, and your dog can’t manipulate the commands it knows into a new sentence.
For example, you may teach your puppy to sit, fetch and go to bed.
But if you want your puppy to bring a ball, go to bed and sit in the bed with the ball, you’d have to teach that sequence as a single command.
You couldn’t give the puppy a command list and expect it to interpret it as first fetch the ball, then go to your bed, but sit when you get there.
Associative memory uses something as a trigger for the memory.
Puppies can develop problems with bad associations – loud noises and other fears, but you can train away from the bad association with patience and kindness.
As part of puppy training, you actively encourage good associations – sit on command and get a treat.
2. Episodic Memory
Humans have episodic memory – when you meet up with an old school friend, you can reminisce about the good old days and compare notes about what happened when.
As far as anyone knows, puppies don’t have episodic memory. But no one can talk to a puppy to find out if that is true.
Experiments show that puppies remember their mom, other dogs, people, commands, and word associations.
But there is no way to test if your puppy remembers that yesterday, by the swings on the park, a squirrel jumped down and ran off to the oak tree.
Science currently assumes that puppies don’t have episodic memory.
3. Can Your Puppy Remember Its Mom?
Research indicates that puppies recognize their mothers.
At age 5-6 weeks, most puppies (not all) will pick out their mother from a crowd of female dogs after a separation of 30 minutes.
Unfortunately, there is no way of finding out why a small number of puppies refuse to rejoin their mother after this short separation.
This same test of bringing together a crowd of mother dogs and their puppies, repeated at two years, has the same result, with most puppies picking out their mother.
So far, no one has tested adult dogs for recall at a later age, so the most that you can say about the puppy remembering its mother is that it can and does, up to two years after separation.
4. How Does the Puppy Remember Its Mom?
The psychologists testing for puppy memory pondered this same question.
A further experiment placed a group of puppies in a room with blankets smelling of another dog. The puppies snuggled with the blanket with their mother’s scent.
The same experiment with puppies and their owner shows the same preference for seeking out the scent of the primary caregiver.
These experiments lead scientists to believe that the puppy’s memory is scent-based and associative.
5. Do Puppies Remember Their Dads?
Most puppies don’t have any contact with their father and have no basis for remembering him.
If the puppy meets or interacts with the father dog, they may file the unique dog scent in their memory banks – but not tagged with “dad” the same way a human would organize the memory of meeting an absent father.
6. Do Puppies Remember Their Siblings?
Each sibling has a unique scent signature, but the puppy needs contact with its siblings to build long-term memory. The relationship and the memory of the sibling aren’t like human memories.
The puppy’s scent memory has valuable information like how old and healthy the puppy was last time they met.
Plus, an indication of dominance, was the sibling more dominant?
Your puppy stores the same information for every dog it meets. The dogs it meets most often are the ones it remembers best – regardless of the family relationship.
If your puppy has regular playdates with its littermates, it will continue to remember them. But if your puppy leaves them behind, then a few months is all it takes for its littermates not to register as important.
Does your puppy forget its siblings?
Hard to tell, the scent memory may remain, but the puppy won’t respond to the sibling in any different ways to meeting a non-related dog.
7. Do Puppies Miss Their Owners?
If the owner is the primary caregiver for the puppy, then your puppy misses them as soon as they are out of sight.
Abandonment issues lie at the root of most puppy behavior problems.
Most early puppy training and socialization revolve around getting the puppy to understand that the owner may not be present for a while but will come back.
There are many instances of dogs remembering their previous owners (died or gone away) for life. When your puppy forms a strong bond with a human, the bond remains for the dog’s life.
However, this doesn’t mean that a puppy must stay with its first human owner for life because, like humans, the puppy can create more than one strong bond.
If you must move your puppy onto a new home with a new owner, your puppy won’t die of a broken heart, but it will grieve – for a short time.
Plus, the new owner will need to help the puppy overcome issues of abandonment and loss – much like a child fostered with new parents.
8. How Can You Help a Puppy Settle into a New Family?
A puppy’s needs are straightforward:
- A secure place to sleep.
- Companionship and play.
- Regular meals and water to drink.
- Regular bathroom breaks.
- Daily exercise and care.
In addition, the puppy needs a person who is the caregiver who meets the puppy’s needs and spends quality time with them.
Contact, cuddles, and soft words help rapidly establish a bond between the puppy and the owner.
The puppy may still remember the previous owner (depending on the extent of the relationship) but will happily form a new bond.
The best way to help a puppy settle with a new owner is for the new owner to spend time caring for the puppy and meeting its needs.
9. How Can You Prepare a Puppy for a New Family?
Unfortunately, you can’t have a conversation with the puppy to explain future changes in its life. You can, however, start to build a scent link with the new owner.
By using an item of clothing with the new owner’s scent, you can prepare the way for your puppy to see the new owner as familiar.
Placing a worn t-shirt next to the puppy’s bed for a few days will help the puppy recognize the scent before leaving.
Short play dates where the new owner interacts with and treats the new puppy every day for a week can also smooth the transition.
But if the only way to transfer the puppy to the new home is delivery without prior contact, it isn’t a problem.
Please don’t fuss over the puppy when you hand it over, and the transfer will not be a massive event in the puppy’s mind.
If the puppy spends months with one family and then transfers to a new family, it will take a little longer to settle, but not that long – a few days to a fortnight.
Assistance dogs for the blind spend two years in a foster home before transfer to a training home. Dogs are very adaptable and will move from one home to another with little distress if well treated.
Your puppy’s memory is mainly associative and for your puppy, out of sight is primarily out of mind.
10. What is the Best Age for a Puppy to Go to a New Home?
The optimum time for a puppy to experience new environments and form a strong social bond is between eight and fourteen weeks.
Some states set a legal age limit before a puppy can be sold and moved from its mother – typically eight weeks.
The age of the puppy is less important than the experiences the puppy gets in its developmental weeks.
The best breeders will socialize and begin puppy training before the puppy leaves its first home. These puppies develop tremendous confidence and are well socialized.
The extra training may mean you don’t take your puppy home until it is twelve weeks old.
Finding the right time for a puppy to leave its mother and littermates is a balance between old enough to be independent but not so old that it has acquired submissive or dominant behaviors.
Your puppy will continue to learn throughout its life, and it gets the best start if you work with your breeder and vet to decide when your chosen puppy is ready to move into your home.
Conclusion
Most people take their new puppy home with them at between eight to twelve weeks when they are bright-eyed and happy to explore the world.
But if you choose to adopt an older puppy (up to two years), you can still build a unique companion bond and train your puppy to behave appropriately.
Your puppy won’t forget its mother, littermates, and previous owners but will enjoy daily life with you while you build happy associations with toys, places, and people.
Puppies feel emotions, but their sense of past and future is different from yours.
Puppies enjoy the present moment, and although they can miss you when you are gone, they are still predominantly content.