Doodle puppy personality testing

Elite Breeder Doodle Puppy Personality Testing & Matching

Doodle Puppy personality testing is critically-important to us as ethical breeders because we are deeply concerned for the welfare of all our owners, puppies, and dogs. Puppy personality testing is so important because this protocol helps us to make certain that our puppies are adopted into the best homes for each of them and YOU!

This protocol allows us to determine the best compatibility of our puppies with specific families or individuals. We don’t just want our puppies and new owners to tolerate each other, but to thoroughly enjoy living together and loving each other for the rest of their lives.

Puppy personality testing by ethical breeders demonstrates their deep commitment to the physical and emotional health and well-being of their puppies and owners. This protocol is significant also because a professionally-matched puppy has a much lower risk of abandonment due to incompatibilities issues.

Breed Temperament Versus Personality Type

Every dog breed available has certain temperament traits that are typically associated with that breed. When selecting a breed, temperament is an important part of that decision.

But within every breed, there are many possible personality types as well. Just because the Goldendoodle and Bernedoodle breed is known to be a friendly breed does not – by any stretch – mean that ALL Goldendoodle and Bernedoodle dogs are friendly. A Goldendoodle or Bernedoodle can still have a shy or timid personality type, while still being 100% Goldendoodle or Bernedoodle.

So what does this mean and why does it matter?

Let’s say you decide that you want to adopt a Doodle puppy for your family because you know that your chosen Doodle are usually social butterflies and you want a dog that will be friendly to everyone he meets. In your case, let’s assume your breeder allows you to select your puppy, so you choose the one that looks the cutest to your 5-year old daughter.

So you take home an adorable little  puppy, but when you invite friends over or try to socialize your puppy, he tends to prefer to not be very social. Perhaps he just wants to stick with you or will wag his tail from a distance, but is too shy to really be a social butterfly at all! You may be very disappointed and feel like you got a “lemon” because your Doodle is not a social butterfly.

In this case, you probably selected a puppy with a Shy-Timid personality type. This puppy is not a “lemon” but rather does not fit the typical temperament that is common with many Doodles or the expectation that you had for the breed as a whole. If your breeder had personality tested their puppies and selected a puppy for you, you would have likely adopted a puppy that was a social butterfly and would have been exactly what you were looking for!

Parent Dogs’ Temperament

Many people believe that if you breed dogs with certain personality types, they will have puppies with similar personality types. However, this is not always the case. We have seen very social, outgoing puppies produced by very shy timid dogs and vice versa. There is no hard set rule that indicates dogs will produce puppies with similar personality types. It can certainly happen, but the opposite can as well!

What Is Puppy Personality Testing & Matching?

In a nutshell, around seven weeks of age, we use a series of 8 simple tests with all our puppies to determine their personality types. Likewise, we have all our new owners complete a New Owner Questionnaire. Using the results of the puppy testing and the New Owner Questionnaire, we determine which puppy is best suited to each new owner based on the puppy’s personality type and the new owner’s preferences and needs.

In this way, we make sure that an inexperienced new owner with small children, for example, receives a gentle puppy that is easier to work with and will give them a good first experience. By contrast, a more strong-willed puppy would be assigned to an experienced owner who would prefer and enjoy the challenge of working with a  bold confident puppy.

Possible Puppy Personality Types

What Personality Types Are Most Common With Our Puppies

By far the vast majority of our puppies test to be somewhere between Bold-Confident and Shy-Timid.  We do not normally get puppies with Dominant or Aloof personalities, so most of our puppies are actually pretty easy to raise and train.