Many of our family are from all across the USA. To be considerate of those having to book flights to pick up their puppy, we allow families to start choosing their puppies at 2 weeks old. This allows families to plan ahead and arrange travel.

We breed for well rounded and minded puppies. Each dog develops their own personalities. Studies show that the first 8 weeks gives the puppy a good foundation but most of their personalities are shaped by environment and genetics. "The two papers noted above are worth reading. The first one convincingly showed that evaluations of puppies were of little use in predicting behavior as an adult. They evaluated 630 German Shepherds at 8 weeks and again at 450-600 days (roughly 1.5-2 yrs). They found that heritability of some of the behavioral traits they looked at was modest, so selection for those would result in some improvement. But the "correspondence of puppy test results to performance at adult age was negligible and the puppy test was therefore not found useful in predicting adult suitability for service dog work".

The second study is recent so the information is up to date, and it does a good job of recognizing the potential pitfalls of studying puppies to predict adult behavior. But again, they "found little correspondence between individuals' behaviour in the neonate, puppy and adult test. Exploratory activity was the only behaviour that was significantly correlated between the puppy and the adult test. We conclude that the predictive validity of early tests for predicting specific behavioural traits in adult pet dogs in limited". https://www.instituteofcaninebiology.org/blog/genetics-behavior-and-puppy-temperament-testing

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Both parents have been selected for our program based off of personality, drive, temperament and trainability. This is why we allow families to choose their puppies at 2 weeks old. New families should seek out reputable trainer that focus on positive reinforcement to build the confidence of their dogs.