Whether you are visiting in person or long distance puppy selection, I am here to guide you. You can watch the 5 week videos of the puppies and listen how I describe puppies, please turn on sound as I am always speaking on any difference in puppy personalities I see or puppy education. What is exceptional hard for me anymore is picking out different personalities. In a video what you would look to avoid is a scared puppy, one that keeps to themselves in a corner (not just tired and wanting to take a nap as that is just timing). Or an aggressive puppy, not to be confused with puppy play as they only have mouths and growling sounds to play and investigate. You can tell when they actually get mad and warn another puppy they are playing to hard, that will last for a second and one of the puppies will walk off. This interaction teaches the puppy that they have played to rough, which is a good teaching tool to teach each other to have a soft mouth and not play so rough. What you do want to look for are puppies with a toy drive and being investigative. If a puppy is walking around the edge of the room sniffing the floor and checking the place out, this is a good action for working class dogs such as bomb sniffing, drug sniffing, airport working, etc. Look for puppies that you can hold on their backs and they don't squirm and they make good eye contact with you. If they squirm for a second or two looking at the floor at their litter mates that is normal, but you want them to give in and lay still after a few seconds as the puppy realizes it can not get down. This is a good training tool to continue when you take your puppy home to teach them you are the Master, the Boss and puppy must listen and obey you.
I start training my puppies at 3 days old with Early Stimulation Training. If I see a puppy more shy, hyper, or aggressive then I work with that puppy for lengthier times, each time until they give in to the training. I am addressing this behavior at 2-3 weeks old. Thus, by 5 weeks old each and every puppy can qualify for working class dog, therapy dog, or perfect companion.
By 8 weeks old when you take the puppy home it has already had 2 months of training, this is what sets Hilltop Pups' Dogs apart from other breeders. Early Stimulation Training makes puppies more intelligent, calmer, and laid back. All the aspects for making training easier and faster. It takes 20 minutes of repetition to teach a dog a new trick, then you must repeat daily for the puppy to remember it.
Years ago I was performing a written test on 5 week old puppies for temperament and personality. It was a 7 point scoring tool; what I found was all my puppies were scoring between 3 and 4, which was perfect pet to working class. Thus, a waste of time and paper. After 18 years with the Goldendoodle Breed I can tweak a puppy early on for whatever I want the puppy to be and I aim for every puppy to be a perfect pet companion to working class as both are easy going and easy to train for anything you want. Armed with the information I am giving you here, you should be able to watch all the videos I take and find some crumb of information that sets a particular puppy apart from another. If it is your turn to pick and you can't visit in person and you narrow your puppy choice down to two puppies, ask me for a video of just those two puppies. Not all the puppies again as you need to start the process of elimination. In a video with just two puppies it may be easier to find some nugget of difference between the two that can better suit your needs and I can assist in the video with pointing out a differences that I see. Turn the volume on in my videos, as I am always speaking about what the puppies are doing, pointing out anything I see that is different, or just speaking on puppy education.