Temperament Testing Puppies: What It Can and Cannot Tell You
Temperament testing does not predict who your puppy will become. It describes how a puppy responded on one day, under one set of conditions, to a standardized set of situations.
That is genuinely useful. It is not a forecast, and any breeder presenting it as one is ahead of the evidence.
At Stokeshire Designer Doodles, a Volhard-based aptitude evaluation is one of three inputs into placement. The other two are weeks of documented developmental observation and a structured conversation with your family. This article explains what the instrument measures, what the research says about its limits, and how we use it anyway.
Why Choosing by Appearance Fails
Most families arrive with a picture in mind. A blue merle. A boy. The one with the white blaze.
Coat and colour are the two things about a puppy that are entirely fixed at eight weeks and entirely irrelevant to how the dog will fit your household. Markings do not predict whether a dog startles at the vacuum, tolerates a toddler pulling an ear, settles in a waiting room, or needs ninety minutes of exercise before it can think.
The mismatch is not usually dramatic. It is a quiet, grinding wrongness — a high-energy puppy in a quiet apartment, a sound-sensitive puppy in a house with three kids and a trampoline. Both dogs are fine dogs. Neither is in the right home.
We are flexible about appearance preferences, and we take them seriously. We are not flexible about placing a puppy into a household its temperament does not suit.
The Volhard Puppy Aptitude Test: Ten Scored Tests
The Volhard Puppy Aptitude Test descends from mid-century work on predicting guide dog suitability — most notably Clarence Pfaffenberger's guide dog research (Pfaffenberger, 1963) and the developmental period studies conducted by Scott and Fuller at the Jackson Laboratory (Scott & Fuller, 1965). The instrument as commonly administered was formalised by Wendy and Jack Volhard.
It comprises ten scored tests, not six:
Social Attraction — degree of attraction to people, confidence or dependence
Following — willingness to follow a person
Restraint — response to brief physical restraint
Social Dominance — acceptance of social handling and stroking
Elevation — acceptance of a position with no control
Retrieving — willingness to work with a person
Touch Sensitivity — tactile threshold
Sound Sensitivity — startle and recovery to an unexpected noise
Sight Sensitivity — response to sudden visual movement
Stability — startle and recovery to a novel object
It is conventionally administered at 49 days — exactly seven weeks. The reasoning is that a puppy at that point has the neurological maturity to respond meaningfully while carrying comparatively little learned behaviour. Testing materially earlier or later introduces variables that make results harder to compare across litters.
We administer it in a room the puppies do not know, one puppy at a time, with a tester the puppies have not met and an independent scorer who records responses without participating. Those conditions are part of the instrument. Run it with a familiar handler in the whelping room and you are measuring something else.
Full administration protocol, ground rules, and the complete raw score reference are published on our evaluation page — including the breeder view, which we make public deliberately.
Reading the Numbers: Two Scales, Opposite Directions
This is the most common point of confusion in puppy evaluation, and it matters before you look at any score.
The raw Volhard scale runs 1 to 6, where 1 is the most forward, assertive response and 6 is the most withdrawn. On Social Attraction, a raw 1 is a puppy that came readily with its tail up and mouthed hands. A raw 6 is a puppy that did not come at all. A raw 4 therefore sits on the softer, more hesitant side of the range.
Low numbers are not better. High numbers are not worse. The scale describes the direction of a response, not its quality.
The Stokeshire trait scale runs low to high, where high simply means more of that trait. High confidence means a confident puppy. High sound sensitivity means a sound-sensitive puppy.
Because the two scales run in opposite directions, a raw Volhard 4 and a Stokeshire trait rated high are unrelated values. They should never be compared to one another, and we present them separately for that reason.
The Twelve Stokeshire Traits
The ten scored tests, plus two observations recorded separately, translate into twelve traits. This is the layer families actually see, expressed as household fit rather than as a ranking.
From the scored tests:
Assertiveness with Humans — deferential to forward. Comfort around people, and whether a puppy approaches on its own initiative.
Confidence — cautious to self-assured. Response to unfamiliar areas, objects, and environments.
Motivation Level — low to high. Willingness to work with a person without heavy coaxing.
Nerve Strength — sensitive to resilient. Coping and recovery across situations.
Touch Tolerance — reactive to relaxed. Response to handling of paws, tail, and body.
Sound Sensitivity — tolerant to sensitive. Startle and recovery to unexpected noise.
Sight Sensitivity — unbothered to sensitive. Reaction to sudden visual motion.
Prey Drive — low to high. Interest in chase, stalk, and pounce behaviour. Worth planning for in homes with cats or small pets.
Human Focus — independent to people-oriented. Preference for people over solo exploration.
Tenderhearted — even to highly attuned. Emotional attunement to people.
Recorded by observation rather than scored:
Energy Level — settled to high. Preferred play, and stamina.
Dog Friendliness — reserved to social. Social style with unfamiliar dogs.
Higher is not better on any of these. A high prey drive is useful information about which household suits a puppy, not a mark against the puppy.
What the Research Actually Says
Here is where most breeder content overstates, so it is worth being precise.
Single-session puppy tests have predicted adult behaviour poorly. A longitudinal study following pet dogs from the neonatal period into adulthood found the predictive validity of early one-time behavioural assessments was limited for many individual traits (Riemer et al., 2014). That finding is consistent with earlier work in service dog selection.
Change over time appears to carry more information than any single score. In a working dog breeding program, improvement in a puppy's behavioural ratings across its first year predicted selection into the program, while scores recorded at any single point in time did not (McGarrity et al., 2016). Those dogs were not companion doodles, and findings from a specialised working population do not transfer directly. The broader lesson still holds: a developing animal's direction of change may contain information a snapshot cannot.
Genetics set the range. Heritability estimates for most canine behavioural traits fall in the low to moderate band, generally below 0.4 (Hradecká et al., 2015). That cuts both ways — genetics matter, and they leave substantial room for early experience to shape the result.
So why administer the test at all?
Because a carefully administered assessment under controlled conditions is informative, and because it is the only part of our process that is standardised enough to compare one puppy to another. We use it. We do not treat it as a verdict.
What We Do Instead of Relying on One Session
The aptitude evaluation is layer two of three.
Layer one — observation, weeks 4 to 8. The Developmental Confidence Circuit™ introduces age-appropriate novelty on a rotating schedule: unstable surfaces, new textures, sounds, objects, and simple problems. Handlers record how each puppy recovers afterward through the Canine Recovery Index™, our internal observation protocol. Recovery — what a puppy does after something gives it pause — is the primary measure, because a puppy that notices, withdraws, and returns on its own has demonstrated something a puppy that never noticed has not.
Layer two — the instrument, around seven weeks. The Volhard-based evaluation described above.
Layer three — interpretation, before Match Day. The raw scores and the two observations become the twelve traits, read as a pattern rather than averaged into a number.
Those three layers, plus your family application, health records, and trainer notes, are what we bring to Match Day.
No puppy receives a published score. No puppy is advertised by score. There is no ranking, because there is no universal best profile — a busy household with older children needs something different from a quiet home seeking a lower-intensity companion.
From Assessment to Placement
Each family receives a match rationale: which puppies suit your household, why, what to plan for, and where you will need to put work in.
A puppy with high prey drive and high energy going to an active family gets a note about recall training and secure fencing before it goes home. A sound-sensitive puppy going to a household near a fire station gets a graduated desensitisation plan. This is not a disclaimer exercise. It is the part of matching that determines whether the placement holds at eighteen months.
What Temperament Testing Does Not Do
It does not guarantee adult temperament. Genetics form the foundation, early development builds on it, and neither the breeder nor the owner controls every variable that follows. We do not guarantee temperament or disposition, trainability, coat characteristics, or adult size and weight.
It does not predict adult behaviour from one session. See the research above. We treat the evaluation as one informative input.
It does not rank puppies. No winning score, no best puppy.
It does not end the work. Dogs commonly show a temporary decline in trainability during adolescence, generally around eight months of age (Asher et al., 2020), and dogs with less socialisation in puppyhood tend to show more fear of strangers and greater noise sensitivity as adults (Puurunen et al., 2020). Continued training, socialisation, and veterinary care remain necessary after your puppy comes home. Our 4-Week Doodle School exists for that reason.
The Honest Summary
Temperament testing works if you are clear about what "works" means.
It does not tell you who your puppy will be at three years old. It tells you how this puppy, on this day, met a standardised set of situations — and when set alongside four weeks of documented developmental observation, it tells you considerably more than either source alone.
That is a smaller claim than most breeders make. It is also one we can support.
Research Notes
Asher, L., England, G. C. W., Sommerville, R., & Harvey, N. D. (2020). Teenage dogs? Evidence for adolescent-phase conflict behaviour and an association between attachment to humans and pubertal timing in the domestic dog. Biology Letters, 16(5), 20200097.
Hradecká, L., Bartoš, L., Svobodová, I., & Sales, J. (2015). Heritability of behavioural traits in domestic dogs: A meta-analysis. Applied Animal Behaviour Science, 170, 1–13.
McGarrity, M. E., Sinn, D. L., Thomas, S. G., Marti, C. N., & Gosling, S. D. (2016). Comparing the predictive validity of behavioral codings and behavioral ratings in a working-dog breeding program. Applied Animal Behaviour Science, 179, 82–94.
Pfaffenberger, C. J. (1963). The new knowledge of dog behavior. Howell Book House.
Puurunen, J., Hakanen, E., Salonen, M. K., Mikkola, S., Sulkama, S., Araujo, C., & Lohi, H. (2020). Inadequate socialisation, inactivity, and urban living environment are associated with social fearfulness in pet dogs. Scientific Reports, 10, 3527.
Riemer, S., Müller, C., Virányi, Z., Huber, L., & Range, F. (2014). The predictive value of early behavioural assessments in pet dogs: A longitudinal study from neonates to adults. PLOS ONE, 9(7), e101237.
Scott, J. P., & Fuller, J. L. (1965). Genetics and the social behavior of the dog. University of Chicago Press.
Stokeshire Designer Doodles is a family-run breeding and development program in Medford, Wisconsin, licensed by the Wisconsin Department of Agriculture, Trade and Consumer Protection, license 514401-DS.
The Canine Recovery Index™, Developmental Confidence Circuit™, and Stokeshire Method™ are proprietary components of Stokeshire Designer Doodles' puppy-development and matching program.