A weird but nonetheless true way of looking at chihuahua clothes is that they can be used as a training device. If you have a chihuahua puppy, dressing her up in little dog shirts and costumes to draw in a lot of people and have them wanting to pet and touch your dog can aid you in your socialization efforts with your little chihuahua. Go with me on this. When you have a new puppy, one of the main things you need to do to condition your puppy into being a balanced dog for life is to properly socialize her, both around dogs and people, during these impressionable months. Well when you put chihuahua clothes on your little dog, what happens? Exactly!–people come running from all corners of the earth–OK, bit of an exaggeration, but at least from across the street, to check out your little cute and cuddly puppy with her adorable sweater and coat and pet her and see how cute she is and use that high pitched squeaky voice and tell you how cute your chihuahua is in her little clothing. In this way, chihuahua clothing serves a very useful function in aiding your efforts in socializing your chihuahua dogs with humans.
Now don’t get me wrong: I think chihuahuas are cute enough without the clothes, but they are even cute with, and if you’re going to do something, you may as well do it well, with your chihuahua wearing the human magnets that are chihuahua clothes!
Something to keep in mind when employing this strategy seriously is that chihuahuas are famous for being excited and not-very-balanced dogs, psychologically speaking and, as a result, with regards to their temperment and outward behavior. This is probably because for their whole life, pretty much all they’ve known from people is that excited, unbalanced energy of “OOOOHHHHH!! HOW CUTE!!! OH, SHE”S JUST SO ADORABLE!!! CAN I PET HER!?? NO, OH WELL NEVER MIND YOU–I”M GOING TO ANYWAY!!! OHH!!!! HELLO CUTIE PIE!!! OhoohOOHHOO!!!…” So unless you want your dog to be semi-screwed up for life in this way, you’re probably going to want to encourage people to interact with and help socialize your chihuahua dogs in a more calm, relaxed, balanced manner, regarless of how cute and adorable they look in their little doggy clothes. To this end, chihuahua clothes by default and on their own are largely going to work against this purpose because they tend to attract that kind of unbalanced attention from people. But, if you set a rule for people and you enforce it and use the small dog clothing to attract people over but require people interact with your chihuahua in a calm way, you can see amazing results in your socialization methods.
Using this method with the little dog clothes has made socializing my little dogs a snap: it has never been much effort for me to accomplish adequate socialization of my own chihuahuas for this very reason. My little doggies are usually wearing chihuahua clothes anyways, and when we go out for our daily walks, they usually attract people like crazy. So if you’ve got a young chihuahua or some other breed of small dog, try this out and use the little dog clothing to pull in the people and have them help socialize your pups. It’s pretty easy and it makes the task a lot simpler!
