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| Mr. President in a car kennel |
When I first noticed that four-month-old Angel was already lifting his leg to pee and showing early signs of marking behavior, it felt to me like the canine equivalent of the time my nine-year-old son, Calvin, told me he thought it was about time he got himself a girlfriend. I felt that twinge so common to parents everywhere: the wistful realization that my children were growing up all too fast.
You won’t get a firm consensus from dog behaviorists about the exact moment when canine adolescence begins. The onset of this stage can begin as early as sixteen weeks—as with Angel’s premature marking behaviors—or it can begin to show as late as eight months of age. Generally, smaller dogs mature sooner than larger-breed dogs. Male and female dogs also tend to grow at different rates. I’m not a dog biologist, but from my years of experience, I’ve come to view a dog between six and eight months old as a “tween,” because at six months, the mating urge is just beginning to form. At six months of age, my sweet Angel turned into a little devil that started humping anything that moved, but because of his general puppy way of being, his behavior wasn’t threatening to the other dogs around him. If Angel were a human boy, this would be a little like his becoming curious about a Playboy magazine but unsure of what to do about it yet. I consider eight months to be the average age when true adolescence kicks in, a period of sometimes daring and unpredictable behavior that can drag on until your dog is two to three years of age. During this phase of his life, your dog’s brain is still maturing, but his body is nearly full grown. From six months to eight months, your dog will still look and act like a nice, big, cuddly puppy. But one day, you’ll wake up and suddenly you won’t see a puppy anymore. Your dog won’t play like a puppy. He won’t growl like a puppy. He won’t bark like a puppy.
“Only in adolescence did Eliza begin barking,” Chris Komives told me, when his wheaten terrier was nearly a year old. “It’s mostly in the house, so I think she’s become a little territorial now that she’s older. When she barks, I tell her no, and then ask her to go to her place and relax. Unfortunately, as an adolescent, she made up her own interpretation of that command. She learned to leap into the bay window, bark her head off at the dog passing by, then run to her place and lie down. I realized I’d confused dog training with dog psychology. We now correct her at the window and make her calm down at the spot where she became excited and started barking.”
Eliza’s “interpretation” of Chris’s command in order to suit her whim is a prime example of an adolescent dog who knows the basic rule book but is still trying to see how much she can get away with. As a puppy, your dog was reliant on your constant input and completely driven by the innate desire to follow you and to fit into your pack. An adolescent dog has a mind of its own. The dog begins to test every single limit that you’ve worked so hard to impose during those previous, formative eight months. If you waver from the program and your dog begins to believe that the rules apply only sometimes, you’ll risk establishing negative patterns of behavior that could haunt you for the rest of your dog’s life. If you go back to basics and stick to the guidelines you’ve already set, however, you will have the chance to establish an even deeper bond with your dog and to build a more mature, more meaningful connection.
I’m saddened by the harsh fact that far too many owners just give up and fold when a previously well-behaved or at least manageable puppy triples in size and starts pushing the envelope at the same time. The owners have been lulled into a sense of false security and suddenly feel they can’t handle all these new challenges. “You only have to look at the main age group of dogs surrendered to shelters,” says my friend Martin Deeley. “Eight months to two years.1 This is also the time a dog becomes a backyard dog because he causes too much trouble in the house. It is an indication that something changed in that period. What really happens is that after beginning well, owners relax because the pup is good, is small, and any developing issues are rationalized away as just being ‘puppy behavior.’ In a very short time the dog becomes larger, stronger, more mature mentally, sexually (if not neutered), and personality-wise more active or even hyper. Now we have the makings of a teenage rebel.” This is exactly why I urge my clients to focus on preventing issues or stopping them early on, before they become chronic. They must lay down a solid foundation of rules, boundaries, and limitations in puppyhood and never waver from those basic guidelines, no matter how big or defiant their adolescent dogs become.
PHYSICAL CHANGES
Your adolescent dog isn’t being willful just to spite you. There are a number of significant changes going on in his brain and in his body that are driving some of these frustrating new quirks in his behavior.
• His permanent teeth either are all the way in or finish coming in, so he goes through a second, sometimes more destructive, chewing phase.
• He may be growing so fast that he has literal “growing pains,” which can range from mild to severe.
• His defense drive begins to develop and mature, so fears he may still harbor from a younger age can show up again, as either shy or aggressive behaviors.
• Rapid growth causes joints and plates to become unstable and susceptible to injury, which means that certain vigorous activities may have to be put on hold until his body matures a little more.
• Older dogs begin to hold the adolescent dog more accountable than they did the puppy, which means new conflicts can develop, seemingly out of nowhere.
SEXUAL MATURITY
One of the hallmarks of this period is the dramatic rise in the role that sexual hormones play in fueling your dog’s behavior. An intact adolescent male dog produces testosterone at a rate several times higher than that of his adult counterpart, which means he will act out his urges in ways that may seem extreme or exaggerated unless he is neutered. Unneutered, a male dog will escalate his behaviors of territorial marking and roaming, and some will start displaying an aggression toward other male dogs—or even humans—that they didn’t exhibit during puppyhood. While sniffing another dog’s urine on a walk, the sexually intact male dog may fixate on it, stare off into the distance (tracking the direction of the dog that left the mark), and either seem unwilling to leave the landmark or act all too willing to tear off in pursuit of the mysterious female whose perfume still lingers. Even the best obedience training during puppyhood will often fail to temper this powerful urge.
The body of an unspayed female starts gearing up for its first heat cycle when she is only about six months old. If you’re looking for warning signs of your female preteen’s first heat, one of the earliest and most obvious will be the different ways that male dogs react to her—they’ll focus in on her right away, usually acting more agitated around her. The female starts sending a scent even before she is fully in heat; it’s nature’s invitation to male dogs to find and breed with her. Even these premature hormonal cues can aggravate competition and aggression in male dogs, and even neutered male dogs will show some reaction to it. The female in heat may also act a little more playful or “flirty” with males, standing very still with her tail straight up in the air like a flag to let them smell her. Some female dogs will show swelling in the vulva area, and once the heat begins, there is a little blood discharge. Frequent urination and touchiness—sort of a “canine PMS”—are also common red flags of estrus.
THE ETHICS OF SPAYING AND NEUTERING
Next to the food drive, the drive to mate is nature’s most powerful passion. A dog’s biology dictates that he or she mate every six months. When the mating urge is not fulfilled, incredible tension and frustration build up in the bodies of dogs—especially male dogs—that are often discharged as serious aggression. This is when the true primal predator self surfaces in previously peaceful dogs, and they can actually kill each other. In rural Mexico where I grew up, dogs don’t get neutered or spayed. The whole countryside becomes one giant dog park to them. They tend to live very instinctive lives because they do mate freely on the schedule nature intended. For these dogs, there is no sexual aggravation to turn into aggression. On one hand, this more natural lifestyle has created a terrible problem of dog overpopulation that developing nations desperately need to address; on the other hand, dogs in Third World countries definitely live much shorter lives than dogs in America.
Like their Mexican counterparts, dogs in America have both the ability and the desire to mate, but unlike them, they don’t have the opportunity. In the Westernized world, our lifestyle, our leash laws, and the way we’ve made dogs members of our families—not to mention the enormous tragedy of abandoned and homeless dogs in America—make it completely unrealistic for us to allow our pets to mate at will. That’s just reality. And that is why I firmly believe that here in America, spaying and neutering is the only ethical choice for those of us who are not professional breeders. We owe it to our dogs to prevent them from having to undergo the extreme physical and psychological suffering caused by not being able to mate when their bodies are screaming at them to do so.
When is the right time to spay or neuter your adolescent or “preteen” puppy? In my opinion, the ideal time is at six months of age. Almost all of your dog’s major growth has concluded by this point, but the sex hormones have not yet taken over driving his or her behavior. Some breeders of show dogs who are looking to mold perfect physical specimens believe in waiting a couple of months longer, to ensure that the dog has finished maturing physically. But I believe that by spaying and neutering at six months, we are blocking the brain from receiving those forceful signals from the hormone world. This way your dog never has to endure the suffering and frustration of needing to mate but lacking the opportunity.
There are so many myths about spaying and neutering—that it changes your dog’s personality, that it stunts your dog’s development, that it will make your dog fat. If I have earned any influence at all by my work as the Dog Whisperer, I want to use it to help dispel those myths. “There are so many health benefits to early spaying and neutering,” Dr. Rick Garcia, one of my favorite vets, agrees. “We’re preventing testicular cancers, mammary tumors, and other reproductive-system cancers; we’re preventing perianal hernias and blocking the development of many other conditions a dog can develop from having too many sex hormones building up in its system over a number of years. Some say that dogs are at more risk for obesity if they’re spayed or neutered, but if they are fed the correct diet and given regular exercise, there should be no issue with this at all.”
In my time in America, I have helped hundreds of dogs and owners better understand the operation and prepare psychologically for it. For every one of them, the process has been a positive experience. Nothing physically, psychologically, or spiritually negative has occurred from the operation. “The behavioral advantages are huge,” Dr. Garcia adds. “Neutering prevents marking with urine in the house and around the dog’s territory, and the accompanying aggression, which can lead to dominance issues and violence toward other dogs and even members of the family. Neutering them makes dogs more manageable, more trainable, and more placid pets at home. The only real downside to neutering is that you can’t breed the dog. Overall, the benefits far outweigh that.”
Of course, spaying and neutering do not promise you a “magic pill” to relieve all unwanted behaviors. Your role as a calm-assertive pack leader and your consistency in fulfilling all your dog’s other needs through exercise, discipline, and affection remain your only guarantees against bad habits or issues. But spaying and neutering do ensure that you are removing the rush of hormones to the brain that drives dogs to want to mate, as well as the consequences of their acting out of frustration when they can’t.
DADDY’S CANCER: A CAUTIONARY TALE
The issue of spaying and neutering became an even more passionate cause for me after my pit bull, Daddy, developed a cancerous transmissible venereal tumor. He survived this life-threatening disease but had to endure surgery, several days of chemotherapy, and an intensive follow-up holistic regimen with Dr. Marty Goldstein to help his body recover from the toxic aftereffects of all the chemo. Daddy was twelve years old at the time and had not been neutered because Daddy’s legal owner, a rapper named Redman, was very much against the procedure. Even though he truly did love Daddy, Redman’s desire to leave him intact came from an emotional place. With good intentions, he wanted Daddy to have the experience of siring puppies, but Redman forgot to ask himself the question, “When I’m not breeding Daddy, how’s that going to affect his quality of life? What will become of that frustration and that powerful drive to mate?”
We can’t say for sure that Daddy’s being intact “caused” his cancer. From a holistic viewpoint, sexual frustration leads a dog to build up excess testosterone as well as negative energy in his body, which can contribute to creating cancer. Soon after Daddy was diagnosed, I adopted him legally and finally had him neutered. It was very painful seeing a dog that I love so deeply suffer so much. Because I loved him, I was going to spend whatever it took to save his life. It ended up costing more than ten thousand dollars. Of course it was worth it—but that ten thousand dollars could have been put toward my mission in life, which is saving more dogs’ lives.
MR. PRESIDENT GETS SNIPPED
When Mr. President reached his six-month birthday, I decided it was time for him to go under the knife so that he could go on to live a long, healthy, frustration-free future. “Oh, how could you do that to such a perfect specimen of dog as Mr. President?” an extremely uneducated stranger asked me. The answer is that even though Mr. President is a very handsome dog, there aren’t a lot of appropriate females available for him. You don’t just go out and place a personal ad for a genetically perfect female English bulldog. I am not a breeder. Lots of people think it’s a great idea to breed their dogs, but as you learned in PERFECT MATCH - Choosing the Perfect Puppy, avoiding the pitfalls of genetic illnesses and behavioral problems is a complicated, scientific task that should never be left to amateurs. I come from the point of view of wanting to prevent unwanted puppies growing into dogs that we put to death, simply because we can’t find homes for them. To me, this is the only real moral outrage, something that creates negative karma for our entire species. By leaving breeding to the pros, we create only healthy dogs for future generations and prevent unwanted dogs from being born into lives of suffering.
A Trauma-Free Procedure
Dr. Rick Garcia of Paws and Claws Mobile Veterinary Hospital has been a great friend and supporter of both the Dog Psychology Center and the Dog Whisperer television show for many years now. Dr. Rick has known Mr. President since early in his puppyhood, so I arranged to bring my growing bulldog to his mobile operating hospital on a sunny April morning.
In order to ensure that a spaying or neutering—or any veterinary procedure for that matter—is an effortless, positive experience for your dog, it’s crucial that you, as the owner, have your emotions in check. Simply put, if you are feeling unsure or guilty about the operation, your dog will feel even worse about it. I hope that by educating yourself on the many benefits of spaying and neutering, you will be going into the situation in the same state of mind in which I approached Mr. President’s procedure—I was truly happy and excited for him and proud to be able to contribute in this way to his future as a stable, balanced bulldog.
When we arrived at Dr. Rick’s, Mr. President was his usual, playful self. All the work that I had done by exposing him to a variety of people, places, and things during his puppyhood was paying off now, with the little guy seeing all new experiences not as scary threats but as exciting, new adventures. He had no idea he was going to get neutered—all he knew was the thrill of coming to yet another new environment. Dr. Rick had instructed me not to feed or give water to Mr. President twelve hours before surgery, but I had brought along one of his favorite toys, a stuffed squirrel, coated with a special organic scented spray I have developed, so that I could keep his nose engaged right up until the moment he went to sleep. I would be there to wake him up in the same way, to ensure his waking up in the same state—calm, content, and submissive.
When we got to Dr. Rick’s mobile van, Mr. President jumped right into it—it’s a familiar place to him and the rest of the pack, and has always had good, happy associations for him, right from the beginning. He immediately started strutting around, making himself right at home. Dr. Rick and his vet tech, Lizette Barajas, marveled at how much he had grown since the last time they’d seen him. He weighed in at a whopping 39.2 pounds! I engaged Mr. President’s mouth with the toy while Lizette petted him—remember, we had spent many months of his early puppyhood getting him used to being touched in all different parts of his body and associating that with rewards and affection, so when the first injection came, he didn’t even notice it. Rick and Lizette were both charmed by Mr. President’s bubbly personality; he is a naturally happy-go-lucky guy who simply loves all new humans. “Not all dogs act like this in the vet’s office,” Dr. Garcia remarked. But then, not all dogs were raised from the point of view of becoming the role model for the perfect dog!
After his first shot, Mr. President seemed just as joyful and curious as when he first came in. He watched Dr. Rick fill his syringe with medication as happily as he would watch me preparing a treat or toy for him to play with. The vet tech held Mr. President’s body and I massaged his jowls and redirected his attention toward me as Rick swabbed his front leg to put the IV in. One more shot, and he quickly drifted off into the land of pink elephants.
Once he was asleep and his body totally relaxed, Dr. Rick began the intubation process. “For bulldogs, with their unnatural body designs and short noses, it’s extra important for us to keep their airways open and keep their necks extended during the whole procedure,” he explained. They also made sure to keep his eyes lubricated. In the operating area, Lizette laid Mr. President on a heating pad to keep his temperature constant (anesthetic drops a dog’s temperature about five degrees) and hooked up his intravenous fluids. Dr. Rick made a delicate elliptical incision around Mr. President’s entire scrotal area. He cut out the skin sheath first, then detached the small ligament that attached each testicle to the genital zone. Finally, he stitched up the incision. Because I had asked Rick to take off Mr. President’s entire scrotal sac to leave him looking “clean and sleek” as well as to prevent some of the skin irritations that can develop when a dog is left with the extra sac hanging, the stitching took a few extra minutes. Even then, the entire procedure was done in just about fifteen minutes. There was one final shot—twenty-four hours of pain and anti-inflammatory relief plus penicillin. Last, before taking Mr. President to his recovery area, a cozy blanket in a corner of the mobile unit, the vets also drew some blood so they could check his immunity titers.
Less than twenty minutes after his surgery began, Mr. President began waking up, trying to sit up right away. He trembled a little bit at first, partly from cold, partly from his body working to release the anesthesia from his system. I engaged his nose with the toy, which caused him to perk right up—even in his groggy state, his spirits were just as high as they were when he arrived. Then, as the best medicine, I brought in his best buddy, Angel, to help cheer him up. Angel approached his friend very delicately. Of course, Angel had no clue that his “brother” had just been neutered; he just knew that he smelled different and was in a different state.
After a moment or two, we carried Mr. President outside wrapped in his blanket and laid him on the grass in the toasty glow of the sun. Dr. Rick was amazed at how hardy Mr. President was and how fast he was snapping back. “If he can stand up, he’s okay to go home,” he told me. Almost on cue, Mr. President leapt to his feet and tried to run… but he was a little wobbly on his feet and plunked down on his bottom after a few woozy steps. Undaunted, he sprang right back up again, chasing after Angel, who was encouraging him to play. After a few more steps, once more, plop! “That’s okay,” Rick said. “Running around will bring his circulation back faster.” As I took out a treat for Angel, Mr. President instantly reacted to the sound of the wrapper—just the idea of food woke him up even further. Though he would not be allowed food or water (except a little to keep his tongue from drying out) for another three hours, Mr. President—still swaying slightly—trotted after me, Angel, and the tempting treat as we returned to my car. In a procedure that took less than half an hour, I had given my young bulldog the gift of a lifetime of better physical and psychological health.
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| Dr. Garcia checks up on Mr. President after his surgery |
TACKLING TEENAGE REBELLION
Neutering a dog doesn’t guarantee psychological balance, nor does it ensure a smooth and stress-free adolescent phase. Even a spayed or neutered dog is undergoing other physical and psychological changes that require extra vigilance and patience from you, the owner, to help guide him through this eventful life stage. This is no time to lose sight of your calm-assertive energy—in fact, now’s the time you will need it more than ever. But be assured that, if you have set down a firm foundation of rules, boundaries, and limitations, it’s only a matter of reminding, rather than teaching, your dog what to do.
“In the home it may be necessary to go back to the training stages,” advises Martin Deeley. “The crate or restricted area may be essential to avoid chewing, running crazy around the house, and even slipping out of housebreaking habits. This is when a dog may decide the sofa or even the bed is a good place to go to the bathroom. Attach a leash to your rebellious teen, even in the house, so that you know where he is and can be aware of what he is doing and—with luck!—even what he’s thinking of doing. In this way you can step in early to correct any attempt at naughtiness.” Hollywood trainer Clint Rowe agrees. “Your pup will have to have boundaries refreshed or redefined. Just stay with the training you’ve done since it was young. Don’t put the pup in a situation where you cannot back up what you command. Don’t put the animal in a situation where it can ignore you or be noncompliant at these stages. Never threaten. Follow through calmly, consistently.”
DISTRACTIONS
An adolescent dog is seeing and reacting to the world around it in a fresh, new way, and may not find you as endlessly fascinating as you seemed to him back in the days when he was working his hardest just to keep up with you. Now he is already wise about his environment and infused with extra energy for exploring it. When you get to the dog park with an adolescent dog, he is all charged up: “Okay, let’s run!” But the dog doesn’t want to just run at this stage, he wants to zoom—and suddenly he notices he can’t get the human to practice that activity. The dog is saying, “What’s the matter with you? Run with me!” And when he sees the human lagging behind, texting on her Black-Berry, he realizes he is faster than the human. This may make him feel a little cocky about his own physical strength versus the human’s. He begins to see other dogs as more attractive companions, because they can match his intensity. At this point, many owners protest, “He used to listen to me but I can’t get him to come anymore!” This “distracted” complaint is probably the number one grievance listed by owners of adolescent dogs.
“I have noticed this difference, especially with working dogs I train for hunting,” Martin recounts.
Here I lay a very solid foundation of obedience and then develop their skills in the field. I have had females who after their first season—usually around the nine-month mark—suddenly appear to have learned very little. It is as though they have lost their memory, their personality changes, and it is not until after their second season that they begin to “click” with me again. That makes six months of—dare I say it?—“dumbness.” They may begin to find that a sniff is more important than the work you are doing and become easily distracted by a favorable odor when it is not the one you want them to be interested in. It may become more important to cock a leg on that tree rather than hunt around it for a retrieve. And this is where we learn whether we have built a solid foundation during the puppy stage and whether we are respected by our dog, as both a partner and a person who should be obeyed.
The solution to a distracted dog is a four-part formula—leadership, consistency, persistence, and patience. When Junior entered his adolescence, the way I managed his drifting attention and the growing intensity of his pit bull energy was to fulfill those cravings for exploration—by taking him with me to as many new situations and environments as possible. Every time I went to a new place with my adolescent dog, it gave me a new opportunity to show him that I was in control, which served the purpose of keeping his mind both challenged and submissive at the same time. While an adolescent dog may be feeling totally like the master of his home domain, a new environment can send him back into a more receptive learning mode.
But the challenges are not just physical ones. When he travels with me, Junior is playing the role that Daddy has played for the first five seasons of Dog Whisperer—he is modeling calm-submissive energy for unstable dogs with many different issues. The energy that another pit bull might channel into fighting is channeled into self-control and healing, and to accomplish that—for any dog—is very, very hard work. And those mental exercises that I put him through constantly reinforce my position as his leader.
Clint Rowe has the same observation of the dogs that he has trained for Hollywood films. “Often, the best way to challenge an adolescent is to work him mentally. Do some structured training while walking; do sit, stay, down, wait; and have him thinking and watching you. Make it fun. If he will fetch, do a few retrieves but again, structured so he has to puzzle it out for himself; he has to sit before being sent for a retrieve, or sit and down and then come back to a sit. Vary it so he has to concentrate. And stop when he is still happy doing it with you. You start the game and you stop the game. That is what leaders do.” The more consistent leadership you practice with your dog, the less erratic behavior you will see.
SOCIAL SLIPS
At seven months of age, Mr. President was among a group of powerful-breed dogs I was working with for a recent Dog Whisperer episode. Being new to the Dog Whispering game, Mr. President and the other puppies didn’t yet understand what Daddy and Junior had learned—that we accept new dogs into our pack and help them adjust. Instead, when I wasn’t watching, Mr. President reverted to his natural desire to tell strange dogs to go away, attempting to convey that message to Troy, a large adult German shepherd. Unlike the previous adult dogs in Mr. P.’s life, Troy did not view Mr. President’s outburst as the move of a cute, nonthreatening puppy. When Mr. President pushed his buttons, Troy pushed back and nearly got in a bite! I stepped in right away, but it was clear to me that Mr. President was actually revved up for more. He was breathing heavily, his eyes were red—he went from dog to bulldog in a split second. By the end of the exercise, they were walking together like old friends, but Mr. President’s actions were typical of the potentially calamitous social slips dogs can make during the transition from adolescence to adulthood. Now that he’s nearly grown, when Mr. P. shows too much of that bellicose bulldog style, he’s in serious danger of ticking off other dogs. It becomes even more crucial that I supervise his social interactions during this phase, until he begins to understand that adult dogs expect a different set of manners from him now than they might have when he was a puppy.
Chris Komives faced a similar social hurdle with the newly spayed Eliza when he brought her to the dog park. “As Eliza became an adolescent, she lost her timidity and became more forward,” he says.
When she was a puppy, I was concerned she was avoiding interacting with other dogs and so encouraged her to get out there. Now that she’s an adolescent, I have to remind her to slow down her approach with other dogs, or she can be overwhelming. If she’s on leash, she’ll get excited to meet the other dog, then gets frustrated when I restrain her. She begins huffing, growling, and spinning, which sounds intimidating to the other dog owner. To work on this, I took her to different dog parks and kept her on leash. I corrected her when she’d start huffing and growling and rewarded her when she entered a calm state by letting her run and play. We’ve made great progress, but I had to learn to ignore the woman who yelled that I was a control freak and should just let my dog play and the couple I overheard saying they hate people who do dog training in the dog park.
As Chris learned, it can take real commitment to remain a calm-assertive pack leader in the face of unpredictable adolescence. The rebellion is a natural part of the process. As a leader, you always have to be aware of what is happening with your dog. You have to remain calm and confident, assertive and positive, to ensure that you are in a position to minimize problems and that all conflicts end with good behaviors being reinforced. Be ahead of your dog; see potential problems coming and avert or manage them so that you always remain the leader in his eyes. “What we have to realize is that behavior is always changing and dogs are always learning. Training happens twenty-four hours a day and training never stops—maybe adolescence never stops—we all become older teenagers,” Martin Deeley observes. “If we accept this as a normal phase in our dogs’ development, then we can be prepared to work with them to ensure that good habits are not lost and even better ones are created for life.”
TIPS FOR TEENAGERS
• Be consistent. If you set a rule, boundary, or limitation, don’t waver from it. Intermittent reinforcement creates an unpredictable dog.
• Follow through. Don’t give a command you’re not prepared to back up with a consequence. Make sure all interactions end on a positive note, with the right behavior being modeled.
• Be persistent. No matter how rebellious your teen, prove to him that nothing in his behavior can rattle your calm-assertive authority.
• Be patient. Your dog won’t be an adolescent forever. The results of your hard work will be more apparent with every success you share. By the end of two or three years, you will have established the good habits to make your dog your ideal life companion.
All the members of the Barnes family are delighted to report that the payoff for seeing a dog through a sometimes rocky adolescence can be enormous. At ten months of age, following his neutering at six months, Blizzard the yellow Lab has actually grown into an even more laid-back, happy-go-lucky version of his puppy self. Christian and Sabrina noted that he seems to have formed a more complete understanding of his boundaries in the house, he has become a more accomplished retriever, and he now responds in a more mature way to the other dogs at the dog park. “He’s still at such a young age,” their dad, Terry, marvels, “but his breed, his Labrador breed, is coming out where his fetching and his walking next to you is just automatic. It’s really amazing to see the whole process unfold.”
PASSAGE INTO ADULTHOOD
The Perfect Dog Revealed
As the adolescent phase nears its end, your dog will challenge you once again. This time, you’ve got more to fall back on than just those eight crucial months of puppyhood and the blueprint you created; you also have two to three years of successfully met adolescent challenges behind you. When your dog asks you with his behavior, “Okay, can I do this now?” you have a whole lifetime of a balanced upbringing to support you in your response. I silently ask my dogs, “What are you going to listen to? What you want in this moment? Or what you’ve learned in the past three years?” I know the answer, because I believe that every test gives me a new opportunity to strengthen my leadership position.
The compensation for your hard work and caring these many months is a mature dog that demonstrates a steadiness and calm confidence that the younger one did not have. He is able to maintain focus and an open, submissive state of mind in a range of both familiar and new situations and environments. “When they’re young, a butterfly can take over their mind state. That’s all that exists in their mind, their world,” Clint Rowe explains. “When they mature, they’re able to watch a butterfly and also be aware of other things in the environment. One particular stimulus usually does not dominate them. They have awareness of their own states more readily. Awareness and wisdom just keep expanding.” This is the end result of spending the first eight intensive months of puppyhood, then another two or so years in adolescence, fulfilling your dog’s needs through exercise, discipline, then affection—and setting and maintaining basic rules, boundaries, and limitations that establish your permanent leadership. It’s that relentless consistency that creates a Daddy or a Junior or whatever role model you want to shape your dream dog to emulate.
This is your reward when you set out and follow through on creating the perfect dog. Congratulations. It’s now much more than a possibility—you’ve actually accomplished it.
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