Puppy to Adolescent: This Too Shall Pass

You did the puppy classes. You practised the recall every single day. At six months, your dog was stopping on a sixpence, turning on their name, coming back to you across a field with the kind of reliability that made other dog owners visibly impressed. And then, somewhere around eight or ten or twelve months, they just… stopped. Not occasionally. Not in distracting environments. Just stopped, as though the previous six months had been a polite experimental phase they had now decided to abandon.

Welcome to dog adolescence. Nobody warns you clearly enough about this one.

Welcome to the Teenage Years

Ellie had a spotless recall record. She had never run off. She was sensible, reliable and not the sort of dog who made impulsive decisions. Then adolescence arrived and she ran off anyway — not dramatically, not repeatedly, but enough to make the point. She never did it before. She never did it again afterwards. It was purely, specifically, an adolescent thing.

Dog adolescence is a real, recognised developmental stage. It typically begins somewhere between six and twelve months depending on breed and size, and can run well into the second year. Larger breeds tend to take longer to move through it. During this period, impulse control drops, risk-taking increases and the rest of the world suddenly looks considerably more interesting than the person at the other end of the lead.

This is not a training failure. It is a developmental phase with a beginning, a middle and — this part matters — an end. Knowing that intellectually does not make it less maddening when your dog legs it across a field toward a stranger's picnic. But it does help to know you are not imagining the regression and you are not alone in it.

The Selective Deafness Phase

The thing that catches most owners off guard is not that their dog becomes difficult — it is that their dog becomes specifically, surgically deaf to their name. Commands they could do in their sleep at four months are suddenly optional.

Jazz ignored her recall training during this phase. So did Ellie. Two very different dogs, from very different backgrounds, with very different personalities — and both of them decided, at roughly the same developmental moment, that recall was a concept worth revisiting later. This is not coincidence. It is a pattern.

What is actually happening is not deliberate defiance. Competing stimuli become much harder to override during adolescence. The smell across the field, the dog three gardens away, the interesting rustle in the hedge — all of it registers at a volume that drowns out a familiar voice. The training is still in there. It has not been erased. It is just temporarily outcompeted.

High-value rewards, a return to shorter lead work and patience get recall back on track far more reliably than frustration does. Keep sessions brief. An adolescent dog has the attention span of someone who has just discovered social media and is not especially motivated to improve.

Sudden Confidence, Sudden Reactivity

Not all adolescent dogs go quiet and distant. Some go in exactly the opposite direction. Jazz, who was not a large dog, managed to have a full-grown German Shepherd backing away from her during this phase. Mini barks, delivered with enormous conviction. The German Shepherd appeared genuinely uncertain how to respond to something that small being that sure of itself. Comic overconfidence — the dog equivalent of a teenager who has developed extremely strong opinions and is not afraid to share them.

Some dogs swing toward overconfidence rather than anxiety: testing social boundaries with other dogs, becoming pushier on lead, or simply discovering they quite enjoy the sound of their own bark. Reactivity that appears during adolescence is not necessarily permanent. Hormonal shifts play a role, and behaviour often settles as the dog matures. Early socialisation is not wasted, even when adolescence temporarily seems to undo it. Giving your dog enough distance from a trigger to actually succeed tends to work better than pushing through a difficult situation and hoping for the best.

The Boundary-Testing That Feels Personal

Adolescence also tends to bring this: the dog who has apparently forgotten every household rule they ever knew. Furniture they had stopped jumping on. Things they had stopped stealing. Behaviours that seemed genuinely settled six weeks ago and are now clearly back on the table.

The adolescent dog usually knows the rules. They are simply running a cost-benefit analysis — and right now, the benefits of ignoring you occasionally outweigh the habit of compliance. The useful response is consistency without drama: calmly restating the rule and not getting drawn into a renegotiation. Ellie came back to herself. Jazz came back to herself. The dog you had before is still in there.

The Neutering Question

Neutering often comes up during the adolescent phase, sometimes as a suggested fix for difficult behaviour. It is worth approaching this conversation carefully, because it is genuinely not a straightforward one.

The right decision depends on breed, sex, individual health and personal circumstances. Timing matters too, and is increasingly part of the conversation between owners and their vets. I have neutered dogs before without a second thought, and I am currently taking considerably more time over the decision for Mouse — not because there is an obvious right answer, but because the evidence is more nuanced than I initially appreciated. Have a proper conversation with your vet rather than making the decision in the middle of an exasperating adolescent phase.

What Actually Helps (and What Doesn't)

Continue training, but adjust your expectations for the time being. Shorter sessions, higher-value rewards and more management of environments where your dog is likely to fail all tend to produce better results than pushing through situations that are currently beyond them.

Avoid comparing your adolescent dog to what they were like at four months. That version was working partly from uncertainty — compliance was partly the safest option available. The adolescent dog has a much better sense of the landscape and is testing its edges. This is actually development, even when it does not feel like it.

Social time with well-matched dogs can help, but forcing interactions with unknown dogs when reactivity is already up tends to make things worse. A good hour with a familiar dog is worth far more than an anxious thirty minutes at a busy dog park.

This Too Shall Pass (But Then There's Pepsi)

Ellie's runaway phase ended. She went back to being exactly the sensible, independent dog she had always been — as though the whole episode had been a brief experiment she had quietly filed under 'concluded'. Jazz's big opinions settled too. Both of them came through the other side as reliably good adult dogs.

Pepsi, on the other hand, is a slightly different story — but that one is for another day.

Your dog is not broken. You are not doing it wrong. The adolescent phase is finite, the training is still in there, and the dog waiting for you on the other side is absolutely worth the chaos. It passes. It really does. Mostly.