The perfect puppy fell apart at ten months. Into everything, barking at the window, up at every noise, never quite switching off. Nobody warned you about adolescence — and no, he won’t just grow out of it.
Free · In person in Norfolk or online · Nothing sold on the dayOwners describe this to us in almost identical words.
Three things are usually running at once, and hormones are only the start of it.
Between roughly eight and eighteen months the brain rewires. Thresholds drop, training seems to fall out of his head, and the world gets louder. This is biology, not regression.
Settling is a skill, and arousal is a habit. A dog that has never been shown how to do nothing will practise doing everything.
The standard advice — tire him out — builds a fitter athlete with the same off switch he started with: none. The answer isn’t more. It’s different.
The order matters more than the technique. Most adolescent chaos is a day with no shape, run by a dog with no off switch.
Sleep, food, exercise, and what happens in between. Most adolescent dogs are under-slept and over-stimulated, and it reads as naughtiness.
Real rest, on a schedule, in a place that means rest. Sleep is training — it’s where the day’s learning lands.
A place to go and a settled position that gets paid. Boring on purpose, practised daily, until doing nothing is something he knows how to do.
The window, the door, the garden fence — every bark practised is a bark strengthened. We manage the stage while the new habits grow.
Guests arriving, family eating, kids playing — the dog settled through all of it, because settled is now his default, not his exception.
Six to eight weeks on the structure and the off switch, with the outcome written down before we start.
When the chaos has grown teeth — lunging, guarding, real reactivity — it needs the longer runway with support in between.
There’s no price on this page on purpose. What it costs depends on what we find, and we can’t find it from a form.
Free · No obligation · Norfolk and Suffolk, or online from anywhere