The Adolescence Stage

The final stage of puppy growth before they become a full grown and developed dog is from 8 to 12 months.  This stage is called the Adolescence stage.  At this point your pup has grown into a full-sized dog but will still have the mental capacity of a puppy so its best to have patience when you continue to teach him/her new things. It’s important to keep training and teaching your dog new things at this stage to help establish you as being the dominant one (this will prevent the dog from becoming aggressive). It is also best that you keep introducing the dog to new animals to try to prevent the dog becoming aggressive towards other animals.  Depending on the breed of the dog, some complex training you can teach your dog is things like herding, identifying objects and running obstacle courses.  Since I live on a farm and I own a border collie I taught my pup, Sadie, how to herd.  On my farm we have goats, horses and cows. So, when I was first teaching her, we started on the goats.  I taught her that when I point to the animals and say “get them” she will go and retrieve them.  It was very easy teaching her to heard considering that’s what her breed is meant to do.  It only took us a couple of tries until her instincts kicked in and she understood.  Now she takes pride in retrieving our goats and horses for my family.  Now when we got our second puppy, Mollie, it took her a while to figure out what to do.  Mollie is a mix between a boarder collie and a lab, and she showed a lot of interest in retrieving the animals with Sadie.  Mollie would constantly get distracted by animals and Sadie that she would mess up and usually ruin Sadie’s work.  We eventually had to train her one on one on what to do then once she for the hang of it we added Sadie.  Now they have learned to work together and love it.  So, whatever you decide to train your pup in just remember that they might not understand the first try, but with patience and persistence they can learn just about anything.