FF125: The Adolescent Dog: Making a Terrific Teenager!

Last week we talked about how the emotional part of your adolescent dog’s brain is growing at a more rapid pace than the thinking part of their brain, and as a result, our teen dogs are more impulsive and prone to acting on feelings rather than decisions. Coupled with easy escalation into over-arousal, this can be a bit of an issue. 

But… we can influence the neural pathways in our growing dogs' brains with our training, exercise and enrichment choices. The pathways that get the most use become the recommended route for information to travel on.  We want to pave the pathways that are the most productive and helpful, from both our perspective, and our dog’s perspective…  and turn those into highways so that when a response comes out automatically or without a lot of thought, it flows most easily on that well-established route.  And, for the same reason, we don’t want  to allow a lot of travel down the bumpy side-roads of unwelcome reactions, since the more they are travelled now, the more likely they are to become recommended routes in the future too. 

Rehearsing our dog’s ability to get highly aroused, and then chill back down, is a great way to build the appropriate neural pathways in a structured fashion. Specifically teaching our dogs to get pumped up, and then calm down in quick intervals, can help prevent them from sliding into over-arousal any time something stressful or exciting happens. 

We have actually already built a good framework for this Up/Down arousal action with our pause button interval training! A short duration of training, followed by a short duration of rest. To turn this into an Arousal Up/Down game, we are going to simply increase the excitement level of the working interval. Use the information from your recent homework assignment to guide this. What gets your dog excited?

We want to choose a game that will increase arousal relatively quickly. Now… we have been aiming for about 10 seconds of ‘training’ followed by 10 seconds of pause button rest, but for this game, for some dogs, we might find it takes a wee bit longer to get a good game going. Our goal, though, is to choose intervals that allow your dog to get aroused and have fun- but not go so long that they lose interest or get fatigued, or dive into frantic over-arousal. What that magic amount of time is  depends on your dog and the game but for this week, let’s shoot for 10-30 seconds of play, and then a matching amount of rest. 

What is the game? Pick something suitable for your dog.  Leroy LOVES chase games- and if I combine those with food play, we end up with a high arousal game that involves me running a little and getting him chasing a cookie and he gets aroused quickly. About 10 seconds of play like this is a good interval for him since he escalates really quickly! 

Many dogs will get really excited by a good game of tug, fetch, or some beloved tricks!  Be a bit creative. Our goal is not to specifically cause our dog to tip into over-arousal, but we want to see an increase in their arousal and get up into that sweet spot if we can!  During our pause button behavior, we are hoping for our dogs to just chill for a second, just as we did in last week’s use of the pause button. 

Play – pause button – play—- pause button– play— pause button. 

Here's a full circuit where Leroy plays, pauses, plays, pauses, plays and pauses- and you can see by the third round of play that there are signs he's getting over-aroused. In his case, regrabbing at a toy he's already dropped is one of my tells! Next time I play, I'd choose to do only TWO back and forth rounds, to keep things more successful. 

Homework:

3 rounds at the most for now, start in a low distraction enviroment.