The challenging age is a period when teenagers begin to ignore their parents, when they have to be repeatedly asked the same thing, and when they seem to intentionally do everything the opposite. It turns out that this difficult stage is not only experienced by humans but also by dogs.
Researchers from the University of Nottingham and Newcastle University conducted an experiment with several dozen young Labradors, Golden Retrievers, and their mixes: trainers and strangers gave the command to “sit,” and the dogs either complied immediately or refused to follow the commands, requiring repeated instructions. (These breeds are commonly used for training guide dogs, so they must obey not only their trainers but also their future owners.)
The dogs' behavior was analyzed at five and eight months of age. At five months, the dogs obeyed both their owners and strangers; however, by eight months, problems arose: they began to ignore their trainer's commands but readily complied with strangers. Eight months corresponds to the adolescent stage, and a paper in the journal Biology Letters notes that the worse the relationship between adolescent dogs and their owner-trainer, the more willingly they obeyed strangers. This resembles the behavior of human teenagers, who, the worse their relationship with their parents, the more actively seek authority figures outside the family.
The authors of the study also surveyed 285 dog owners and trainers working with Labradors, Golden Retrievers, and German Shepherds about how the psychology of young dogs changes. Indeed, at eight months, according to dog handlers, the dogs entered a challenging age: while they had been well-trained and quick to follow commands from five to eight months, by eight months, the training process became significantly more complicated, and the dogs stopped obeying even those commands they had previously mastered well.
The challenges of growing up are usually associated with hormones (although opinions on this vary) and changes in the developing brain. It is evident that hormones and brain restructuring affect not only humans but also dogs, and it would be interesting to find out which other mammals experience a similar challenging age during their youth.
