Training teenage dogs isn’t the same as training puppies or adults—but why? Christopher Pachel, DVM, DACVB, CABC (IAABC), breaks it down.
Christopher Pachel, DVM, DACVB, CABC (IAABC), owner and lead clinician at the Animal Behavior Clinic in Portland, Oregon, explains how professionals and owners should adjust training strategies during canine adolescence and why consistency matters more than correction. Adolescence is a pivotal developmental stage in dogs marked by neurological and hormonal changes that influence behavior, impulse control, and emotional regulation. Unlike puppies, teenage dogs bring a growing learning history and a rapidly changing brain into the training equation. Understanding how these biological shifts affect behavior is essential for veterinarians and behavior professionals advising clients through this often challenging phase of development.
The following is a transcript of the video, lightly edited for clarity and cohesion:
Pachel: When we're working with puppies, we can often assume, for the most part, that [the] puppy is relatively naive. They just haven't seen much in the world yet, so we're laying those learning experiences on top of a…blank slate—knowing that puppies aren't fully a blank slate, even as 6- and 8-week-old youngsters. But for our purposes, that's kind of what we're doing.
By the time we get to [the] teenage [phase]—9 months, 12 months, 15 months, 18 months—that animal is no longer naive, so their learning history does accumulate across that first year or so. [Often], what happens is if we have caregivers who don't fully recognize the impact of this teenage brain, they go down the pathway of, “Listen, we did our training. You know what to do.” And as that brain starts to go offline a little bit in that emotional direction, we often find caregivers are resorting to more of a correction-based training method to get that dog back in line.
I understand the motivation for that—really, I do. I know that those teenagers can be really, really frustrating to navigate. Yet what those teenagers often need more than correction is consistency. It's consistency of expectation, consistency of training, consistency of exercise, consistency in enrichment, [and] consistency in those daily routines. Not that every day needs to be a mirror image of the next, but we need to consistently provide for the needs of those animals, knowing that they are changing at that teenage phase.
So, what does it look like to provide that consistency [while] knowing that even if a dog does actually know what the rules are, they're still going to break the rules some of the time because that's what the dopamine in their brain is telling them to do? We simply need to acknowledge that, [manage] them appropriately, and [continue] to provide that education so [that] as the brain matures, they're maturing in a consistent direction vs layering in corrections, especially at a time of life when that emotional system is really dialed up.
Keep in mind that the impact…of positive and negative experiences is magnified during adolescence, so a little correction may have a big impact, either in a positive way or potentially in a negative way. And now we're on the back end of a trauma experience that changes everything about how the brain actually processes stimuli. So, keeping that in mind, consistency of implementation is way more important than escalation of correction for the average canine teenager.