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Old January 10th, 2011, 05:21 PM
Longblades Longblades is offline
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Join Date: Apr 2007
Posts: 2,528
Well sorry, I don't understand why you expect comments on your first posts in other posts. Or if you expect them here? But anyway, here goes.

It is absolutely normal for your puppy to appear to have what you call a split personality. Calm, attentive and compliant versus wild, crazy, excited disobedience. What I do note is your puppy sure has it backwards from mine and most others I've known.

Calm, attentive and compliant is what mine are IN the house, or our own yard, where there are far fewer distractions. Until they learn how to control themselves, from repeated exposure and lessons in behaviour, yep, they're wild and crazy outside the house.

Now, you can see Dozer seems to have some kind of contrarian bent to him, he's opposite. But the remedy is the same. Training.

If you have achieved Dozer's good behaviour outside with relatively little effort then my guess is that he is a little overwhelmed by the big, wide world and is behaving out of a little apprehension. THIS IS GOOD. He is relying on YOU to look out for him. This probably won't work for long, they do grow out of that period where they look exclusively to you and become more brave and sure of themselves. My guess is you should use this now while you can, it likely won't last.

Dozer is not that young a puppy and mine would have been out of this period long ago. Do watch out for "fear periods", actually he may be in one now. they go through stages where things they have seen everyday all of a sudden are frightening. With us it was garbage cans, they all of a sudden were very suspicious objects.

Hope that helps, best I can come up with without observing the two of you in action.