Our pup has suddenly turned into a teenage nightmare, is this normal?! I’m losing my mind.

Sorry for the longggg post but I’m hoping to get some advice/reassurance from other people who have been through adolescence with their dogs because I feel like our dog has suddenly turned into a completely different dog over the last 2–3 weeks. 😂

He is a male cockapoo/poodle mix, born in December, so he’s 9 months old now. He’s always been a really sociable, friendly dog and, until recently, we could walk him off lead quite happily. He’d greet other dogs, but he was generally sensible about it, if another dog wanted to play, he’d play, and if they weren’t interested, he’d usually just carry on.

Now it’s like someone has flicked a switch.

On his walks, we currently can’t really let him off lead because he is OBSESSED with other dogs.

If another dog walks past, he’ll lunge, jump towards them, put his paws out and try desperately to get to them. It doesn’t seem aggressive at all, he very clearly wants to play but he gets so overexcited that I can understand why another owner might think he’s being aggressive.

We’ve been trying to keep him on lead and walk past dogs, but he’ll turn around, jump and lunge towards them.

I’ve tried using treats to get his attention and reward him for walking past, but if he’s excited enough, he just jumps up at me trying to get the treat. He basically becomes completely deaf and forgets I exist.

So at the moment we’re trying to create more distance from other dogs and avoid situations where he gets completely over threshold, but I’d love advice on how to actually train this because I don’t want him to lose the ability to walk calmly around other dogs.

Barking is probably the biggest nightmare at the moment. He has suddenly become SO barky. He now barks at the back door probably 40+ times a day. Sometimes every 10 minutes. We don’t just let him out every time because we know a lot of it is attention rather than genuinely needing the toilet.

The problem is that when we do let him into the garden, he has become obsessed with the fence between us and our neighbours. He will run straight over, walk up and down the fence, and has even started trying to scale it. (Luckily it’s a very tall fence) Their dogs can obviously hear him and sometimes react, which then seems to make Nigel even more excited.

He gets so distracted that even if he genuinely needs a wee, he’ll forget about going to the toilet and just stand there barking at the fence. We’ve got to the point where we don’t really feel we can let him freely into the garden anymore because I’m very conscious that if I were the neighbour, I’d probably be getting pretty irritated too.

He also just WON’T settle. He’s constantly at the back door, scratching, barking, running around, wanting to go outside, chewing things, etc.

It’s like he needs to be doing something every second of the day. We try to enforce naps and before this period he would take himself off for naps on his blanket a couple of times a day and just chill out, now it’s impossible to even make him.

He’s also started humping, which has apparently become an issue at daycare (he hasn’t done this at home or on walks) they’ve warned us that if he continues, he may not be able to come back. He’s just generally much more excitable, impulsive and difficult to redirect than he was a few months ago.

We genuinely haven’t changed anything major with him, which is why the sudden change has surprised us so much. Some things are still fine such as sleep, he sleeps through all night with no trouble. When he’s left at home on his own he just sleeps and doesn’t cause trouble.

He’s booked in to be neutered on 28th September, so we’re obviously hoping that might help with some of the hormone driven behaviour, particularly the humping and general excitement. But I’m not expecting neutering to magically solve everything, and we know we’ll still need to train him.

I’m mainly wondering whether this sounds like normal adolescent behaviour, or whether this is getting beyond what you’d expect and we should be doing something differently.

For those of you who’ve had adolescent dogs, Did yours suddenly become completely feral around this age?!

How did you deal with:

- Lunging/jumping towards other dogs because they desperately want to play
- Sudden barking at everything
-Fence barking/obsession with neighbouring dogs
-Constantly demanding to go outside
-Struggling to settle
-Humping
-Basically forgetting every bit of training they previously knew

And, most importantly, did they eventually come out the other side? Any practical training advice would be massively appreciated because we want to get on top of this now rather than let these behaviours become ingrained.

We love him soooo much, but at the moment he is honestly being a bit of a twat. 😂