Puppy Puberty

Our Puppy Care for Dummies pocket guide tells us the following about handling our six month old hound/retriever:

“Random defiance, running off for hours, ignoring direction: Don’t take any of your pup’s frustrating behavior personally. Your puppy must challenge you in order to grow up. Through this age-appropriate behavior, she’s testing your authority to ensure that she can trust your judgment. It’s simply a part of nature.

Managing yourself is the most important concentration during this time. Anger and frustration will spell your ruin — your puppy will view your loss of control as weakness, and she’ll either assert her control or become unsure and manic.”

Bryson is roughly six months and two weeks old. After experiencing the past two weeks with him and his “age-appropriate behavior,”  I think I am going to write the editors at ol’ Puppy Care with this revision to the puppy puberty section:

“Puppy puberty will result in one or all of the following outcomes: you will murder your puppy and experience great satisfaction in the process, you will assume the fetal position and beg your puppy through desperate sobs to stop dragging the wet chew toy over your laptop, you will send the humane society an anonymous photo of your middle finger,  and/or you will not survive to see puppy adolescence. In any case, by the end of the journey you will feel closer to Michael Vick than ever before. And also, you, too, could be facing jail time.”