Dogs be Dogs

Dogs be Dogs Behaviour, training & support for cockapoos, doodles, labradors, spaniels & vizslas in modern pet homes.

Helping owners better understand their dogs across Reading, Berkshire & South Oxfordshire.

22/08/2026

Nero started this chase. He’s almost 9 and Elphaba is 7 months.

He stops and waits round the corner to ambush her, and she’s stopped falling for it.

She also stole the toy he actually cared about.

Seven months old and she’s already learning how to work an almost nine year old dog.

Follow for common sense that makes life with a dog easier.

19/08/2026

Pair their name with everything awesome.

Before I put the food bowl down, I say her name. She gets excited. And I use it throughout the day with part of her daily food allowance - I say her name, and I give her food.

I don’t waste my time on sit and wait with food, at least not initially. What I want is a dog who is really, really excited to hear her name and runs to it.

I don’t say her name in vain.

If she’s doing something annoying and I want to interrupt it, she gets “puppy” or “oi”. I’m not using her name to stop something that’s annoying for me but brilliant for her.

That’s how you get a dog who gives up a stolen tea towel.

Follow for common sense that makes life with a dog easier.

Another dog comes into the park and your recall is gone. On lead, he either drags you towards them or plants himself and...
13/08/2026

Another dog comes into the park and your recall is gone. On lead, he either drags you towards them or plants himself and refuses to move until they get close.

Where has your biddable little puppy gone?

You expect puppyhood to be hard. Everyone tells you that bit. And then somewhere around six months, your puppy is toilet trained, the biting has stopped, you have got your house back, and you think: right. Nailed it.

Then at eight months he forgets his own name.

Welcome to adolescence.

There is no fixed timetable for this, which is the first thing people want and the first thing I cannot give them. It depends largely on the size of the dog, and sometimes the breed. Adolescence is the pivot between puppyhood and adulthood, and it arrives when your dog is heading towards social maturity, not on a date you can put in the diary.

Here is what is going on underneath.

We bring puppies home at eight weeks old. In the wild, loosely speaking, a puppy that age would not survive without his mother. He would stay with her and his siblings until adolescence, and then his brain would start telling him to loosen those old bonds and go and form new ones somewhere else. The theory is that this is nature’s way of stopping dogs breeding with their own family. It is not personal. It is a very old instruction, and your sofa-dwelling spaniel is still receiving it.

There is research on this. A 2020 study followed guide dog puppies and tested them on a cue they knew well, sit, at five months old and again at eight months. At eight months they were around twice as likely to ignore their own caregiver. They did it perfectly well for a stranger.

Your dog has not forgotten the cue. He is just declining to do it for you.

Meanwhile his brain is being rebuilt. Old connections pruned, new ones formed, the whole thing a building site with no completion date. And his instincts are arriving at the same time. Your spaniel discovers that hunting is the greatest thing that has ever happened. Your Labrador discovers that other people are amazing. Your Vizsla starts working further and further away from you, exactly as he was bred to.

So what do you do?

You batten down the hatches, and you do not stop training.

Adolescence is not the time to teach new behaviours. It is the time to make the existing ones ridiculously easy to get right. You find new ways to reward staying close. You stop setting your dog up to fail and then feeling let down when he does. And where you can, you make him think that coming back to you was his own idea all along.

It passes. That is the honest bit and the reassuring bit at once.

You do not have to do this on your own either. A 1-2-1 in adolescence is not starting again from scratch. It is finding new ways to make yourself relevant when the world has got louder, and working out what social maturity is doing to your particular dog. Spaniels hunt. Retrievers retrieve. Pointers and Vizslas do all of it, further away from you than you would like.

If you want proof that this happens to all of us: Napa passed her Gundog Club Grade 1 HPR at fourteen months. Obedience, controlled hunting, retrieving, recall. The ink was barely dry on the certificate when a swallow swooped past her, and I lost my dog for an hour in a secure field. Nothing I did made the slightest difference.

Her littermates’ owners had been telling me their recall had fallen apart. I had been quietly smug about it. I ate that.

If your dog is eight months old and pretending he cannot hear you, you have not ruined him and you have not failed. He is a teenager. Keep going, make it easy, and wait it out. And if you need some help along the way - get in touch!

And if you know someone with a twelve-week-old puppy who thinks the hard part is nearly over, send them this, so they know what to expect 🫣.

05/08/2026

Throw a puppy into a free-for-all and one of three things happens.

One - your puppy is fine. You got lucky. It’s the least likely outcome.

Two - your puppy rehearses behaviour you’ll spend months undoing. Rushing up to every dog. Jumping all over them. Learning that other dogs are the most exciting thing in the world - and you’re not.

Three - your puppy gets scared. Hiding under a chair. Trembling behind your legs. Learning that other puppies are bad news. This is how fear of other dogs can start - in a session that was supposed to prevent it.

Socialisation is not puppies playing with puppies. That’s the biggest misconception I hear, and it’s where a lot of problems start.

Real socialisation is teaching your puppy to live in a human world. New sights, sounds, smells, textures. Another dog they can see, and still choose you instead.

That’s Elphaba in the video. The recall is trained - but she can only hear me at all because the world doesn’t overwhelm her.

Exposure does not equal interaction.

Send this to someone who’s just brought a puppy home.

“My puppy hides behind me every time another dog comes near. Will he grow out of it?”I get asked this a lot, and I under...
21/07/2026

“My puppy hides behind me every time another dog comes near. Will he grow out of it?”

I get asked this a lot, and I understand why. At home they’re happy, bouncy, full of themselves. Then you take them out for a walk, another dog appears up ahead, and suddenly they’re a different puppy altogether. Tucked behind your legs. Or barking at the dog across the road. Some plant themselves and refuse to move. Some freeze completely. Some roll onto their back looking for all the world like they’re being friendly, except every muscle is tense.

And the advice you’ll usually hear is that they’re just shy, they need to socialise more, they’ll get over it, they’ll grow out of it.

Here’s the honest version, and it’s not meant to worry you or make you feel you’ve done something wrong: most of the time, fear doesn’t fade on its own. It builds.

This is the bit that surprises people. Every time a puppy meets something that frightens them, at a level they can’t cope with, the fear doesn’t wear off. It gets a little worse each time. It’s the opposite of how you actually help a worried puppy, which is to keep things gentle enough that they never tip into panic, and grow their confidence from there. It’s also why “chuck them in at the deep end and they’ll sort it out” is some of the most damaging advice going. A good puppy class is the opposite of that deep end - a calm, controlled place where a worried puppy only ever meets as much as they can handle at a time.

Now, not every wobble is fear. Sometimes a cockapoo squeaking and pulling towards another dog is just desperate to say hello. The difference is in the body. A frightened puppy makes themselves small, hangs back, wants to move away. An excited one leans in, moves forward, loose and waggy. And it really matters which you’ve got, because that frustrated “let me at them” spaniel, held back on the lead week after week, is very often the reactive adolescent I meet a year later.

This is where puppy classes can really help. Not for the sit and the recall, though that comes too. A good puppy class is one of the only places you can watch your puppy around other dogs and people while someone who knows exactly what they’re looking at is standing right there with you. They can talk it through as it happens, and tell you honestly whether what you’re seeing is normal or something worth working on. And if it does need work, you’re already in the right hands. Sometimes that’s a small change within the class. Sometimes it’s a few gentle socialisation sessions to build confidence. Sometimes it’s a one-to-one. Either way, you’re not left guessing, and you’ve caught it early, while it’s still easy to help.

I’ll leave you with one puppy I worked with. At his very first session he didn’t bark, he screamed, and threw himself at the wall trying to get away from me. Genuinely petrified of people and other dogs. We started him behind a playpen, just watching, nothing asked of him. Then peering over it. Then a couple of puppy friends he decided were safe. He finished as an unstoppable little socialite. He would not be the dog he is today if he’d been left to grow out of it.

If any of that sounds like your puppy, that’s exactly who our puppy classes are for.

Know someone with a puppy? Tag them in a comment!

Link to book in comments.

14/07/2026

This is what a puppy class actually looks like.

Most people booking their first one have no idea what they’re walking into. So here’s ninety seconds of it.

Ball pits, tunnels, things that wobble underfoot. Puppies meeting new surfaces and new sounds and working out, with a bit of help, that new isn’t the same as frightening. Time off lead with other puppies, indoors, where it’s safe to get it wrong.

And if there’s one thing to take away from it - a puppy who looks at you is a puppy who doesn’t pull on the lead. A puppy who looks at you is a puppy who comes back when you call.

Classes run at Mapledurham, just outside Caversham, and Sulhamstead, just outside Burghfield.

Link in the comments if you’re local and want to know more.

20/05/2026

4 months old. Watch what she does with a crisp wrapper.

Elphaba is a Stabyhoun - a rare Dutch gun dog breed. But her brain works exactly like your Cockapoo, your Labradoodle, your Spaniel, your Lab.

Bred to hunt and retrieve alongside a human. That working partnership is in their DNA.

I haven't taught her to sit. Or stay. Or give a paw.

What I have done is make her name the best sound in the world. Every single time I've said it, something good has happened. So when she picked up that crisp wrapper, I called her name once.

She dropped it and came back to me.

A behaviour that gets rewarded gets repeated. The more your puppy learns that their name predicts good things, the less you ever need to worry about what's in their mouth.

This is what we build from day one in our puppy classes in Berkshire and Oxfordshire. Not tricks. A dog that actually wants to be with you.

Follow us for more on raising gun dogs and their crosses to actually fit real life.

If you're local - link to puppy classes in the comments.

08/05/2026

This is usually when the biting starts.

Earlier on this walk, Elphaba met bin men for the first time. At the time, she actually seemed to cope really well.

But puppies don’t always show overwhelm in the moment. Sometimes it shows up later as jumping up, panting, zooming around, grabbing sleeves or suddenly struggling to focus.

A lot of puppy “bad behaviour” starts with a puppy whose nervous system has simply had enough.

This is why puppy socialisation is about so much more than just puppy play.

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