My dog is now a teenager.
He's gone from being a cheerful nut who obeyed most of the time to an unpredictable jerk who obeys when he feels like it. The biteyness that made his early days so action-packed has returned, with a much longer and stronger mouth. He'll be affectionate and playful one minute, needy and whiny the next, and growly sometimes in the middle. He's making me crazy. He makes me feel like a failure.
I thought that his little operation would prevent this. I thought wrong.
I'm told that this is a phase, as it is with human teenagers; that fortunately, in the case of dogs, it only lasts about three months, so we're already halfway through.
I hope so.
The teens are a particularly icky time of life for teens and those around them. I did not enjoy my adolescence overmuch. I am not enjoying the dog's now.
The mystery about all this is not why dogs would behave the same way people do at hormone-spurtin' time. I guess it's how we become our own creatures, not just a part of the pack, which dogs and people and I guess cats do, but not your lesser mammals. No, the mystery to me us why more people don't murder their teenage children. Adolescence lasts a hell of a lot longer in children than in dogs, and dogs can't make smartass remarks.
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