The Weekly High Five 🐾

Hey Reader,
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Your dog has never done this before. Not like this.

The couch has a chunk missing that wasn't there last week. He's up bouncing off the walls at 9pm after a day that should have worn him out. Or he snapped at nothing tonight, over the leash, over a toy, something that never bothered him before. Where did that come from?

Here's the confusing part. You haven't been slacking. You've added a walk, redirected more, corrected more, tried to burn off whatever this is. And it's getting worse, not better.

We just came off a run of heat advisories across eastern Mass, feels-like temperatures near 100. Weeks of hot, disrupted, overstimulating days, one after another. If your dog's been "acting out of nowhere" lately, that timing isn't a coincidence.

Here's the deal. That behavior isn't defiance and it isn't a training regression. Essentially, it's an overtired dog running on a second wind.

A dog who's been overstimulated for days doesn't just get tired and shut down the way you'd expect. Their body dumps stress hormones instead, creating a wired, revved up energy that looks like acting out. Chewing. Restlessness. Snapping over something small. It reads like defiance. It's actually a nervous system past capacity, with nowhere to put it.

More walks feels like the obvious fix, right? More commands, more correction. All reasonable instincts, and all the wrong move here. You can't train a brain that's already over capacity. Calm comes first, always.

I work with a herding mix named Kali who lives in an apartment with her owner. He was walking her up to six times a day trying to drain the energy out of her, and she was still wound tight at the end of it. Herding breeds need jobs, that's all. Not more mileage.

So we gave her one. I showed him how to roll parmesan cheese into a towel, loose at first, then knotted to make it harder. Parmesan is stinky. She thinks something's still in there long after the food is gone, so she keeps unrolling and sniffing and sniffing until she's genuinely spent, and then she just lies down.

It stuck. She rotates between enrichment stations around the apartment now, and she still works that towel after the last crumb is gone, looking for more. Same dog, different job.

Try a version of this tonight. Before your dog's usual wind-down window, take a towel, scatter something smelly in it, roll it up loose and hand it over. Let him figure it out himself. That's it. One ten-minute job instead of one more lap around the block.

Don't expect a switch to flip overnight. The point tonight isn't to fix the whole week. It's to give his brain one calm rep instead of another wired one.

Your dog isn't broken and he isn't being bad. He's over capacity, and more of what hasn't worked won't fix that.

One towel won't undo a whole overstimulating week. If you're wondering whether your dog is overtired or actually under-exercised, and you want an actual plan instead of guessing, that's what a free 15-minute intro call is for. We'll talk through what's really going on with your dog. https://down4paws.com/15-minute-free-intro-call/

You're not doing anything wrong here. Your dog just needs a beat to catch up.

Talk soon,

Pam,
CPDT-KA

Find me on IG: @down4paws