Advice for Seaweed
Our 4-month-old lady, Seaweed, had my boyfriend and I down BAD our first few weeks together but we’ve settled into life together and we absolutely love her. She’s a funny, weird, smart, incredibly loving girl who also gets overstimulated VERY easily in certain situations.. I’m sure no one here is shocked by that.
One thing we’re still struggling with is how she behaves around my parents’ dogs, who are 5 and 7 year-old Labradoodles.
Seaweed desperately wants to interact/play with them and absolutely does not understand when they’re not interested. She’ll keep trying until she gets more and more worked up - play bowing, pawing/slapping at them, getting in their faces, and eventually lunging/bouncing at them trying to initiate something.
The interesting part is that my parents’ dogs will often choose to stay relatively close to her or follow her around, so they seem interested in what she’s doing, but they very clearly do not want the level of interaction she’s trying to have with them.
Right now I mostly keep them separated or give them very controlled time together because I don’t want Seaweed rehearsing this behavior and I especially don’t want to put any of the dogs in a situation where someone eventually feels like they have to escalate.
She’s similar with most dogs. We take her to a supervised puppy playgroup and she tends to be one of the puppies who needs the most help regulating herself. She goes from 0–100 very quickly and doesn’t seem to naturally know when to disengage. Interestingly, she recently found one dog she clicked with (a Great Dane/Vizsla mix). They played tug together and it was the first time I didn’t have to be ready to grab & separate her the entire time which felt like a huge win.
She can calmly coexist with dogs when interaction isn’t expected. She does puppy training class next to other dogs and can usually sit with us at a coffee shop or park while other dogs are around without needing to get to them. It seems like the problem starts once she thinks another dog is available for interaction.
My goal isn’t necessarily to get the three dogs to play together. I’d really just like to teach Seaweed that she can exist around other dogs without constantly interacting with them, while also helping her learn to recognize and respect when another dog is not interested.
For those of you who have had very social/easily overstimulated puppies: how did you help teach this? Would you work on structured parallel activities, place/settle around the other dogs, very short interactions followed by separation, or something else?
I’d especially love any advice on how to build a healthy relationship between Seaweed and my parents’ dogs without expecting the older dogs to be the ones responsible for teaching her boundaries.