Sorry if this is word salad. I’m writing this from a place of desperation and on my phone so it’s super hard to proofread and edit.
We brought our GSD home at 8.5weeks and he wasn’t bad at all, normal puppy mouthing but super quick to potty train. We follow fear free and force free positive reinforcement. We spent a week with him at home with us before we brought him to puppy headstart class and socialization play skills. We go to these professionally run courses 2/week. We also got a stroller so he could neutrally observe our neighborhood and the park. He’s now 12 weeks and is now compulsively growling and barking at us and nothing. Digging at the wall and floor in a spot that has nothing on it. Gets up and will actually start screaming randomly. He will chase his tail for 15 minutes even when we try to redirect him, if we get him to focus on us for a second, he will go immediately back into it. He’ll even do it in his crate. We cannot break him of it until he gets physically tired. And even then it’s not play, he’s exhausted and cannot stop chasing his tail.
This behavior has started up really severely the last couple of weeks and exploded the past 3-4 days.
He’s gotten progressively worse and more violent (actual growling and serious barking) during calm moments. We’ve never raised our voices at him and have him on an enforced nap schedule 1hr awake, 2 asleep. The screaming for no reason is really affecting our mental health. He’ll also just start barking at random spots on the wall or what we perceive as nothing. We’ve taken him to the vet twice and they don’t think he has Giardia (he had a positive antigen test but they said its just that he had an infection previously and not an active one) but they sent us home with another round of dewormer which we’re in the second day of.
He suddenly started to get reactive towards other dogs (about 3 days ago) and people talking to us. The dogs don’t have to be close for him to freak out and he’s never had a negative experience with them because we have supervised him 24/7 basically.
We both work from home so we are able to see his behavior and reinforce him consistently. We change his environment so he literally can’t make mistakes and provide him with high quality food, mental enrichment, play, exercise, love and multiple short sessions of obedience training per day.
The thing that’s so weird is in the mornings he will be a normal fine puppy and after his last nap around 3pm it’s just turmoil for the entire night. He cannot be stopped from compulsive behaviors no matter how hard we try to redirect.
He also has developed really severe but selective separation anxiety. Sometimes we can leave and he won’t be upset and then others he will scream to where we have to worry about our poor neighbors and a noise complaint.
Ive had a German shepherd puppy before, and this was not my experience at all.
We hired a private trainer and she thinks it‘s giardia causing this but if it’s not I don’t know what to do. From there on she mentioned a veterinary behavioralist but this is already severely affecting our mental health. I originally got him as a Therapy ESA prospect and planned to train him as a psychiatric alert dog because I suffer from random debilitating panic attacks.
I know puppy is what you have to go through for a good dog but the behaviors he’s exhibiting aren’t normal from what I’ve read and experienced.
Has anyone had this happen? We have spent so much time and energy into researching positive ways to raise a potential service dog and it‘s really devastating to see him deteriorate. Is this just a really intense reaction to Giardia?
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