seven month old border collie aussie mix whose stay was rock solid at five months and has fallen apart over the last four weeks in a way that the published adolescent regression material does not quite describe, looking for the version of this from handlers who have specifically lived adolescent regression in a working bred herding dog and what the rebuild actually looked like inside it

Juniper is our first herding breed and she is a seven month old border collie aussie cross from a working farm litter in oregon. we picked her at nine weeks specifically because she was the puppy who stayed and watched rather than the puppy who charged, the breeder used the same word stable that we wanted to hear, and through five months she lived up to it. her sit stay was a minute at thirty feet in the kitchen by week sixteen, three minutes with mild distractions by week twenty, and at five months we were getting clean two minute stays in the front yard with cars going by. i was bragging about her at agility class. i should not have been.

What started shifting at six months. the duration began crumbling first. the same three minute kitchen stay i had been getting on tuesday was a forty second stay by saturday with no obvious change in the environment or my handling. she would hold the position and then visibly check out, her eyes would drift, and she would get up and walk to me looking confused rather than defiant. i thought it was a fluke. it was not. over the next three weeks the kitchen stays got shorter, the front yard stays became unreliable past ninety seconds, and the proofing distractions she had been handling at twenty weeks were suddenly making her break almost immediately. by last weekend i could not get a thirty second stay in the front yard with the neighbors kid biking past, which was a duration and distraction combination she had been clearing two months ago.

What makes this confusing relative to the published adolescent regression material. she is not blowing me off in the way the articles describe. she is not making eye contact and choosing to break. she is not getting up and going to a more interesting stimulus. she is holding the position correctly for a stretch and then losing the thread of what she is doing and walking to me looking like she forgot the assignment. this looks more like a cognitive piece than a defiance piece, and most of what i can find treats adolescent regression as a motivation or impulse control problem, which would lead me to different interventions than what i think she actually needs.

Specific questions for handlers who have done this with a working herding dog. is the cognitive flavor of this regression normal at seven months in a working bred dog, or am i reading something into it that is not there. does the rebuild look the same as a regression rebuild in a less driven dog, or does the working bred adolescent need a structurally different protocol because the underlying drive and cognition profile is different. and at seven months in a herding cross, am i looking at the bottom of the adolescent dip or is there meaningfully more regression to come before we are out of it. i can hold the line on patience and structure if i know what the runway looks like, but i am operating on the published timeline and the published timeline does not seem to match what i am watching, and i am worried that if i misread the pattern i could bake in a stay problem that follows her into the sport work we want to do