Adoption

Adopting a dog can be a wonderful and rewarding experience (most of my crew are ‘secondhand dogs’) and an ideal opportunity to start your life together on the right paw! When dogs are adopted into new homes, very often the humans shower them with toys, affection, treats… all the ‘fluffy’ unimportant stuff while the dog is actually starving for leadership, rules, boundaries, structure, training and accountability so that he can understand this new situation that he finds himself in and what the new human’s expectations are for dos and don’ts in this new home.

When we prioritize our soft emotional human stuff, we show the dog that our leadership abilities are unreliable and flimsy (think ‘poor manager’) which in turn enables the dog to, well, act like a dog! ‘I’ll just jump on this human and bite at her clothes/freely roam the house and eat all the socks, she doesn’t correct me nor structure me nor teach me to make better choices, she only hugs me and spoils me… I’ll be hogging the couch later!’

BUT if we prioritize the important lifestyle and educational stuff like setting non negotiable boundaries, upholding firm rules, applying consistent daily structure (daily crating and place command), and holding ourselves (and especially our emotions) and our new dog accountable for them then, WELL! Then we set that dog and our family up for a respectful relationship built on the right kind of foundation so that in time (after enough patterning to reshape the dogs mindset and behaviour) we can extend the properly balanced and well trained dog a few those fluffy delicious privileges (in moderation of course) without the disastrous behaviour and toxic mindset fallout that landed him in a shelter in the first place.