Yay! You've Adopted a Rescue!
You just adopted a border collie. So let's do the things: Walks! Hikes! Frisbee! Picnics! Even dog sports, right?
Wrong. Or rather, not just yet. Your newly adopted rescue dog needs time, typically about three months but sometimes even longer with high-intensity herders.
Time to fully decompress, learn the house rules, continue counter-conditioning, form positive emotional responses to everything new around them, and begin the bonding process with you, their new family.
Seven Tips to Improve Your Odds
Here are seven tips to improve your odds before adopting a dog that needs remedial socialization (adapted from Pat Miller's Do Over Dogs: Give Your Dog a Second Chance for a First Class Life):
1. Have a solid understanding of counter-conditioning, desensitization, and conditioning positive emotional responses. Make a strong commitment to practice these with them every single day.
2. Read Do Over Dogs by Pat Miller, The Cautious Canine by Patricia McConnell, Help For Your Fearful Dog by Nicole Wilde, and Dogs Are From Neptune by Jean Donaldson. Acquire solid training manuals like Excel-erated Learning by Pamela Reid and Before and After Getting Your Puppy by Dr. Ian Dunbar.
3. Be prepared to assertively protect your dog from unwanted advances by well-meaning strangers. Do not allow people or their dogs to interact with or approach your dog until your dog is well-socialized enough to tolerate interaction and approaching.
4. Know that love is not enough. Many well-meaning adopters believe that giving a psychologically neglected pup a home filled with love is enough to "fix" the problem. Don't fool yourself. Love is an important part of the equation, but it takes a lot of work too.
5. Be prepared for heartache. Some under-socialized dogs -- most likely those who are genetically sound -- do respond well to remedial socialization and turn into reasonably well-socialized companions. Others don't. If you don't succeed in enhancing your dog's social skills, are you prepared to live with a fearful dog who might be at risk for snapping -- you, visitors, children?
6. Think long and hard before opening your heart to a do-over-dog that has unusual behavioral needs, high drive, or rehabbing. If you fail them, they may not get another chance.
7. Remember there are gradations of energy levels, drive, and personalities among rescue dogs. You do as much of a good thing by adopting a dog with small issues as you do one with large challenges. Both dogs are in desperate need of a human to call their own, one who won't give up easily on them, and one who will at the right point in their lives, whether sooner or later, be there to give them a gentle goodbye.
Allow Time To Establish Safety and Comfort
Modern, scientific, and common sense dog training rejects any use of compulsion or aversive tools. However from Applied Dog Behavior and Training Volume Three by Steven Lindsay, we still know that "loss of safety and comfort mediates escape behavior and defensive aggression." A decrease in reward promotes increased arousal, scanning, and vigilance, whereas reward-based training using positive reinforcement intensifies attention and interest, promoting fearless seeking and exploratory activities.
Any newly adopted dog in the first days and weeks surely experiences feelings of loss of safety and comfort, at least early on. Allowing time for feelings of increased safety and comfort to be established, combined with ongoing positive counter-conditioning to achieve positive conditioned emotional responses sets up our dogs for success in their new home.
Reach out to me if you need ideas on implementing counter-conditioning and creating positive conditioned emotional responses. As a rescue volunteer, I want every dog to find the perfect fit.
It's okay to accept your dog for who they are. Pat Miller says like a good marriage, the best dog guardians enter into a relationship with expectations about their new canine partners. If the journey reveals a different path, they adjust accordingly and still fulfill the social contract they made to love them "until death do us part."
These are humans who know how to love their dogs. Every dog should be blessed with at least one, for the rest of their life.
Pearls:
- Patience. Allow enough quiet, in-home, one-on-one bonding time, starting with a minimum of three months, for your new dog to decompress, learn the house rules, and continue learning positive conditioned emotional responses.
- Positive reinforcement. Use counterconditioning, desensitization, and simple reward-based training games to establish feelings of safety and comfort for your new dog.
