This is very good advice, but I wish it wasn't presented without qualifiers. There are good reasons to get a shelter dog:
- You are potentially saving a dog's life that would otherwise be put down.
- They are often initially cheaper than buying a dog from a breeder.
People rightly focus on the strong moral argument of the first point and they even emphasize the second to imply that it's a good self-interested choice too. But they advocate so strongly that they often omit the real downsides:
- The long-term cost may be higher. There are breeds that are known for significant health problems, but many breeds don't have them and if you buy a puppy of those breeds, their health is closer to being a known quantity. With a shelter dog, you are rolling the dice. There is maybe an argument that hybrid vigor makes shelter mutts statistically more healthy, but that has to be balanced against the facts that (1) the dog may have ended up in the shelter because of health problems or (2) the dog's life pre-shelter may have caused health problems.
- There may be long-term behavioral problems. Dogs in shelters may have been feral, living on the streets, abused, or relinquished because of behavioral problems. If they were feral and weren't potty trained well as a puppy, you may never train them out of marking. Even if the dog was homed, the kind of people who don't spay and neuter their animals (thus leading to puppies that end up in the shelter) are often the kind of people who don't train them well either. There also seems to be a correlation with shelter dogs coming from dog fighting communities. You see a ton of pitbulls, which are wonderful sweethearts when raised right but are not when they aren't. Even non-pit breeds may have been abused as bait dogs.
I love the dog I got from a breeder, and I love my shelter dog (who is snoring next to me as I write this), but the latter was not the pure win that shelter advocates often make it out to be.
The right way to think of it is sort of like getting a used car: it can save you money and be a morally good choice (in the case of a car, less waste and better for the environment), but it's also an unknown quantity where you need to do more due diligence to know what you're getting into, or accept that you are taking a risk with higher variance.
But, unlike with a car, you're signing up for the dog for life.
So, yes, please consider a shelter first. Any future dogs I get will likely be shelter dogs. But consider it cautiously and take your time finding the dog that is right for you.
I know this is right - but I feel obliged to point out that this is true with a new puppy too.
Training dogs properly is work, and inconsistent or incomplete training only gets harder and harder to fix. Plenty of dogs in shelters are there because owners could not rectify their own mistakes. Not from malice, or lack of caring. Simple unknowing incompetence.
Don't be too quick to judge those who give dogs up
I've rescued several greyhounds from the racing industry. One time, after our old greyhound "Pasha" died, we decided to take on a challenge: a greyhound who was rehomed several times, and even abandoned by a shelter (run by a bleeding heart who had no idea how to handle dogs). Lily was a crazy black greyhound who hated all dogs and was afraid of most people. Her name wasn't Lily - she was 6 years old and didn't have a name that she responded to. For the next 2 months we basically had these rules:
* Always have treats in your pocket
* Avoid triggers (dogs) but whenever Lily sees one at a distance, give her a treat
* If she acts aggressively, don't yank the leash or shout, put a treat at her nose and call her name
That's it, in a nutshell. It works for basically any behavioural problem in any dog. (Of course, the breed will have its own personality type - they all do). 6 months later Lily would go nose-to-nose with a rabid chihuahua and remain calm. She was one of the best dogs I've ever had. Still miss the old thing.
She died last year, and we rescued 2 greyhounds (brother/sister). Dorrie is fine but Merlin was, for reasons unknown, afraid of certain types of street light. Which is a massive pain in the ass of you live in a city. We followed the exact same rules, and within a few weeks he was ignoring them. (Still gets spooked at random stuff, like the moon, or light reflected from a kitchen knife onto the ceiling)
We have a new dog since a month (podenco mix) that had about 5 previous owners and is 4-5 years old. Lovely but very rough edges. Even a few scars on his nose and head so our guess is that he was at least in one tough fight.
Similarly he has problems with other dogs (not with our other podenco, who he loves). He is insecure, stares, starts to go full aggro if they stare back etc. We try to be as careful and consequent as we can. The good thing is he is a very fast learner, not as stubborn.
We give him praise and treats typically after he did well on an encounter (which we keep at fair distance as well). It wouldn't occur to me to give it to him beforehand.
Your method seems simple and I get why it would work, but it's counterintuitive. Can you elaborate? It is something that worked specifically for her for some reason? Or do you think the simple conditioning thing just works. My intuition would be that he has to show the desired behavior and then gets praise/treats. What do you think?
Not the person you asked but I’d guess it has to do with managing the emotions or anxiety that lead to the bad behavior. The way I think of it is I don’t want to teach the dog to overcome negative emotions, I want to help them not have negative emotions in the first place. If possible.
This, exactly. I think that the idea is to teach to dog how to interrupt the negative emotion with something positive. It gets to the point where they interrupt it themselves without your intervention. With Lily, it got to the point where she'd see a small dog or a cat, and she'd look straight up at me (good girl!)
To begin with, practice randomly when there is no trigger. Have a sneaky treat ready and say the dog's name. If it's difficult to begin with (because they don't know their name), try putting the treats into a small plastic container and shaking it, or taking the plastic packaging of their treats. They learn to respond to that noise very quickly. Words are more complex, but if you say their name when you make the noise they'll start responding to that too. Always carry accessible treats.
5 months since we adopted untrained (pretty wild) greyhounds, I can get either of them to sprint to me by calling their name, sit, high-five, lie down... no matter what's going on around them. That response makes it easier to discourage cat-chasing and to reduce their prey drive.
I think you're approaching it from an operant conditioning model where the treat must come after as a consequence of good behavior. But what they describe sounds like reciprocal inhibition:
The idea is that you can't feel opposing emotions simultaneously. So if you can make the dog feel relaxed (by giving a treat beforehand), it interferes with their ability to feel anxiety.
They aren't earning the treat for choosing not the be anxious. The positive emotional feeling from the treat prevents the anxiety from occurring.
With Lily we didn't take the risk of bad behaviour during an encounter. We would just ply her with treats and tell her she was a good girl as we walked by a small yappy dog. I think she started associating those encounters with positive emotions.
Thank you! I'm not very experienced with dogs (my partner is) and I'm still too much in my head instead of with the dog. I think I might be trying a bit too hard (or rather too often) to train him instead of just managing situations in a nice way if that makes sense.
I'm not saying this to judge the dogs' original owners. In many cases, the dog was feral and there is no original owner.
The important point is that dogs go through developmental milestones just like people and when you get a dog that has already finished its puppyhood, you have lost the opportunity to be present during those milestones and train the dog. Dogs can learn as adults, of course, but correcting bad behaviors is a lot harder. When you get a younger dog (shelter or not), they are more plastic and easier to train.
Yes, of course, it's on you to actually do that training well, but at least you have the chance. When you buy an adult dog, which is what most shelter dogs are, you're kind of stuck with what you get.
Right, but when you don't know the dog's breed (i.e. it's 17 types of cross-breeds) nor its history (if it's gonna have PTSD from being abused or fighting for its life in the streets), it's a much safer bet to get a purebred or simple/common cross of 2 breeds where you can Google the general behaviours of those types of dogs, and you know its entire history of life up to that point: being born, then laying around with its siblings and mom
You really want a common cross that has been breed from that same cross for generations. Otherwise what you get is an unpredictable grab bag of behaviors from the original breeds.
Wall of text on point. I got a shelter dog 5~ years ago and it is a relatively difficult breed. I knew nothing about dogs. But I love it and take care of it (because I take ownership of my decisions, particularly where they involve the life of another creature), and it's gotten better over time. I also exercise caution where necessary.
Anyone getting a shelter dog should pay for a dog behaviorist to either help them select a dog or evaluate the dog they have selected. They should also have a trainer lined up to help them teach the dog how to live with them. This goes 20x for first time dog owners.
I was ineligible to adopt a Daschund from a shelter because my property doesn't have 1 acre of fenced in yard. Other places required 2 veterinarian references (we had 1 reference due to owning a cat). It can be a lot harder than people think to adopt a dog from a shelter
I was recently having a conversation with a married couple I had just met through a mutual friend. They were detailing their recent difficulties trying to get a dog. They were looking at both shelters and breeders, and both had their own difficulties, costs, red tape, waiting periods, etc. The woman was also pregnant with their first child. I asked, and the irony was not lost on them.
This really varies. I got this kind of treatment from a group of ladies fostering Shi Tzus. I think they really just wanted an excuse to keep those dogs or give them to new potential old-lady friends.
At the next place I tried they basically threw the dog at me.
This is most excellent advice, and certainly did not state “you should not get a puppy from a reputable breeder”, which seems to be what a lot of the replies to it assume it said.
