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I need some help  I'm afraid we're in over our heads.My wife and I adopted a 5 year old rescue dog on Saturday. At first things went great. She was very excited and happy to explore her new home and seemed to adjust almost instantly. She approached us happily and without fear, she would go to the door to be let out (and tolerated us taking her out a couple extra times to be on the safe side), she voluntarily slept in the open crate we made available to her, etc. Zero issues the first two days we had her. Since then, though, she's gotten progressively worse. For reasons unclear to us she's become steadily more fearful of going outside. What started out as barely noticeable hesitation has become a full-blown phobia over the course of a couple days. She's perfectly happy to be either inside or outside but it's virtually impossible to get her from one to the other unless you carry her, which she also hates and is terrified of. At this point she basically runs when we try to get a leash on her. Complicating issues, she hasn't been super food motivated. While at first she'd take treats readily and try to beg them from us, she's quickly decided that treats aren't worth the risk that we'll try to put a leash on or try to lead her through the door. I feel like I hosed up really bad by taking her in  Thankfully my wife works at home and has a lot of time to spend being patient with her, but I have no idea where we go from here. Do we just suck it up and let her go wherever she wants in the apartment? We tried giving her time and waiting to see if she would be more interested in going outside when she really needed it, but that just wound up with her pooping in the corner.
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Feb 17, 2016 06:35
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Engineer Lenk posted:Get a lightweight leash or ribbon and let her drag it for a few days, step on the leash to prevent having to chase her when it's time to go outside and make it as low key and calm as possible. This made all the difference in the world for us, thanks!
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Feb 19, 2016 15:34
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Does anyone have any idea how to go about teaching a dog to play? Our rescue dog was originally a puppy mill breeder and we're having a hard time finding any play instinct left in her. She likes cuddling and going on walks, and we've managed to teach her several tricks which she gets pretty excited for, but she has never shown any interest in toys (unless they immediately dispense food.) Part of the problem is that her teeth were not in good shape when we got her, so she's had a lot of them pulled. She still has some interest in rawhide chews, though, so it's not like she's opposed to gnawing on things for enjoyment. We've been trying to train her to interact with a squeaky toy on command (by hitting it with a paw, since she's more inclined to do that than chew on it) in the hope that it might lead her to take more interest in it in general, but she doesn't seem to be able to follow or identify it very well. If the toy is presented to her she will paw it right away, but if it's next to her it never occurs to her to look for it to paw it, even if she saw it get put there. She will just repeatedly paw whatever objects she can find in front of her instead. When/if she looks around and sees the toy she will recognize it and immediately paw it, but no matter how many times we play this game it doesn't seem like she's any faster to realize that she should look around and find it. It's kind of sad, we want to make sure that she's getting as much enrichment as we can provide but she just doesn't seem interested.
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Mar 1, 2019 04:47
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MF_James posted:Have you showed her how to play with it? Play tug between you and whomever and see if the dog understands that; hell even chew on it and tug on it while doing that and it might show her how to play solo. Yeah, we've tried. She's seen other dogs playing with similar toys (and occasionally even the same one we've been trying to train her with) but has never given the toys more than a cursory glance. wilderthanmild posted:Some dogs also don't have a ton of toy interest. I remember one of my dogs growing up was really never interested in toys except for various rawhide stuff that's more "slow food" than toy. It looks like this is probably the case. We just feel bad with her cooped up so much due to the weather since she doesn't really have anything for indoor entertainment.
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Mar 1, 2019 16:04
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Protocol7 posted:We taught this to our pup with the "dance" command and now he "dances" every time a treat is offered to him. We rescued our dog at 6 years old. Reinforcing behaviors is really easy, teaching her to recognize commands is the hard part. When she's excited she will just spontaneously go through every trick that she knows.
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Mar 30, 2020 18:30
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We recently adopted a rescue and she had some moderate barking issues which are getting out of hand. At first she would bark for a few minutes when crated but now she is literally barking all night. I don't know what to do since at this point anything we do is reinforcing it. She already struggles to hold it for 8 hours so we can't not take her out if she needs it but also there's no way of knowing whether she actually needs it. Do we just continually take her outside until she gives up? Do we ignore her and just deal with cleaning up an unholy mess of poo poo and piss every couple days (and also not get any sleep ourselves)?
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Sep 16, 2023 07:54
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The peeing/pooping is likely health related; she's had to go on a succession of prescription diets as we've been working with the vet to narrow down whatever health issues she has, and she tolerated some of them better than others. She's off the diet that she was having accidents on, we've gotten her a different crate and moved it to a different spot and so far we haven't had any more accidents, but I really don't want to press my luck on her ability to hold it because I know that is a habit we do not want to develop. Pre-scheduled nighttime breaks seem like they might be a good idea, I'm not looking forward to having to wake up in the middle of the night for the indefinite future but at least if it's planned it might work out better. Do I just gradually wean her off later by pushing the break time closer to bedtime and eventually merging it?
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Sep 17, 2023 01:19
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Ragnar Gunvald posted:Does she bark when she wakes up? Thats our cue Freja needs taking out, and it just got longer and longer and literally one night she slept straight through.. This is what she would do at first, and she even managed a more or less full night's sleep a couple times, then that night she literally barked for 4 hours straight and would not settle even after going out.
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Sep 17, 2023 20:30
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We'd take her outside every 60-90 minutes in case she actually needed to go, but otherwise didn't interact with her directly.
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Sep 17, 2023 21:08
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Yeah, her attention-seeking bark is much more rapid fire and continuous than her "I have bathroom problems" bark. But we figured better safe than sorry on letting her out, since reinforcing that she can just go in the crate is probably worse than reinforcing that barking is fun. And I mean... if we're not able to get to sleep, then we're going to be occasionally getting up and going to the bathroom, there will be movement and bits of muffled conversation that I'm sure she can hear from the crate and maybe she decided that was fun enough to keep trying for. We did move the crate a little further away from the bedroom door the next night and maybe that was what helped. But we do still want to be able to hear her bark in case there is an actual issue.
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Sep 17, 2023 21:39
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Had another bad night :/ This time she was somewhat better, she "only" barked for 30-40 mins on and off this time. So that's an improvement, I guess, and hopefully it will continue to get better with time. I still wish I knew why she was only going off some nights and not others.
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Sep 18, 2023 13:35
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It's a complicated issue. Making people jump through extra hoops to get X breed also imbues the breed with a sense of prestige. You already see breeds with bad reputations getting adopted by people just for the sake of trying to prove that they can handle them, and giving them official validation is not going to help anything. I guess at least it would still probably be a net improvement, since I imagine most attacks are just plain abuse/neglect/deliberately training them to be "mean."
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Sep 30, 2023 16:48
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Cooked chicken bones are pretty notorious since they're brittle and the shards can gently caress up dogs internally. I'd definitely recommend cleaning the meat off and giving that to him instead.
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Nov 2, 2023 15:47
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We've had our dog for almost 4 months now and she still absolutely refuses to walk over the threshold of the back door and demands to be picked up every time. She loves the house, she loves the backyard, she is terrified of the boundary between them  The shelter warned us that rescues often struggle with doors and she doesn't love them in general but for whatever reason that door in particular is the worst.
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Dec 12, 2023 06:58
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When we first rescued our dog she had a hard time making it 8 hours without peeing so we'd take her outside frequently and made a point of taking her out right before bed. Now she's in a happier and healthier place and only actually wants to pee 3 or 4 times tops and her last pee is 9:00 but she's still internalized that before we get ready for bed I'm supposed to take her outside so she can immediately beeline for the door and stare at me until I take her back inside.
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Dec 16, 2023 17:32
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Neutering your dog isn't necessary if you teach him to use a condom.
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Dec 27, 2023 06:16
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HootTheOwl posted:There's like onesies you can use to protect the incision area. Our dog had surgery a week and a half ago and we've been having good luck with this option but YMMV.
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Feb 19, 2024 15:20
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We picked up our dog from the rescue 6 months ago and she's been very sweet without a hint of aggression, letting us fish contraband directly out of her mouth without even so much as pulling away, and she snarled at us for the first time yesterday. She found a swiffer duster within her reach for the first time and decided that this item was so special that she would not even allow us within 3 feet without some serious calming. So yeah, dogs can be unpredictable about random stuff.
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Feb 20, 2024 04:15
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| # ¿ May 22, 2024 16:56 |
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Our first dog was pretty sedentary and we had to feed her way less than the recommended amount to keep her at a healthy weight. Our current dog is an enthusiastic walker and that's enough that we have to feed her a good bit more than the recommended amount to maintain a healthy weight. In short: TooMuchAbstraction posted:Food recommendations on the bag are borderline meaningless. Feed the animal what gets them a stable weight. Generally the amount will decrease as they hit adulthood, since they're no longer growing, and somewhat less active.
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May 1, 2024 22:54
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