How to Bring a Newly Adopted Dog Into Your Home

Adopting a new dog is an exciting time. If you have planned for your new addition with care, you are already in a position to have the experience be enjoyable, safe, and successful with minimal stress for all parties. But, even if you missed some steps back when you adopted your dog, it is never too late to start restructuring to achieve a more balanced relationship. The steps below are a broad strokes game plan of how I introduce dogs into MY home (in Board & Train), and we have great success with it, even as we have dogs coming and going all the time. I hope it is helpful for you as you plan for your new family member.

The Crate

Hands down the most important thing you can do for your new pup is to set them up with a space of their very own. Having a respite area will give your dog opportunities to process all the change, and adjust to it’s new home safely. If you have other dogs in the house, crating the newcomer will give everyone a chance to get used to each other’s presence safely.

If your dog is coming from a shelter environment, there will likely be some gastrointestinal issues that work themselves out over the course of a few weeks. Getting your dog started in a crate means you’ll be less likely to have to clean up nasty shelter poo accidents. A solid crate routine also limits your dog’s access to be destructive in the house, which will mean you never have to face the harsh reality of coming home to find your dog has ingested a blanket, or fought with your other dog in your absence.

Training

Once your dog takes the first step inside your home, it begins learning. If you don’t simultaneously begin teaching, your dog will most likely learn things that aren’t compatible with your lifestyle - chewing items, jumping up, pulling on the leash, excessive barking, and soiling in the house are the RULE for most dogs, not the exception. The vast majority of dogs will do these behaviors if not taught to behave differently. These behaviors do not occur only with certain breeds, or only with “rescues.” They occur in the vast majority of dogs and they are easily fixable if you start EARLY and don’t wait until the small problems become big ones.

The first few days to weeks in your home, you are in a position of power, and in a good place to start leveraging resources, like food and freedom. This is part of why our Board & Train is so successful - we have zero history with the dog, and we begin communicating boundaries and asking for respect immediately. Then as the dog learns the ropes, we can begin to share our softer side. Where people often run into trouble is when they try to flip that process - adopt a dog, shower it with love & affection, spend six months allowing it to behave impulsively around the house and your personal space and THEN try to enroll in some training when the behaviors become unlivable or dangerous. It’s a recipe for heartache and stress, when in reality things could have been MUCH smoother for everyone had the humans in the house had a plan to start with structure.

Leveraging food is a giant first step. After all, it’s how dogs became domesticated from wolves - they started working for us! lYou can start training basic commands - sit, down, place, heel - immediately using the dog’s daily kibble. If your new dog doesn’t want to work, put it back in it’s kennel and try again 6-8 hours later. Your dog will eat when it is hungry, I promise, and it is important that your relationship be set up in the correct way. Your dog learns that interaction with you is the only way to earn meals, which automatically makes you someone worth listening to. Your dog has to eat anyway, so you might as well use that food for training, right? After you can seamlessly lure obedience behaviors with food, you can build on this foundation by sharing corrections for not performing the commands in a timely fashion, or for lack of effort in training. If you play your cards right with the working for meals part, the corrections you eventually will have to share for noncompliance will be MUCH more subtle than if you allowed your dog to have free meals for 6 months and THEN tried training. It’s all about managing the dog’s perception of you, and that actually doesn’t take a whole of skill, it just takes a plan and consistency.

Guilty Until Proven Innocent

I can’t count the number of calls I get from owners of newly adopted dogs, who find out the hard way that their new dog doesn’t like the man of the house, or children, or the current dog in the household. Oftentimes things are great for the first few weeks before going to shit. This is known as the “honeymoon period.” The dog is on its best behavior as it figures out exactly what is acceptable in its new home. Often you will see a “suppression” of overall temperament as a result of the dog having to get by in a crazy foster home, or on the streets, or in a chaotic shelter. Issues like resource guarding and aggression generally take time to show themselves - as the dog becomes more comfortable in its new environment, it will feel entitled to make certain choices. You may see a pushier dog, a more attitudinal dog, or a more aloof dog. Be watching out for how the personality changes over time.

Think of your home like a company, where you’re the CEO, and your new dog is a new hire cubicle dweller. There is most definitely a hierarchy when it comes to who can make what decisions, who controls the culture of the space, and who can demand or request things. The cubicle dweller doesn’t barge into the CEO’s office to raise an issue about the quality of snacks in the snack room. The CEO doesn’t chum around near the cubicles. The different “levels” of a company may interact, of course, but with accordant rituals in place to let everyone know what their role is. Status is a real thing in social animals. Everyone is allowed to make some choices within reason, and everyone is allowed to have a personality, but we do set limits on who can make what choices and discourage anti-social behaviors.

You have just adopted a predator. A predator with a mouth full of teeth capable of shredding flesh, who could kill you in your sleep if it wanted to, and whose history is relatively unknown. You don’t know what the dog is capable of, or what the dog will do when push comes to shove. The most important piece to the puzzle is controlling your space right away, such that your dog doesn’t feel entitled to make CEO level choices. Everything - including his access to meals, space, toys, fun, affection, and freedom - will be cubicle level choices. Just as the cubicle dweller does not have access to all the company’s spaces and financial records, your dog will not have access very many choices at first either. This means extremely limited fun and affection (including with other dogs). Until you’re sure that your new dog doesn’t have a resource guarding issue, assume that it does, and take steps to prevent it (by keeping resources put away and not allowing the dog access to free food). Observe your new dog as you introduce more choice making.

All the other animals (and children) in your house should be easily directed. You need to be able to claim space easily. The children if present will need to have appropriate training with dogs, and you will need to establish an automatic “no-go” zone around the kids. While your kids are playing, your dogs should not be up in their business, unless the child is older and is playing WITH the dog (like tug or fetch). Children move unpredictably and this is concerning to many dogs, especially if they have never been around children before.

Your dog will see you tell your other dog to move, come here, do this, don’t do that, etc. If you struggle to set boundaries with your children or other dogs, you are more than likely going to struggle with the new dog. Everyone needs to be on the same page. It is apparent to dogs who controls the space and energy of a home; it is not hard for them to figure out the hierarchy. When they understand that the CEO position is not available, most dogs generally put their heads down and get to work. But if it is unclear who’s in charge, dogs tend to want to figure it out.

The Long Game
One of the things I coach my clients on is learning how to play the long game. In all reality, owning a dog should be enjoyable. When foundational structure is established, it can be easy to own a dog - and we can have the cuddling on the couch, the playfulness, the companionship that we all desire. And we can have it for a longer proportion of the dog’s life. But when we try to START with cuddles and softness, it tends not to play out well (at least, it doesn’t for the clients who end up needing my help). It is when humans put the need to love and cuddle before the basic social needs of the animal that we see struggle.

Start with boundaries. Start with clear communication. Start with structure. Have very few rules, but enforce them consistently. Understand that heel, place, sit, down, and recall are NOT a lot to ask of a dog. Let your dog be a dog by teaching it how to go off leash, how to romp with a pack, and how to migrate with humans. Teach it how to relax and let you handle threats. Teach it how to be okay in its own skin. Watch as before you know it, you can allow your dog to have free time around the house (because of default good choices that YOU have leveraged), your walks become longer and more enjoyable for both of you, and your dog can be welcome into most parts of your life. Watch as your pack mates never have to deal with the stress of competing over human attention and resources.

Overall, the struggles that most dog owners face are due to improper expectations - expectations that are not based on reality. Most of my job involves client expectation management. And, allow me to be clear - the expectations are not all on the dog - you have obligations to your dog as well! You need to walk your dog in a certain way every day, feed your dog appropriately (a cost which may be more than intended if your dog struggles with health issues) and teach your dog rules. While you may have had a dog in the 80s that lived on your parent’s country ranch, hung out outside, and never once ran off, your newly adopted shelter dog living in an apartment may need a different recipe. It is not a worthwhile exercise to focus on that dog from the 80s. It prevents you from training the dog in front of you. My job is to help you understand which exercises are worthwhile, and which are not. :)

Dog ownership, like any relationship, is about playing the long game. From what I’ve seen, when owners play the long game, with appropriate expectations for all parties, the short game becomes a hell of a lot more enjoyable. When they try to play the short game of what feels good, comfortable, sweet in the moment….the long game becomes unfathomable.