3 Ways to Welcome an Adopted Dog to Your Home
3 Ways to Welcome an Adopted Dog to Your Home
Establishing trust is key.
My friend, Andrea, called me in exasperation. Her recently adopted dog, Maddy, was refusing help from her husband, Tim. Maddy wouldn’t leave the house with him. She wouldn’t eat when he fed her. Annoyed and frustrated, Tim gave up, forcing Andrea to get out of bed, fever and all, to care for Maddy.
Andrea and Tim’s frustration are common for people with newly adopted dogs. My own daughters often exclaimed, “Mom why do our foster dogs like you best?” when the dogs would run from them to me when I entered a room.
My response? “If you’d feed and walk them like I do, they’ll run to you more.”
Sounds simple, right? It can be. Provide a dog with a reliable feeding and outside schedule, regular exercise, and plenty of praise, and the dog will most likely respond with lavish amounts of exuberance.
What complicates that simple formula is the dog’s life prior to arriving in your home and the willingness of household members to participate in the development of trust.
To truly help your adopted dog transition to your home, consider three things:
Adoption looks different to the dog than to you.
Building trust is the primary key to a good adoption experience.
Trust and healing take time.
Let’s explore these questions more.
Understand Adoption from A Dog's Perspective
You’re excited. The kids are bouncing off the walls. You’ve got tasty food, plenty of treats, a mountain of toys, and a comfy new bed, so why isn’t your new dog as excited as you? Why is she trying to run away? Why won’t he play with you and the new toys you bought?
Everything to your new dog is, well, new.
Everything once trusted is gone – his name, his people, his home, his favorite toy, his pet friends, familiar smells, the usual food, voice commands, hand signals, outside routines – all erased.
Your encouraging smile and kind heart mean little to the dog at the beginning and everything as your relationship progresses.
Have compassion. Go slow. Be persistent. Proceed with a bit of insight.
I recommend finding out as much as you can about your dog’s life prior to yours. If you don’t learn much, here are a few reasons why dogs end up in shelters and why you might not learn more.
• Perhaps she’s a discarded dog from a puppy mill.
• Perhaps he’s one of many pups seized from a hoarding home.
• She may have been surrendered when a family ran out of money for her food or medical care.
• He may have been surrendered when his family moved and didn’t, or couldn’t, bring him along.
• She may have been surrendered when another dog in the family had puppies, and she was one too many.
• His elderly owner may have died, and no one was willing or able to care for him.
• Her caregiver may be in the hospital or nursing home for an extended stay, and no one is willing or able to care for her.
• He may have been traveling with his family and fear drove him to escape.
• A fire, flood, hurricane, or tornado may have separated her from her family.
Your new dog may have come from a well-funded animal impound or shelter with plenty of food, clean water and kennels with volunteers who provided walks and enrichment.
Your new dog may have lived in filthy, near starving conditions at an animal control or rescue facility hanging by a thread in a rural community with limited resources. Who Will Let The Dog’s Out is working tirelessly to help those facilities and the animals by raising awareness of the need.
Chances are your dog traveled hundreds, if not thousands, of miles to get from his old home to yours. Imagine the stress from being stacked kennel to kennel, hour after hour, among other dogs and cats, all in fear.
Rescue Road by Peter Zheutlin was one of the first books to illuminate the extraordinary efforts of volunteers saving dogs through cross-country transport. I’d highly recommend this book. It will help you understand what your dog may have encountered on his journey from old home to new.
If your dog was fortunate to live in the comfort of a foster home with plenty of food, love and encouragement, the transition to your home, your rules, your lifestyle will require yet another adjustment.
The wonderful thing about dogs is they tend to be highly resilient. Give a dog time to decompress and heal, provide her with opportunities to gain trust, shower him with love and affection, and you should find your dog shedding layers of self-preservation to reveal a wiggly bundle of energy just waiting to engage with you.
Trust Is Built One Treat, One Meal, One Walk At A Time
Your job as adopter is to oversee the building of a new bridge to trust. But you can’t be the only construction worker. Everyone in your household needs to add piles and piers and wing walls and girders for strength and cohesiveness.
When I probed deeper into Maddy’s first weeks with Andrea and Tim, I learned that for a variety of reasons Andrea had become the primary dog walker and feeder. She was providing Maddy with the building blocks of trust and bonding. Tim was not.
I had them remember the old proverb that suggests the way to a man’s heart is through his stomach.
“It’s no different with Maddy. Whoever feeds and walks her will be her hero. If she can rely on both of you, she’ll share her trust with both of you.”
I suggested Tim create a cache of have high-value treats that only he doles out to Maddy: little pieces of cheese, soft training treats for tiny dogs, a shred of cooked chicken without skin. (Dogs don’t need much. They can smell a beef needle in a cheese haystack. Keep the portions small so added calories are kept to a minimum.)
Tim started rewarding Maddy for every little bit of progress: when she let Tim attach the leash to her collar, when she followed him out the door, when she did her business outside, when she followed him back inside. Tim even gave her treats when she sat nicely for him as he put her food bowl down at feeding time.
The high-value treats helped Maddy associate Tim with good things. Tim was adding to the bridge of trust that Andrea had begun.
Trust Is A Function Of Consistent Action Over Time
Building trust is no different than developing reading skills. No one expects a kindergartner to read Shakespeare just because she knows the alphabet.
Reading is a process that begins at birth and continues until third or fourth grade. Once a foundation has been established, reading becomes a stepping stone to greater things.
The same is true with dogs. Trust begins with one meal, one pat of encouragement, one walk. But it doesn’t end with one. A dog learns to trust over time, eventually shedding fear one layer at a time.
Before my family started fostering, we attended an orientation with Second Chance Animal Rescue. We were cautioned it could take a year for some pups to feel at home in their new home. Length of time was dependent upon the layers of self-preservation a dog needed to survive.
Dogs Are Resilient
Walk a mile in your dog’s paws. Can you imagine if you were uprooted from every comfortable, dependable thing you knew, then shuttled between places and people, surrounded by questions and fear?
Building a bridge to trust is a team effort that blossoms with persistence and time, aided greatly by your encouraging smile and kind heart.
Stay the course! The love from an adopted dog is worth it!
Four Things to Consider Before Getting a Pet and Consider How You Communicate Before Getting a Pet are two additional blogs that might help you better welcome a new pet into your home.
(Photo of dog on front steps by Josh Hild on Pexels)