Imagine you’re a dog. You’re an emotional, sentient creature who is utterly dependent on the two-legged beings you live with. They control everything you need to survive – food, water, shelter, comfort, warmth. They have lots of complicated rules about what you can and can’t do and in the beginning, you make a lot of mistakes. But by the time you’re about two years old, your hard work and careful observation has paid off and you have most of the rules pretty much figured out.
Then your world is turned upside down. For reasons you’ll never understand, you’re removed from your home and taken to a bare kennel in a rescue centre. Your people, the ones you’ve relied on your entire life, leave you there and you never see them again.
A forever home?
After what seems like an eternity, a new family turn up and take you home. You have no idea who they are or what their rules might be. You’re scared and anxious. Your last people went away and never came back, so you decide to follow the new ones around the house just to make sure you never lose them again. When they leave you at home, you start to panic and get so upset that you’re being abandoned again that you’ll do whatever it takes to be near your new people again. Because after all, where else will you be safer?
Because you’ve lived in a kennel for months, where nobody came to open a door for you when you asked for a toilet break, you learned new rules. Nobody shouted at you for peeing in your kennel so the rules must have changed right? It’s safe to pee indoors now. But in this new home, peeing indoors gets you shouted at and maybe worse. Now you’re really confused and even more scared.
Just when you think things can’t get any worse, your new people, the ones who bought you a nice comfortable bed, new toys and a shiny new collar and lead, pack you back into the car and take you back the kennels. You never see them again.
So much for second chances
This is what just happened to a delightful little dog an acquaintance of mine recently adopted. Just two weeks after he found his ‘forever home’ he was handed back. The bit that makes me even madder, is that the family in question asked for advice on his house training and separation anxiety from a local dog trainer, they were told that the problems were ‘untreatable’. What utter, unadulterated poppycock.
For the first few weeks, Annie howled the place down when one of us left the room, let alone the house. I was even forced to do one conference call from my shed at the bottom of the garden one day because of the noise! My friends 3 year rescue dog would run upstairs to toilet when she first got him. Who knows what he was thinking, but we think he worked on the principle that doing it out of sight of humans was just safer. I hate to even think of how he learned that lesson, but it can’t have been pleasant. Two weeks of going back to basics and treating him as you would a new puppy was all it took to remind him of his housetraining and reassure him that nobody was going to shout at him or hurt him for getting it wrong. He’s never had an accident since.
I hope with all my heart that this other little dog has gone on to be re-adopted by someone who understands dogs a bit better and realises just how long it can take for them to overcome the upset of rehoming. Some dogs settle very quickly, but for others, learning to trust new people and figure out new rules can take a long time.
Surely, for all the love and joy they bring us, we can at least try to see the world from their point of view now and again and give them the time, love and understanding they need to readjust.
This post breaks my heart. However, I suppose it is better to give the dog back than to sentence it to live outside with no love or attention.
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I suppose so, but it’s so sad. I’m so hoping he ended up with a much better deal 🙂
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Yikes, they wouldn’t have coped with either of our dogs. We found out that our first one had been trained to fight AFTER we rescued her, and with other issues, we soon found out why we were her third or fourth home. Lots of love and patience, (and some tears and stress) we were thankful she’d found her forever home with us.
Our second rescue dog can still be a tear-away – but we muddle along nicely and understand each other now. The problem is a lot of people aren’t prepared for, and don’t understand, how dogs can take a while to settle. The trainer they used should be named and shamed; I wouldn’t take a dog to someone who clearly knows nowt. Your acquaintances sound inadequately prepared, and a professional supporting them could have made all the difference…..
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Thanks for the comment!
I’m 99% sure the trainer is the same one we went to for our awful puppy classes and who used training discs and other horrible startles on LB. Sadly, a name and shame would probably earn me a libel case but just like the useless TV dog trainers, there are a lot of people out there making money off sometimes very questionable advice. The thing that makes me really mad is that, if like me, you know nothing when you start out, you don’t know any better so these people can seem to be really plausible ‘experts’. 😦
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