Bringing Home a Rescue Dog (6 Rescue Dog Tips for your First Week Home) THE KIND CANINE

Hey guys, what's up? Have you just adopted a rescue dog and you're wondering where to start? Maybe your dog is a little scared, anxious, or just a little confused about what's going on. To be honest, you may be having some of those feelings too. Today I'm gonna share six tips that'll help acclimate your dog to their new home. I'm Erika Pasha with The Kind Canine, where we create videos for tips and tricks to help energize and strengthen your relationship with your dog. Let's get to it. Though rescue organizations and shelters certainly do their best to help dogs feel comfortable while they're waiting for adoption, they're usually pretty stressed and have a hard time with this new environment. The same can be said about their new home. The good news is there are a lot of steps we can take to help them adjust to this new normal. First of all, thank you so much for adopting. There are so many dogs out there that don't even have reliable access to food or water or shelter. You are completely changing your dog's life just by the simple act of offering them love and safety and comfort. Tip number one, meet your dog where they're at. Even though it seems like your dog should be so happy about their newfound situation, it's really important to have patience. Your dog's behavior is likely going to morph a lot in the coming weeks. Even months after adopting, a dog's personality continues to open up and change, though it's sometimes really hard. Watching your dog bloom into their true self over time is one of the greatest gifts of having a rescue dog. Stress and a need for decompression have a way of masking who a dog really is for quite some time. Many people think that because their dog is showing some signs of fear or isn't seeking out affection, that they might've been abused. Thankfully, this is usually not the case. While some dogs certainly have traumatic histories with severe neglect and abuse, most dogs do not. It's important to not create an artificial past for your dog and to instead meet them where they're at right now in this moment. But to know where they're at, you first have to have a really good understanding of dog body language and the basics of dog behavior. Tip number two, learn how to speak your dog's language. Did you know that dogs speak a different language than us? Yes, we can teach them words through the process of training but ultimately it's our responsibility to learn their language. Dogs are actually really great at showing us what they're feeling and what's going on inside their brains. We just have to know what we're looking for. As your dog's new guardian, being well-versed in how they communicate is going to be vital to the successful integration into your family. Some body language you might be seeing a lot of in the first few weeks in your home are signs of stress and anxiety. This is perfectly normal and the signs of stress can be very easy to spot as long as you know what you're looking for. Signs of stress could include lip licking when no food is nearby, excessive or fast panting, or carrying their weight really low to the ground and moving slowly, yawning when they're not tired, or hypervigilance, always scanning for a threat, lack of appetite, or even pacing around the room. Tip number three, reduce stress for your dog. If your dog is showing a lot of stressed out body language, don't worry, there are lots of things we can do to help them adjust. Let's start with things that we can actively do to help and then we'll move on to things that we should probably avoid. First, we wanna create a safe space for our dog. Ideally, this is a calm, quiet, and darker place where they can relax. I like to have an open crate with a blanket draped over the top and a warm, comfy bed or other blanket inside the crate. This should be the place of all good things, all the best things. All meals and food enrichment should happen in this space. If you'd rather not use a crate, there are other options too. You can use a baby gate to separate off a couple of rooms and make some smaller spaces. Smaller spaces are often less intimidating for dogs coming into a new place. Alternatively, you can use a folding metal exercise pen to separate spaces as well. Once your dog is comfortable in their safe space, you can encourage them to investigate a larger room or the rest of the house. If you can create a safe space and a reliable routine that your dog can predict, they're gonna feel a lot safer and more secure in their new living space. We can also reduce stress for our dogs by making sure that they have lots of access to fun food enrichment and high-value food rewards. This helps to build positive associations with their new space. If you need some ideas for food enrichment, you can check out my first video on my channel where I talk a lot about mental stimulation and why meeting our dog's natural canine needs is so important. I like to provide lots of outlets for chewing and licking as much as possible because these are two great stress-relieving behaviors. Keeping the environment as calm as possible is also critical in reducing stress. In our house, we like to keep white noise on most of the time. This is usually in the form of thunderstorms or beach waves or light classical music just to drown out any potentially scary noises outside so that the dogs can just relax. You can also create visual blocks on your windows. There are lots of options for this. You can use your blinds or curtains, but I've found window privacy film to be especially helpful here. When you block the windows in this way, the dog is more likely to settle in and relax instead of feeling the need to be on guard from all the potential threats. When you're ready to venture out into the world with your dog, make sure you do it in a gradual way. Start with short potty breaks, making lots and lots of positive associations when you go. I personally like to give hot dogs or cheese anytime we go outside. Once they are starting to get comfortable with these short walks for potty breaks, you can then start to walk them for longer periods of time during less trafficked hours. For example, I'm a morning person and I walk my dogs around six or 7 a.m. every morning. It's so much less stressful for them. It's nice and quiet. And honestly, I kind of prefer it that way anyway. I also like to take my dogs to really remote areas on a long leash and take them for sniffing walks. On these sniffing walks, we're really far away from any potential triggers. So my dogs can just settle into their exploration and chill out. Because there's no unexpected sounds or triggers, this experience can be really decompressing for dogs. Tip number four, don't take it too far too fast. First off, don't take your new dog to a dog park right away. You still don't know this dog very well and you don't know their history. Maybe your dog was attacked by another dog in the past or they're just afraid of other dogs. If either is the case, this probably wouldn't be a very fun experience for them. Regardless of how they feel about other dogs, even if they really like other dogs, the stress of having their whole life uprooted and everything changing is enough to make this situation really unpredictable. Nobody likes to see their dogs get hurt. And taking a brand new rescue dog to a dog park is just a recipe for disaster. In addition to this, I would recommend that you hold off on introducing your dog to any other animals in your home for now. Your dog needs time to adjust to all the new sights and smells of their new home before you add another living being into the equation. This is another reason I like to section off the house with baby gates or exercise pens. This can give your animals a few different spaces without actually coming into physical contact with each other. You can even cover your gates with a blanket so that they can't see each other. Sometimes this adds another layer of stress. Give them a couple of weeks in this setting before trying to introduce them face-to-face. You can have them meet for the first time in a neutral area, preferably away from the home or in a very large yard. If you have other dogs, I suggest having them meet off leash instead of on leash as the leash and the tension in the leash can often add a lot of negative emotions and make things a little bit more tense. Be ready to intervene if necessary and have another person there to help you in case you need it. If you happen to have cats in the home, do not assume that things are going to go well right away. Most shelters don't have the time or the resources to adequately cat test a dog. And even if they do, the stress of being at the shelter can often mask how a dog truly feels about cats. For example, my dog Chester was cleared to be in a home with cats when he was at the shelter. But after just a few weeks, he started to show a lot more interest in them and thought about how fun it might be to chase them. If you can physically manage your environment, you can prevent a lot of these habits from ever developing. And your cats and dogs can coexist peacefully. Let's talk about what we can do to manage our environment for the best success possible. Tip number five, set your dog up for success. It's common that dogs like to get into trouble right after they are adopted. This is usually an outlet for stress and decompression. They don't have it out for you because they chewed up your shoes. They were feeling stressed. They needed to chew something and your shoes just happened to be there. We can proactively manage our environment for success and prevent these things from occurring in the first place while still meeting our dog's needs. First off, I would suggest that you put any popular chewable items up high where the dog can't reach them. This could include shoes, photo albums, pillows, socks, toys, books, anything your dog might be interested in chewing, make sure it's out of reach. If your dog finds something to chew on that you didn't proactively remove in the first place, take it away or block access to it and give them an appropriate chew item instead. It's obvious that they need to chew right now. When we first brought home Chester, he was really stressed and he chewed up a lot of her video game cases. We figured out pretty quickly that if we gave him other things to chew and blocked off the entertainment center to where he couldn't get to it, he would get that need met and all of our video games would be spared. Secondly, take your dog outside to go potty regularly. In my next video, I'll be discussing common behavioral concerns with rescues and one of those common concerns is potty training. It's normal for shelter dogs to have a little bit of a regression in their house training even if they were completely house trained before. In order to teach them to go potty outside, take them out on a leash, yes, every time, even if you have a fenced yard, and walk around with them. When they go potty in either capacity, whether it's number one or number two, as soon as they are done, praise them and give them a high value food reward. They will learn super quick that pottying outside is a good thing. If they make a mistake and potty on the carpet, take a mental note that they need to go out a little sooner next time. Clean up the mess with an enzyme cleaner and continue to love your dog. There's no need to scold them or rub their nose in it or tell them they're a bad dog. Take a deep breath, be patient, and continue to reward them for pottying outside. Lastly, don't leave any food or any items you don't want your dog to get to on the counter if they can reach it. When Chester first came home, we were notified by the shelter that he had never really lived inside a house before. He spent most of his first year of life in a small confined area outside. We made our home very warm and inviting for him in an attempt to mitigate some of his stress. We were very surprised when our camera caught him climbing on the dining room table when we left the house the first time. Thankfully, we didn't have any food or potentially dangerous stuff on the table at the time. From that moment forward, we made an effort to block physical access to the table while we were gone and taught him how great being on the floor was. Tip number six, be smart. Build the behaviors you'd like to see. Smart times 50 is a great training process that you can implement right away without any formal foundational training skills. This system of training capitalizes on what your dog is already doing that you like and allows you to reinforce those behaviors as they happen naturally. For example, is your dog relaxing on their bed? That's the perfect moment to reinforce relaxation. Are they sitting in front of you politely? That's another great thing to reinforce. Are they calmly walking around your house with four feet on the floor? Awesome, reward them for it. The acronym SMART stands for see, mark, and reinforce training. The goal of this process is to first see something your dog is doing that you like, mark that behavior with a click or a yes, and reinforce with a high value food reward at least 50 times per day. You may think 50 is a lot, but think of how much food your dog gets for free every day in that bowl. If you were to set aside that meal or just 50 tiny high value food rewards and scatter them throughout the house in different rooms, you can easily see, mark, and reinforce all of the things that your dog is already doing. In our house, we keep little jars up high in every room so that we can take all of the moments that we see our dogs making good choices and reinforce them. This allows us to build our dog's natural default behaviors into things that we like so that we don't have to constantly tell them what not to do. I hope this video has been helpful for you as you start your journey with your new shelter dog, and congratulations on your newest family addition. Thank you for giving your dog the gift of love and stability. Every dog deserves a loving home and a family that can care for them and meet their needs. If you like this video, make sure you give it a thumbs up, and if you're new here, subscribe to our channel. Next time, we'll be discussing some common behavioral concerns with rescue dogs and how we can help them to peacefully coexist in our homes with us. Hope to see you there. Bye for now. Woof. Hi.