Teaching your dog boundaries is crucial to your long-term relationship. Fostering and adopting a dog is so rewarding, but often times comes with many challenges. Decompression is a real thing for shelter dogs, but setting boundaries from the beginning is totally acceptable, if done correctly.
Earlier this month we brought in our first dog of 2020, Bubbles, a young Pitbull female. She had been at the county shelter for some time, where the stress proved to be too much. With her stress increasing, the shelter felt it wasn’t fair for her to be in that constant state of anxiety (it’s not). Thankfully a rescue stepped forward to pull Bubbles out of the shelter.
While the rescue waited for a foster, Bubbles stayed in a lovely boarding facility, but it still wasn’t a home. When the time was right, we stepped forward to foster her.
Bubbles is as sweet as they come, a little timid and afraid of certain new situations, but so sweet. In the first few days she started coming out of her shell and was a giant ball of energy. In addition, she had zero concept of personal space or appropriate behavior. I’m talking running 100mph at you and launching 5′ into the air at your face to play and say hello. Not cute at all.
It’s important to recognize dogs need time to decompress before you start asking, or expecting, them to learn a bunch of obedience. However, I am here to tell you it is 100% OKAY to start teaching your dog boundaries immediately. Especially for this level of reckless and dangerous behavior. I actually highly recommend it. Setting boundaries sets the tone for your relationship from Day 1. The difference between waiting to let them decompress and starting right away, is your expectations. They need to be reasonable in the beginning.
Once your dog (or foster dog) is decompressed, you’re ready to move on. I wrote a blog post about 5 tools I teach every foster dog that can be found here. It’s important to incrementally teach your dog as not to overwhelm them. Incorporating things into every day life, rather than formal training sessions, helps stop overwhelm.
For more on this topic, visit the latest YouTube video! Don’t forget to subscribe, I post new videos every Tuesday! I also have a great resource for the top 3 behaviors I teach every dog that you can get here.
