Adding a New Rescue Dog to the House
The best advice I can give to you is going to seem like a bit of a buzz-kill: Patience. Patience. Patience. And set the dog up for success.
Don’t put her in that room with the antique rug and hope for the best. Don’t have her run right through the front door and immediately get to know the other dogs. I know it’s exciting and you want to do everything at once, and introduce her to everyone and everything and show her how much love there is in the world.
The enthusiasm is awesome. Love it, in fact. Bottle a bit of that. It’ll serve you well when you start training (which will be this afternoon, right? :) ). Just dial the pace down a little bit. She’s learning a whole new world, and she needs you to make it easier on her. When in doubt, have her on a leash, even in the house. Set up babygates. Close off closets and bedrooms. Take her out more often than seems necessary. Don’t let her practice what you don’t want her to do. The way to stop this is not by constantly yelling “no,” it’s by setting up the situation so that she will succeed.
She is a beginner in your house. She needs a simplified playbook, just like a rookie quarterback. She needs a basic recipe, just like a novice cook. Let her learn addition before you insist on calculus. You are going to give her amazing things and an amazing life. It doesn’t all need happen in the first few days.
Training a New Rescue Dog
Keep play sessions short. Work on teaching her to relax from Day One. Start teaching basic behaviors. You will be grateful in the long-term. (Heck, in the short-term too. Good training is never regretted.) Don’t merely hope for the best, even if that worked with your previous dog. The luck always runs out. (That’s when the fun starts.) Keep it simple. Forgive her ignorance. She’s doing the best she can. She’s learning a new language and a new set of rules.
Some common questions:
What are realistic expectations for a new dog?
Patricia McConnell provides some solid rules of thumb: http://www.patriciamcconnell.com/theotherendoftheleash/three-ways-to-confuse-a-new-dog. See our page on Destructiveness for tips on limiting the damage to your house (and yes, this is a risk, even for a dog that has been perfect in its previous home).
I will repeat: Hoping for the best is a bad plan. It sets you and the dog up for failure. I know it’s a bad plan because these are mistakes I made when I first came into the dog world. I made a lot of the mistakes I recommend against. Now I know better, and the dogs transition much better, and everyone wins in the end (except for the used furniture store and the Amazon.com shoe department).
But they promised me the dog was house-trained!
This word means different things to different people, and even when the rescue/breeder/shelter/past family is being 100% honest to the best of their ability, they still can’t guarantee results. Dogs do differently in every environment. Treat every new dog that comes into your home as if they are not house-trained. This will save you a lot of pain. This will lead to quicker, more reliable house-training, and the closer monitoring will also significantly decrease the chances that the dog gets into destructive habits.
Do not assume that an adult dog will naturally know where to go, or not have any accidents. It’s hard to perform well in unfamiliar environments. Even professional athletes do not perform as well when going into someone else’s home. Your dog is smart, but she’s not smarter than Peyton Manning, who has been training non-stop for 30 years to be best the quarterback in the world, and still has occasional accidents.
Adding a puppy to a house with adult dogs?
Start here: http://www.clickertraining.com/node/4037
My dog has some troubling behaviors. Is she too old to be trained?
Dogs of all ages can be trained effectively. You can read more here: Is my dog too old for training?