Adopting a dog from a shelter or rescue

Give a rescue dog the best chance at success.

Adopting a dog from a shelter or rescue.

Today is National  Rescue Dog Day. All of my dogs are rescue dogs. Valentino is a dog that was rescued and now he rescues other dogs. Some of the dogs that he rescues are rescue dogs themselves. Tino is a rescue that rescues rescues. Many of the calls that we get are for dogs that were recently adopted from a shelter or a rescue. I think it’s great if anyone would adopt a dog from a shelter or a rescue. I volunteer with a nonprofit rescue, and I frequently catch stray dogs that end up with our rescue, or in a shelter.  We are always looking for people to foster or adopt the dogs that we are trying to help.  I have built my entire life around rescue dogs, and they are the best things in my world. Obviously, I highly recommend that you should get a dog from a shelter or rescue if that is right for you, but it is important that you take into consideration the past life of that dog and how he might feel about the changes he’s going through.  Although you have the best of intentions for that rescue dog, and you want to give him a great life, he can’t necessarily be expected to get that message from you, a stranger.

I adopted my first dog from the shelter in 2000. The first three weeks were a disaster. The next 14 years were mostly wonderful and I can honestly say that adopting Porter changed my life. When I adopted him, it’s fair to say that I had unrealistic expectations. I saw him in the kennel at the shelter, and he looked very serene and composed and happy. I can only surmise that he must’ve banged his head on the concrete wall and stunned himself, because, he was completely crazy once we got him out of the kennel. He was always friendly and happy, but  out of control.  I had him beside me in their little office as I filled out the forms, and he was so crazy that I couldn’t even keep my hand steady to write. I had to put his leash around the leg of my chair while I filled out the forms. The shelter staffer  that got my information and the adoption fee was looking at me like she was probably thinking, These two are going to die within an hour of leaving the shelter. Because I now run a nonprofit rescue where I want to find the best home for any dog under our care, I know that we have an extensive list of questions for anyone who would foster or adopt one of our dogs. I don’t think I would have matched my 2000-self to a crazy dog like Porter. I didn’t have a fenced yard at the time, and I had no experience with owning a dog.  Knowing what I know now, I would’ve had grave doubts about the old me adopting Porter. Shelters can be under pressure to adopt dogs out quickly, and they don’t necessarily have the time or resources to do a home check or a through interview to be certain that a person is a good match for a particular dog.  Many shelters do try to take steps, in a limited way, to ensure that the dog is going to a good home, with people who are a match to the challenges the dog might pose.  Some shelters, at certain times, seem to give a dog to anyone who walks in the door.  Just because a shelter would give you a dog doesn’t necessarily mean that it’s going to be a good match for the two of you.  If a shelter or rescue is just going let you adopt a dog without much of an interview, then the responsibility falls on you to make sure you are going to be a good home for the dog.  I was not a good match for my first rescue dog, initially, but I learned, and we made it work.

When I got Porter home, I was upset that he seemed to never understand my intentions.  He was happy and friendly, but difficult to manage.  If I ever left him alone in a room, he would start destroying things.  He was maybe a year old, and really still a puppy.  Taking him for a walk was an unpleasant experience.  He was constantly yanking on the leash.  I thought about taking him back to the shelter.  When we were at the beach, he ran off to play with a dog he saw, and he wouldn’t come when I called.  For a few moments, I thought that I might not really mind if he never came back.  Of course, I did go after him.  When he returned to me, I yelled at him, which was definitely sending the wrong message.  I don’t remember where I read it, but in my search of the internet, looking for advice on how to manage a difficult dog, I read that I should praise him for doing nothing.  If I wanted him to stop being destructive and impulsive, I should wait until he was relaxed, and praise him. It took quite a while to find a moment when he just relaxed, but when he finally did, I praised him for being calm.  This made a world of difference.  He really responded to this.  We survived those rough times at the beginning, and he became just a wonderful dog.  He was the reason I got a second dog, Tess.  Then, years later, I adopted Kelsy from a shelter, and she completely changed my life.  She became my search dog.  Everything I do today, the work I do for lost dogs, at least 80 hours per week, it all started with Kelsy, a dog from the shelter.  I got Kelsy because of my good experience with Porter, a dog from the shelter.

All of my search dogs have been rescue dogs.  Mu was never in a shelter, but he was chained in a yard.  I volunteered with Missing Pet Partnership at the time, so people contacted me to help him.  He was a puppy, and he couldn’t lift his head because his chain was wrapped around a shrub.  I bought him for $100 to get him away from a life of abuse.  He went to a foster home for a couple of months, and then they said he was too difficult to manage.  At 8 months of age, he came to live with me as a last resort.  I had to keep Mu on a leash in the house in order to keep him from destroying things.  He would try to chew on electrical cords unless I kept a close eye on him.  When Mu turned one year old, I started training him to find lost cats. Giving him a job made him much easier to live with.  Mu searched for lost cats for 12 years, and he found hundreds of missing cats.  Mu is absolutely the best dog in the world, and he was unwanted and unmanageable when he came to live with me.

Fozzie was running down the freeway when he was first reported to me.  This freeway was the boundary between two jurisdictions and wasn’t technically in either juridiction.  Freeways are a no-man’s-land in the eyes of animal control agencies. Not knowing which shelter to take him to, and since he could have come from either jurisdiction, I fostered him while I reported him to both shelters.  I looked for his previous owners for two months.  No one ever went looking for him, that I am aware of.  I don’t know why.  He was a perfect little dog from the beginning.  Well, he was perfect except that he liked to run off.  It wasn’t that he wanted to run away from me.  He just liked to go zooming around the neighborhood and explore, and meet other dogs.  After the first escape, I put a GPS tracker on him.  In spite of my efforts to contain him, he escaped 8 times in the first year.  The GPS tracker allowed me to catch him within ten minutes on each of these escapes. Fozzie worked as a search dog for a couple of years, between Kelsy and Tino, and he did great work.  He is retired now, but he is still a great dog.

Kelsy was never any trouble, and never really at risk of running away.  She was a great dog from the beginning.  In fact, I did a very foolish thing, and I got away with it because she was such a good little dog.  At nine weeks old, after picking her up from the shelter, I took her to a park and let her off leash to play with my other dogs, Porter and Tess.  Looking back, I see that this was a horrible idea, and I’m very lucky that she didn’t run off and get lost that first day.  Kelsy only ever wanted to be with me, from the moment we met, fortunately.  Knowing what I know now, I cringe that I was so careless with Kelsy in the beginning.

Tino’s mom was a stray, up in the mountains, and I caught her in a humane trap.  Tino was born the next day.  I notified the shelter, and they let me foster the two dogs.  His mother was eventually adopted by a great family.  Tino has always been bonded to me since I was the first person he ever knew.  When he was a puppy, from the start I took extra precautions to make sure he would never get lost.  He never wants to be apart from me, so losing him was never much of a risk, but I took all the precautions anyway.

Now I have Raven.  She was found in a nearby city, at about three months of age.  As she grew, the family that found her began to realize that she was too much for them to handle.  She is now 1 year old.  She is crazy, and really kind of difficult to manage, even though she is always happy and friendly.  She is training to be a search dog, and she is doing very well. At this stage, I think she is showing more aptitude and drive for search work than any dog I have had.  She will be less crazy, eventually, I hope, and I think she will have a great career as a search dog.  If she ever decides she would rather not be a search dog, of course we will still have a wonderful life together, whatever we do.

I have fostered more than 30 dogs.  I have kept ten of those dogs, over the years, usually the ones that were not suitable for adoption, due to behavior difficulties.  I like the difficult dogs, the crazy ones, even if they can be a bit of a challenge. Independent, spirited dogs make the best search dogs, in my experience.  Every dog I have owned, since 2000, could be considered a rescue dog in one sense or another, whether or not they came from a shelter or a rescue.  My dogs have taught me what works and what doesn’t.  Raven, my most recent rescue, is a challenge, but I know we can get through the hard times and she will eventually be a great dog.  Not that Raven isn’t great now, but she can be hard to manage.  I would absolutely recommend that you get a rescue dog, from a shelter or nonprofit rescue, if you can.

However, before you get that dog from a shelter or rescue, take a moment to consider that it might not be easy.  It is very common to see cute videos on TikTok or Facebook that show a dog looking sad at the shelter, and then later they are happy in a home.  For some dogs, they will be easy from the beginning.  Kelsy and Tess were very easy dogs to get along with.  Fozzie was easy in most respects, except that he would run off from time to time.  Viktor was very challenging at the beginning, but we learned to get along.  Sky has always had her challenges. Raven might be my most challenging dog yet, but I love her very much.  You might get a dog that is perfect from the beginning, or you might get a dog that needs help to become a good dog.  I mean, all dogs are good, even the difficult dogs, but there are steps you can take to help a dog learn to get along in life.

If you think you can rise to the occasion, I encourage you to get a difficult dog. I hope you might be the one to adopt that dog at the shelter who has been returned because he couldn’t behave the way people wanted, or the home wasn’t suitable for some reason.  As I said, most of the dogs I adopted were the kind that would have been hard to find a suitable home for.  I am absolutely very happy with all of my dogs, and the ones that were the most difficult in the beginning, such as Mu and Porter, have been my favorites, not that I have favorites.  You just have to be prepared that it can take a lot of work.  If you get off to a difficult start with a rescue dog, that doesn’t mean you can’t eventually get to know each other and have a great life.

As mentioned earlier, many of the dogs we are asked to search for came from rescues or shelters.  Sometimes they haven’t even been in the home for an hour, or maybe they didn’t even get in the front door before running off.  For a dog to be in rescue, it usually means they are going through big changes.  A dog’s job is to be bonded to a human, and for the most part, if a dog ends up in a shelter or with a rescue, it means that bond was broken.  Dogs like to have a routine and a home and a familiar territory.  Needing to find a new family means all of that is changing.  If you are going to be that dog’s forever family, how is he supposed to know that?  He is going from one strange building to another, and he has no idea what’s going on.  Some dogs are happy and friendly no matter what, but it shouldn’t come as a surprise that being adopted into a new family can be stressful for a dog.

When you adopt a dog from a shelter or rescue, two of the main things you need to consider right from the beginning are Calming Signals, and Loss Prevention.  Please read the information in these articles if you are adopting a rescue or shelter dog.  I won’t repeat all of the information in this article.  Briefly, when people decide to adopt a dog, they are usually excited and happy, and they can approach the dog with behaviors that can make the dog more tense or upset.  Three things I see people do, which in most cases they probably shouldn’t: they look right in the dog’s face and smile, they loom over the dog or crouch towards them, and they put their hand over the dog’s head.  All three of these gestures can be forms of aggression in dog language.  Once you get to know a dog, you can do these things all you want, and the dog will probably like it.  When you don’t know a dog, you may be accidentally communicating the opposite of what you intend.  Instead of looking right in a dog’s eyes and smiling at him, make eye contact and then look away, as if your attention is fixed on some other thing.  Mostly ignoring a dog can help him get to know you at his own pace and check you out.  Instead of crouching, which is the posture of a predator getting ready to pounce, you should sit in a chair or on the ground.  This communicates to the dog that you are relaxed, and you aren’t going to move suddenly.  I always see people going to pat dogs on the top of the head, which is what a dog would do if he was trying to show dominance.  Instead, let the dog come to your hand if he wants to, and the initial pets should be on the cheek, where he can see your hand, and he won’t think you are trying to grab him.  Above all, just observe the dog (without staring at him).  Watch how he responds to different movements you make and figure out his comfort level.  Don’t push a dog to behave a certain way too quickly.  Give him time to adjust.

Of all of the rescue dogs we have been asked to search for, most of the escapes could have been prevented with simple precautions.  If you adopt or foster a rescue dog, and you take all of the precautions listed in the Loss Prevention article, it is very unlikely that you would lose that dog.  Most loss prevention methods are not difficult or expensive.

Adopting rescue dogs has truly been one of the best experiences of my life.  I absolutely love my dogs, who were all unwanted by their previous owners.  They are beautiful and amazing.  They are my working partners. They are my family.  From 11 pounds to 100 pounds, mutts and at least one purebred, easy going or shy, they are all great dogs.  I am very lucky to have them in my life.  I highly recommend adopting a rescue dog, as long as you approach it with realistic expectations, and you take appropriate steps, such as Calming Signals and Loss Prevention, to give that dog the best chance of being a great dog.