I called it “pee pee feet” and I hated visiting my neighbor’s house for it. Their dog peed on the floor every time he got excited which was anytime people came to visit. The worst part was that it was a wooden floor so the dog pee created a big puddle. He danced in the puddle getting his feet sopping wet with dog pee just before jumping up on you. Their dog didn’t just jump on you once, he was up and down and all around making sure to cover you with dog pee from ankle to thigh.

This was long before I ever owned a dog and I didn’t realize there were things they could have done to prevent their dog from peeing in the house or jumping on people. First and foremost they should have put their dog up somewhere when people came to visit even if it was just a baby gate blocking him from their visitors. You should never subject your visitors to bad dog behavior.

Dakota was a bad dog when we adopted her. She jumped, she chewed, she bullied our other dog, she bothered people, she got in our face when we were eating and most of all she peed. Dakota had the problem of being a nervous pee-er. If she was stressed, she peed. If she was excited, she peed. If you raised your voice one iota, she peed. If she was mad at you, she peed. If the urge struck, she peed. While putting the leash on to take her out to pee, she peed – every time.

They have fancy names for the different reasons that dogs pee in the house such as stress pee, excited pee, and nervous pee but the cause is pretty much the same: the dog lacks self control. Dakota came to us as a semi-adult dog with a total lack of self control and it took a lot of hard work to fix her but we succeeded.

We even wrote a book about our experiences in training a problem dog. The chapter on how to stop a dog from peeing in the house is 16 pages long. Today, Dakota routinely spends nine hours with total freedom of the house on our workdays and she doesn’t pee in the house, chew or destroy things, or get in the garbage. We trust her to be a good dog and that’s a pretty big leap considering her awful beginnings with us.

Dakota was a semi-adult shelter dog who was the Queen of Bad Behavior and the Master of Dirty Tricks. Bad Dog to Best Friend takes you from Dakota’s awful beginnings to her amazing transformation.

Bad Dog to Best Friend: The Book The Transformation of Dakota Available in Paperback & Kindle

If you know someone with a bad dog, or even a good dog except that he pees in the house, Bad Dog to Best Friend is the perfect gift. It’s more than a dog training book, it’s the story of one dog’s amazing journey from being a dog that nobody wanted to being a cherished family member.

Too many dogs end up at the dog pound for dog problems and we’re hoping that Dakota’s story can teach people how to fix their dogs instead of abandoning them. Keep the bad dogs out of the dog pound. Instead, transform them into Man’s Best Friend as they were meant to be!

Tags: bad dog, bad dog to best friend, bad dogs, dog, dog pee, dog peeing in the house, dog pees, dog pees in the house, dog potties in the house, dog pound, dogs, excited pee, nervous pee, potty train a dog, potty train an adult dog, potty training a dog, potty training an adult dog, sharon delarose, shelter dog, stress pee, train a bad dog, train a shelter dog, train an adult dog, training a bad dog, training a shelter dog, training an adult dog

Category: Dog Tails of Adventure

She was a dreamboat
(What were her previous owners thinking?)

We often hesitate to adopt a dog from the dog pound because we figure we don’t know what we’re getting into adopting somebody else’s used dog. We assume that if the dog is at the dog pound there must be a reason. He chews up your smelly shoes, he pees on Aunt Molly, he rummages through the trash…. there must be something really wrong for the dog to be at the dog pound.

That’s the big myth. In fact, when adopting a dog from a dog pound they often have some kind of record about the dog: any training he’s had, whether he’s been an outdoor or indoor dog, plus they’ve spent a few days around him and know if he’s an aggressive dog, friendly, fearful, etc. Dogs don’t just appear on their doorstep. People turn their dogs in and they must fill out a fact sheet about the dog.

My very first dog was a dog pound special, also known as a “shelter dog” or “rescue dog”. Gypsy Rose was a year and a half old and it was a tough decision whether to adopt an adult dog or a puppy. I didn’t want to train a dog from scratch so I didn’t want a puppy. I wanted the dog to at least be housebroken and maybe sit or lay down on command.

According to their records Gypsy Rose was housebroken, knew the command sit and preferred the outdoors. I liked what I saw in her eyes: they were calm. She wasn’t jumping around and barking like the other dogs. There was no sign of aggression or fear. She sat calmly, looking at me with a question mark in her eyes.

Today her eyes are full of joy and laughter and love and the question mark is in my eyes because I don’t understand how she came to be abandoned by two different families. Somebody, somewhere, spent a lot of time with this dog and it shows. Gypsy Rose knew a lot more when I adopted her than just sit.

She was about the closest thing to the perfect dog that I could ever imagine and it baffled me utterly that anyone would have gotten rid of her. To think how close she was to the gas chamber. She’d been there for a week already and I don’t know how long they keep a dog before the axe falls but I don’t think it’s much more than a week.

Obviously not all shelter dogs are going to be as perfect as Gypsy Rose. She’s got her quirks as do all of us but the moral of the story is never to assume that just because somebody dumped the dog, that there’s something wrong with the dog. Maybe it’s the owner that was the problem.

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This article was written in 1999 in honor of our perfect dog. Gypsy Rose passed away at the age of 15 years old in 2009. We adopted another shelter dog in 2007 who didn’t come to us as well trained as Gypsy Rose. Her name was Dakota and she took us on a wild ride. She filled our life with “Don’t Kill the Dog” sticky notes and she was quite a handful. We wrote several articles during her first two years with us about the retraining of this awful dog and later turned them into a book which is now available on Amazon.com.

Training a shelter dog who wasn’t as perfect as Gypsy Rose. Dakota was the exact opposite. From Bad Dog to Best Friend takes you from her awful beginnings to her amazing transformation.
Paperback	Kindle

Tags: adopt a dog, adopting a dog, bad dog, dog, dog pound, dog rescue, dog shelter, dog training, dogs, good dog, perfect dog, rescue dog, rescue dogs, shelter dog, shelter dogs, train a dog, training a dog, used dog

Category: Dog Tails of Adventure