I’ve talked to quite a few dog owners as a result of writing Bad Dog to Best Friend. Once you write a book about training a problem dog, you find yourself meeting people with problem dogs everywhere you go.

One of those dog owners had been through several dogs and when her dogs hit that rebellious teenager stage, she’d ship them off to somebody else and go adopt a puppy. She never quite got the hang of training a dog so adopting a new puppy didn’t solve the problem, it just started the cycle all over again. From her perspective, she just hadn’t found “the right dog” yet.

What she didn’t realize is that there is no such thing as “the right dog.” Puppies come to us as blank slates and it is our job as the dog trainer to fill that blank slate with positive dog training. While there are certain factors based on the dog’s breed that will steer the dog in one direction or another, you are still in control of where your dog ultimately ends up on the training scale.

And if you think you are not a dog trainer, think again. The minute you adopt a dog you become his trainer regardless of how you see yourself. Not training a dog is just as powerful as training him, because he will be learning from you. Failure to take the lead results in a dog who hits that teenage rebellion stage, putting you at your wit’s end and sending your dog to the dog pound.

I tried to gently explain to my friend that learning the skills of how to train your dog carries with you for life. While that first bad dog may be a learning experience as our dog Dakota was, once you learn the proper skills of training a puppy, from that day forward all of your dogs will be good dogs. The dog training techniques will be with you for every dog you adopt thereafter.

Not only that, the dog training skills that you learn will rub off on your friends and family. If you have kids, you can teach them the skills so that their lives can be full of happy, well-behaved, well-adjusted dogs. Your friends will see your well-trained dogs and they’ll watch you for tips to take home to their own dogs.

So while taking on the challenge of training a problem dog seems overwhelming, it’s only overwhelming for the training of that one dog. You almost learn more yourself when you have to take on a big challenge, such as training a dog that you’ve allowed to travel down the bad dog trail.

It’s totally worth the effort to learn the skills of dog training so that all of your dogs can be happy housemates and make no mistake — owning a dog makes you a dog trainer whether you like it or not, so why not learn how to train your dog successfully?

If you’d like to read the story of the problem dog that challenged us, Bad Dog to Best Friend shares her dirty deeds, head-strong nature, humorous anecdotes, and some of our tips in retraining her.

If you know someone with a dog who never quite got the hang of potty training, or who thinks the house is a giant chew toy, give them this book. 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, and includes detailed how-to’s for potty training an adult dog and stopping your dog from chewing your house to pieces.

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

Tags: adopting the right dog, bad dog, bad dog problems, bad dog to best friend, dog, dog problems, dog training, dog training techniques, dog training tips, dogs, finding the right dog, problem dog, sharon delarose, techniques for dog training, techniques for training a dog, the right dog, tips for dog training, tips for training a dog, training a bad dog, training a dog, training a problem dog, training a puppy

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.

###

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

Dakota had been progressing. From her early days with us as the most godawful dog imagineable, she had reached a place where she brought us joy and laughter rather than work and frustration.

She’d come a long way from her early days of peeing all over the house, chewing, picking on our other dog, and taking off for the wild blue yonders when outdoors. Dakota is a rescue dog that we adopted from the dog pound when she was seven months old and she was a handful. It took a lot of hard work and dedication to train her. I don’t think many would have committed to Dakota the way we did.

But after two years of hard work, Dakota brought laughter into the house instead of Don’t Kill The Dog sticky notes. Most of her problems had been solved and the ones we were still working on were livable. She was a happy dog. She was also a very strong willed dog, due in part to her lack of early training and in part to her breed which required her to be independent and able to make decisions on her own.

Our other dog, Gypsy Rose, passed away at fifteen years old. We had spent two years intervening between Dakota and Gypsy Rose, one being young and full of spunk and the other being elderly and fragile with age. Dakota tormented Gypsy Rose any chance she got and I never left them unsupervised together, making sure to assert my pack dominance into the fray to make sure Gypsy Rose’s last years were peaceful.

Dakota surprised us by not sniffing around for Gypsy Rose after her passing. Dakota showed no signs of missing her, looking for her, or caring that she was gone. Dakota now had our full attention and she was loving it. She wasn’t designed to be a dog who shared attention. Her competitor was gone and she was happy for about two weeks until she unexpectedly reverted to some of her earlier bad behavior. She’d been doing so well, why was she suddenly being bad?

I’d let her out for potty and she wouldn’t come back in. At first she’d linger just a little longer than usual, then longer and longer until she simply refused to come when called, pointedly blowing me off with her body language. Things came to a head one morning when I was late for work because she decided to gallivant for 45 minutes and I had to revisit some of the training methods I’d used to deal with it before. But the question haunted me… why was she acting up? Why was she suddenly being such a bratty dog? I’d been so proud of her and the progress she’d made with us and now here she was being awful again. Why?

Then it hit me. We’d lost a pack member, a senior member of the pack who’d been in the pack for many years before Dakota joined us. This was Dakota’s perfect opportunity to challenge for Pack Leader and that’s exactly what she was doing. She was challenging me for the role of Leader of the Pack.

Tags: alpha dog, alpha dog challenge, boss dog, challenge for alpha dog, dog chewing, dog not listening, dog training, leader of the pack, pack leader, potty training a dog, training a dog

Category: Dog Tails of Adventure