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@ewanmac
Do people have advice about adopting dogs?
I’ve had family dogs my whole life but almost all (7/8) have been from puppies (including breeding our own). Now my fiancé and I are looking at getting our first dog as a couple, and today we visited a dog that is fostered in our village. The dog was rescued from Romania and is (probably) a collie cross about 6yr old. He was a total sweetie and was very chilled when we met him in the foster garden. We also went for a walk together and met up with my mum to introduce him to one of her dogs. 99% of the time everything was good he walks great on the lead and was mostly disinterested in other dogs. However there were two moments when he suddenly became very defensive with vicious growling towards my mum’s dog. I’m not sure what set him off, certainly my mum’s dog didn’t provoke him in any ordinary sense, but my guess is that both moments were when the foster owner moved to talk to my mums dog so maybe it was some kind of possessiveness.
We’re committed to getting a dog and understand that the dog has likely had a hard life making behavioural issues inevitable. But my question is how trainable these kind of behavioural issues are? It would simply be unworkable for us if the dog couldn’t socialise well with others and an additional consideration is that we are hoping we might have kids soon. Maybe growling is just a short term and understandable case of anxiety. But our one other adopted dog (rescued from an abusive farm aged 6mo) has never grown out of an extreme fear of “bangs”... we weren’t even able to walk past a local cricket match until she went dead aged 15!