The Truth About New Dog Ownership
Here is the truth nobody wants to admit: the single most common error made by new dog owners in the very first week is not making sure you’re feeding the right kind of food, not having the puppy sleep in your bed, and not properly using a crate—it’s expecting the dog to love you immediately. I realize this sounds brutal, but please bear with me. It might seem like you’re doing a good thing by rescuing this creature or purchasing it from a reputable breeder, but you’re expecting it to understand that pretty quickly.
I have been working with dogs and dog owners for over fifteen years now. I have seen the surprise and confusion on new parents’ faces when their brand new four-legged family member finds a little safe corner to hide in for the next three days. Or growls at them.
Or refuses to eat the top-end organic kibble they spent 45 minutes scouring every pet forum for at 2 in the morning. “But I saved her,” they tell me. “And now she seems to hate me.” Because she doesn’t know you yet. Because from her point of view some big hairy ape has just hurled her out of the only home she has ever known—quaint apartment, leaky keys, or otherwise—and deposited her into a place with all new smells, sounds, and noxious particles, where every day everything seems to be three times as big and three hundred times as loud.
Learning the Hard Way
When I brought my own disaster dog home—a hound-mix named Benson—I thought I knew it all. I mean, I have over fifteen years’ worth of dog experience. So when I brought Benson home, then, and he immediately peed on my vintage record collection—and I mean immediately, like he’d been scheming it his entire life—I was on top of the situation. By which I mean I sighed loudly, cleaned it all up, then followed him around like some alarmist helicopter parent for the next four hours, waiting for him to make a wrong move so I could fix it.
And weeks and weeks later he still wasn’t relaxed. Honestly, that was half my fault. I was so busy actively managing him that I failed to realize he needed this.
That he needed a dog time-frame, not a human one. If your dog is sniffing and pacing around the house a little longer than you think she should, don’t scold her for being a bad dog. If you think I have not heard this old refrain so many times I can’t even stick a number on it, then you know me too well.
The Three Day Rule
Please follow the three day rule during first week. Do way, way less than you think you should.
- Don’t have friends over for the first few days.
- Don’t start obedience training right away.
- Do not bring them to the dog park for the first week.
- Don’t even bother to take off through the neighborhood since roads are loud, smell wrong, and everything is terrifying at first.
What You Should Do Instead
Just be there. Allow the dog to do what it needs—allow it to hide if that is a requirement—can you can help. Put resources in a low-distraction area.
Walk out of the room and leave the dog there. Slink on your couch with no special energy. Dogs trust people who stay boring and predictable.
That’s really all you need. Can’t say I wonder why, but the hard truth is that the three day rule is probably the single best tip I can provide. Some kind of thirty-six hour rule occurs in a lot of other training manuals.
Others claim it’s three weeks until your new dog considers your home a place he belongs and six month before he’s genuinely relaxed. However long it is, I believe that it’s at least three days. Three days where the dog needs to feel safe and not pushed to fit into your plans.
Three days where you do nothing and you are boring and dull. Three days. This may seem discouraging, but think about how it’s not so exciting when you have an infant at home: your dreams of impressively hitting them timed milestones will be disappointed in those first two days, because food still just sounds like a giant pain in the ass, and your snuggly duckly farm-fresh baby is just going to cry or throw up or squirm or otherwise remind you, even if it isn’t trying to make you crazy, that it didn’t ask to be here either.
Please give your dog 3 days. First. This is why.