Soos clearly wants to engage with Catty and D'light and the majority of the time they are not interested. So, with having Corwin over - I thought it would be a great chance for Soos to interact with someone roughly his age and size.
We know that Soos gets nervous with new dogs so, we needed to pay attention and monitor interactions between the boys. Having Catty, we've become pretty good at this.
People often think dogs should "hit it off" and if they don't then that's a problem. Lets face it, how many times do we "hit it off" in the first couple of hours or even days with a stranger. It's curious why we place such high expectations on dogs...
Here's the first meeting - notice the body language of both boys.
We did take some time outs - meaning Soos was getting a bit overwhelmed with his lack of confidence so, we picked him up and took him into another room to settle down. When I say he was getting overwhelmed this means his body language was getting stiff despite some of the calming signals from Corwin. For me the stiffness was enough to call time out.
I've also hear people say "just let them work it out". That's the one of the stupidest things I've heard. Not only are you creating a fight you are setting both dogs up for failure. If you let dogs "work it out" then you're either a jerk, very misinformed on how dogs communicate, lazy or all of the above.
Just because Soos needed some time outs, this doesn't mean he doesn't like Corwin or doesn't like to interact OR is a bad boy. Everyone needs time outs and it's our jobs to help our dogs have a positive experience. If Soos (or any dog) gets to overwhelmed with the environment or other beings (dogs or people), they can't think and we soon have a mess and a lot more work to do. To the best we can, we want to be proactive not reactive to situations.
And a little bit later... again watch both dogs body language
And this is about an hour into Corwin's visit. Wanting to set both boys up for success, I made sure there were no "favorite" toys out and no high value chews out. Again we have to manage the environment as a way to set the dog(s) up for a positive experience.
And here we are at 2 hours. The boys are doing fantastic! Notice Soos' body movement - compare that to the first video and he's relaxed a good amount.
The boys really did great together and this was a great experience for Soos.
Many thanks to Corwin for helping out! For those of you who don't know of Corwin , we fostered him exactly a year ago. He was a very nervous and under socialized dog. He was a mess both psychologically and physically. His confidence was zero and we expected him to be in foster care for a long time. He was only with us for about a month. We were all lucky when his dad applied to adopt him and did adopt him knowing all the work ahead. Corwin has made huge strides in only a year - I'm amazed and beyond thrilled. His dad is a gem and Corwin is a lucky and now a pretty confident boy. You'll be seeing more of Corwin in the coming weeks as I'm going to be doing some posts of a class that he, Catty and D'light have been taking together.
If you're interested in more links on dog language, here are a few that I found and like:
(I've shared the first one already but, it's a favorite of mine so I'm posting it again)
And I saw this one and thought it was great given the season!
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