No Dog Is Perfect

Whether you buy a dog or adopt a dog from a shelter, your dog will behave in unexpected ways. These behaviors can be destructive or annoying, funny or cute, or just odd, and you need to decide whether you will live with the behavior or try to correct the behavior with training.

Examples of destructive behaviors you may encounter are chewing, knocking things over (like the trash, or lamps), barking, marking, or going potty in the house. These behaviors can be addressed through good and consistent training – and not training these behaviors away often leads to dogs that are surrendered to shelters. Don’t be a statistic like this – get a trainer, and help your dog be one of many Happy Dogs in Happy Homes.

Examples of funny or cute behaviors you might encounter are tail chasing, vocalizing – especially huskies –, counter or table surfing, sneaking onto the furniture when you’re not looking. Again, these behaviors can be corrected through training, and some should be, but others may not bother you so much. For example, tail chasing can be very cute, and some dogs do this occasionally throughout their lives with no ill effects. But for other dogs, this can become a fixation and can lead to self-injury. In the first case you may not care to correct the behavior, but in the second, training is essential to help your dog be a Happy Dog in a Happy Home.

Examples of odd behaviors come in almost as many varieties as there are dogs. One example: one of my dogs would react whenever she came upon genuine black leather – a jacket, shoes, a handbag, etc. She would sniff and immediately break into bark mode, not stopping until we were away from the leather. I could have trained this quirk away, but I never knew when genuine black leather would appear. I learned to live with it until she eventually got over it. Another example: one of our dogs will search for tissues to eat in all the crevices of the couch. Is it gross? Yes. Do we care? Not really – if that’s what he needs to be a Happy Dog in a Happy Home, he can have it.

Don’t expect your dog to be perfect. You should be prepared to adjust your expectations to fit the dog, get training where it’s needed, and learn what’s needed to have a Happy Dog in a Happy Home!

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– Tomi