It takes a village to raise a puppy…
I’m excited to say that last week Loki was officially adopted! His new family seemed to love him right off the bat and seemed to be a pretty good fit for the little guy! Loki can look forward to learning how to go for long runs with his new parents who are avid runners that had been looking for a canine partner. He will get to live with a feline friend and 4 adult humans who can dote on him day and night. I have hopes that they will continue on with training classes and maybe even get involved with agility or another canine sport.
In reflecting on the months he was with me, I realized that I could not have done all the things I did with him, to resolve his behavioral problems without the help of many many willing victims helpers. I relied on so many people to help me socialize Loki to various situations, people, and other dogs. There is no way that I could have stopped his concerning behavior by myself.
I traveled far and wide to meet up with friends with appropriate dogs to help Loki learn some canine manners. He met somewhere around 25 different dogs through play dates with friends with canines who could help him. Without my awesome friends letting me use their dogs as bait role models, I’m not sure Loki would have ended up being so good with other dogs.
I won’t even begin to try and count the number of people Loki met over his time with me. Again, this was all facilitated by fantastic friends, neighbors, fellow trainers, and even WPHS students (when Loki came to a few orientations) who listened to my instructions on not petting him when he was jumping and pause the petting if he started to mouth. I relied heavily on people I knew because strangers, although they often want to pet him, don’t know how to listen to my words reliably. I also relied on many of my friends to help work on Loki’s resource guarding by having him drop items in his possession or trade items for something else. He had stopped resource guarding towards me very quickly but I needed to make sure he started to generalize this to more people than just me, so I took advantage of lots of people cuing drops, trading for treats, and taking toys and presenting yummy treats.
I wanted to thank all of my friends, fellow trainers, and students for helping me right a puppy gone wrong (aka Loki). I couldn’t have done it without you guys! He really turned into an amazing dog and I owe you guys a lot for the help you gave me with socializing the naughty boy by being bait victims helpers!