The Common-sense Dog: Longer evaluations are solid investments
People who follow my company on social media know that I’m fostering an 8-month-old male Belgium Malinois named Reb. Reb comes from a local rescue after his owners surrendered him, and I am evaluating him for the next month to see if he will be a good fit as a helper dog in the rehabilitation work I do. While I already have two phenomenal helper dogs, Genesis and Lumen, Reb would fill the much-needed male dog component.
As I’ve been documenting his stay with us, many people have asked why I need to evaluate a dog for a month. “Why can’t you do it in an hour or a day like other people do?” There are a lot of reasons for the month-long evaluation, but the biggest reason is accuracy.
When dogs enter a new environment like a shelter, rescue, or new home, it can take 30 to 90 days for the dog to show its full personality and temperament, and depending on the stress level in the environment, it can take even longer. When a dog enters a new environment, especially a stressful one (all transitions carry some level of stress, even for stable dogs), dogs react in two different ways. They either reserve their natural instincts by going into a type of survival mode, or amplify their natural instincts by going into defense mode. If you evaluate during that survival/defensive time for the dog, you can very often document false results.
This 30 to 90 day mark is when I receive the most phone calls.
“We adopted a dog thinking it was sweet and docile, but now it is anxious and aggressive. What did we do wrong?” Or “We adopted a new dog that seemed reactive and aggressive in the shelter but brought him home, and he is as sweet as pie. Why did this happen?”
The dog finished its transition and is showing its true personality and temperament.
To avoid false positives with Reb, we evaluate on a weekly basis over the course of a month. We spend an entire week evaluating dozens of typical triggers. By spacing it out over a week, we avoid adding too much stress to the dog.
We evaluate those same triggers again during the course of the following week. And then again the following week and the one after that. If the results are consistent, I will accept them and choose to adopt or not adopt on my findings. If the results are inconsistent, I will request more time with him in the foster program so I can continue to evaluate him.
Shelters and rescues do their best to evaluate dogs, especially if they only have them for a short time, but you should do your own evaluations once you have brought the dog home (dogs change in new environments). Give your dog plenty of time to acclimate and decompress, and limit their freedoms until they have fully opened up. By evaluating in a slow and controlled way, it can help avoid dangerous situations in the future.
Happy training!
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Stephanie Vichinsky is the owner/head trainer of Method K9 in Post Falls.