ROMANIAN RESCUE DOGS – YOU CAN’T RUSH NATURE

(Meesh Masters, The Dogs Point of View)

 

This is something I find myself saying A LOT when working with my Rommie clients so I thought I would put a shout out in here just to reiterate the importance of it, especially for those of you who are about to get your Rommies or have recently adopted.

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Slooooow Down.....

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Whatever speed you think you can progress at with your dog, half it at least. This is mostly in relation to the things you do with them and any challenges they may be dealing with. I'm not going to go into the whole stress stacking explanation again here as I've done it many times before and you can find an article about it on my website, but another aspect it's important to remember about your Romanian dogs is that, for the most part (there are always exceptions of course) they are highly instinctive individuals.

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This means the way they behave or the challenges they have are part of how they are put together. You cannot rush NATURE.

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This means they HAVE to process things at their own speed and you have to give them time to do that. So whether it's in relation to exposing them to the outside world on walks, working to get them used to travelling in the car happily, teaching them to be ok with visitors or strangers or working on reactivity challenges... nearly everyone when I first start working with them realise very quickly they have been doing too much too soon and trying to make progress too quickly. In doing so they've ended up with some major challenges, hence they've contacted me.

Enjoy the process...enjoy watching your dog learn and grow as an individual. Hold space for them to just 'be' whether that's inside the home or outside. Stop and smell the roses... even if those roses are just outside your front door!.... stop and smell them for a few minutes before setting off on your walk and overpowering your dogs with a tonne of environmental stimuli to process.

Give them space in between experiences that are hard work for them... and this could be something as simple as stepping outside the front door for some dogs. They need down time to process and recover.

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I'm not usually harsh with my explanations, but I've seen too many of these beautiful dogs returned because their humans let them down. I know 100% that in a different environment the reasons for that dogs return would not have happened and it is always down to lack of knowledge (and lack of effort to gain it) lack of understanding and rushing through the settling in process. For those dogs that get returned, life can literally be ruined forever, so I don't care what YOU want to be able to do with that dog, what YOU expect them to be ok with... it's not about YOU.

These dogs are amazing and can be taught so much, but you can't rush it! Learn and grow together, love them for who they are, warts and all, as they do for us... but give them time.

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