WoofGate

Multi-Dog Households

Managing multiple dogs

socially selective four year old cattle dog mix with a known slow warmup pattern, putting a nine week old working line ACD puppy deposit down next month, looking for the calibrated framework on how to assess whether our specific resident is one who can integrate a young dog or one who will struggle with it

Saskia is our 4 year old female ACD mix (DNA test came back 62% australian cattle dog, 28% kelpie, 10% miscellaneous, basically a heeler with extra herding), 38lb, intact-spayed at 18 months, came...

Posted by passionatePetparent745•
4 comments

six month writeup on integrating a 3 year old blue heeler rescue into our household of two resident retrievers (5yo gsd-retriever mix and 3yo golden) because the "going from two dogs to three" transition is something nobody actually writes down in detail and we made every classic mistake the first six weeks and i wish someone had told us

Otto is our blue heeler / cattle dog mix, 3 years old when we adopted him from a regional cattle dog rescue in january, intact when surrendered, neutered at the rescue before placement. our resident...

Posted by MuttLover_KC_64•
6 comments

eight year single dog household just brought home a second dog six weeks ago after our golden was an only dog her entire life and the integration has gone meaningfully worse than the introduction guides prepared us for, the regression on the established dog has been what has surprised us most because she was the dog we were least worried about, looking for families who have done the long gap second dog introduction and what the actual months looked like inside it

Pia is an eight year old golden retriever we got at twelve weeks who has been an only dog her entire life. She came into a household that was set up to be a one dog household, she has had our full...

Posted by second_dog_eight_year_gap•
4 comments

three dog household where the pack dynamic has shifted three times in eighteen months and each shift made the household feel qualitatively different in ways the books on multi dog management do not name, want to write down what we lived through because the consumer advice frames a stable pack as a resting state and the actual pattern looks like a sequence of stable states with renegotiations in between that look like problems and are not

Three dogs in our house. Sable is a 6 year old lab mix who came to us as a puppy and has been the steady presence in the house her entire life. Atlas is a 5 year old husky we brought in at two years...

Posted by three_dog_pack_dynamic_shift•
6 comments

eight months into a three dog household after adding an anatolian shepherd to our existing pyrenees and golden, want to write up the dynamics that nobody warned us about because the multi dog content online stops at the two dog case and the third dog changed almost everything about how the original pair functioned

The starting state. We had a stable two dog house for four years, Bjorn the great pyrenees who was 9 when we got the second dog, and Klaus the golden retriever who came in as a puppy at 8 weeks and...

Posted by three_dog_juggler_pyrenees•
6 comments

Adding a second dog was the best decision we made

Was so nervous about getting a second dog. What if they didnt get along? What if it was too much work? Theyre inseparable now. They play together, sleep together, keep each other company when were at...

Posted by sploot_pupmom•
5 comments