New dog. · 11:04pm Apr 26th, 2015
This is Guapo.
My wife and I "rescued" him a few days ago from the shelter. He's a sweetheart, and very friendly with our first dog, Odie. There's just one problem... he won't come near me without my wife's assistance.
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Considering that's going to work for me about as well as it did for Shy-shy, I feel like I'm up a creek without a paddle right now. My wife's working tonight, and Guapo won't come near me, so I can't leash him to bring him outside. If I let him find his own way outside (which would be OK in theory, as our yard is fenced in), he will refuse to come back inside. We know, because we've tried it already. Food bribery doesn't work, because he's begun to associate food with being wrangled and leashed. It actually wasn't this bad at the kennel... at that point he felt secure enough to come up to me on his own. It's gotten worse since bringing him home.
He's not a growler or a barker, but at the same time I don't want to do the wrong thing and provoke him to bite... the shelter said that it could take more than six months to wean him out of this behavior, though, and it's likely that part of it is because I'm male.
It's going to be a long six months...
You couldn't, say, block the door so it stays pen and then walk away so that he can come in without passing you?
...eh, but then that screws with the air conditioning, don't it? NVM
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The other night, we had the door open and turned the heat off trying to coax him back inside... I ended up upstairs out of sight, and it still took my wife almost two hours and a breakdown where she was crying and pleading with the dog to come back in.
Thankfully it's not mosquito season yet.
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Wow. And I thought my cousin's dog was bad.
All I can suggest is just give it time, sadly it just takes time. Just make sure to try and feed him and not leash so he loses that association.
Luck friend, I've raised shelter dogs before and while it's hard, when you can look back on things and look at how far they've come, it's a hell of a feeling.
He looks adorable!