We went through the upset of rehoming our gorgeous, but reactive, working line BC a couple of months ago. He is an excellent dog and we worked very hard with him for years and did lots of training/enrichment, but recently we’d had a few warning incidents where he’d lunged at our kids, and was frequently showing stress signals like panting, ears back etc when they were around.
After taking advice from trainers who know the breed, we rehomed him via specialist working line BC rescue. He was clearly becoming very stressed by living in a house with lots of children (including a toddler).
It took a lot of work finding and waiting for a place, and was very upsetting for all of us, but a few weeks ago the rescue contacted us to say he’d been adopted to a fantastic home with experienced owners who don’t have kids or grandkids, and he’s much happier. I’m satisfied that we did the right thing by him, even though it broke our hearts to rehome him.
All the while this was happening, my wife was constantly getting ‘concerned’ messages from her family, saying about how the dog was dangerous and unpredictable, and we shouldn’t have him around kids, we shouldn’t have such a big dog etc etc. She got very little sympathy when we rehomed him. Her family all have small ‘pet’ type dogs which they do no training with whatsoever, and they said after he’d gone ‘maybe we’d get a dog like theirs who is completely safe around kids’. (we won’t be getting any more dogs until all of our kids are grown)
We’d used what we’d learned from our experience with our dog to try to help them, and have repeatedly told them stuff like ‘don’t let your toddler get into your dog’s crate’, but they’d basically laughed if off and said their dogs are really tolerant and safe with kids etc .
Anyway, fast forward to this week, and we get a message saying that their dog has bitten their toddler when she was messing with it. Luckily the kid isn’t too badly hurt. Of course the dog faces an uncertain future now (at best it will be rehomed), and the toddler is now scared of dogs.
What made this worse is that it’s come to light that the dog has been biting random people in the park. We weren’t told about this, and we’ve had it around our kids when it’s clearly not safe to be so. But because it was a small fluffy dog, they said it was ‘just being grumpy’, even though it drew blood on several occasions.
I’m struggling to find any sympathy given the history, although I feel really bad for the dog and the kid.
I see this so often with small dogs - people just don’t take them seriously.
tldr; we rehomed our reactive dog before anything bad happened and got no support, only judgement from family. Now their dog which we warned them about and were told was really tolerant, has surprise, surprise, bitten their kid. And they didn’t tell us it had been attacking people in the park when letting it near our child.
After taking advice from trainers who know the breed, we rehomed him via specialist working line BC rescue. He was clearly becoming very stressed by living in a house with lots of children (including a toddler).
It took a lot of work finding and waiting for a place, and was very upsetting for all of us, but a few weeks ago the rescue contacted us to say he’d been adopted to a fantastic home with experienced owners who don’t have kids or grandkids, and he’s much happier. I’m satisfied that we did the right thing by him, even though it broke our hearts to rehome him.
All the while this was happening, my wife was constantly getting ‘concerned’ messages from her family, saying about how the dog was dangerous and unpredictable, and we shouldn’t have him around kids, we shouldn’t have such a big dog etc etc. She got very little sympathy when we rehomed him. Her family all have small ‘pet’ type dogs which they do no training with whatsoever, and they said after he’d gone ‘maybe we’d get a dog like theirs who is completely safe around kids’. (we won’t be getting any more dogs until all of our kids are grown)
We’d used what we’d learned from our experience with our dog to try to help them, and have repeatedly told them stuff like ‘don’t let your toddler get into your dog’s crate’, but they’d basically laughed if off and said their dogs are really tolerant and safe with kids etc .
Anyway, fast forward to this week, and we get a message saying that their dog has bitten their toddler when she was messing with it. Luckily the kid isn’t too badly hurt. Of course the dog faces an uncertain future now (at best it will be rehomed), and the toddler is now scared of dogs.
What made this worse is that it’s come to light that the dog has been biting random people in the park. We weren’t told about this, and we’ve had it around our kids when it’s clearly not safe to be so. But because it was a small fluffy dog, they said it was ‘just being grumpy’, even though it drew blood on several occasions.
I’m struggling to find any sympathy given the history, although I feel really bad for the dog and the kid.
I see this so often with small dogs - people just don’t take them seriously.
tldr; we rehomed our reactive dog before anything bad happened and got no support, only judgement from family. Now their dog which we warned them about and were told was really tolerant, has surprise, surprise, bitten their kid. And they didn’t tell us it had been attacking people in the park when letting it near our child.