Life with Someone Elses Family Pet — Trissie

Recently our family was enlisted to take on yet another family pet, Trissie, a nine month old Cocker Spaniel.  She’s a beautiful dog, really! Gentle, full of life, energetic, good with the girls and best of all she gets on well with our Golden Retriever. They play for hours in the yard. It’s nice for our dog to have company too as she doesn’t get much fun out of playing with our lazy old tabby cat.

Unfortunately Trissie had one rather nasty habit. As soon as we’d put her out in her kennel at night to sleep she’d start barking. Well, that’s not totally factual. She’d wait till all the lights were out in our house and we were nicely in bed and then she’d start. Unfortunately we have elderly neighbors next door who aren’t very fond of animals, or kids, or noise, or parties, or anything really.  They were livid with us.  We were pretty upset with Trissie as we all had a terrible night’s sleep too.

Anyway, the long and short of it is that, after much debate and a fair bit of research, we decided that we’d try the citronella bark collar.  Fortunately for us, and our relations with our neighbors, this worked quite well.  I wrote about it in more detail on another post dedicated to Trissie and the Citronella Bark Collar and an update on Trissie and the citronella bark collar, if you’re interested in reading more.

We were really undecided at first what to do.  Researching on anti-bark collars turned up some horror stories but in weighing the pro’s and con’s and in assuring ourselves that we were responsible family pet owners who weren’t going to allow anything bad to happen to our dogs we decided on the citronella spray collar. It’s a pretty humane way to stop a dog from barking. When you think of it, it’s much better than what I’ve seen many people do — open their door or window and yell at their dog to ’stop their damn barking’ or some such thing. Or going and beating your dog to get it to stop.

There’s been quite a bit in the news lately about people being cruel to their family pet, family dogs in particular and I am horrified when I read some of these stories.  Anyway, that’s enough rambling. Suffice to say, as per the title of this post, it’s been a bit harrowing inheriting some one else’s family dog without knowing all the details about it but we’ve worked through it and Trissie has won all of our hearts.  It’s a shame when such a cute little puppy has a bad habit like she had. Often people’s response, when they don’t know what to do, is to go dump their dog off somewhere or try to get rid of it in another way.  It’s a shame really, as there’s usually a simple or easy solution to helping the dog overcome problems if people would just take the time to research it.

Filed under Dog Training, Family Pet: Dogs | Comment (0)