How to Introduce a New Puppy to an Existing Dog

Video Transcript

"Hi! I'm Dr. Greg McDonald. I'm a veterinarian in Southern California and I own a veterinary hospital called McDonald Animal Hospital in Santa Barbara. I want to talk a little bit about introducing a new dog to your home and also to an existing dog. I think this is one of the most critical things. One of the ones I like to talk about is if an owner is coming home with a new baby, it's always a good idea I think to have the husband bring the new baby in to introduce it to the dog because the mother is going to be doing once the baby is carried we don't want the dog to be jealous. And so the same can be true if you bring a new puppy in. Probably the primary caregiver is the one that should be in the house, holding on to the dog and talking to the dog, the adult dog and then have the secondary caregiver bring the dog in the house. I think it's important to have both dogs on a leash so you can control these circumstances. Generally what I find works best if you another traces to get the opposite sex and so if you have a male dog, you want to get a new female dog and it's also better to bring a younger dog into the house. A lot of the aggressiveness happens with adult dogs because of just territoriality and they don't have them when they're puppies. So if you take a young puppy and bring it in of the opposite sex it's going to make your life a lot easier. I do think that being totally aware of maybe not having children around at this point in time to watch the interactions between the dogs, you might see a lot of tail wagging on both parts and that's a positive thing and they're going to be starting to sniff and touch each other with their noses and you can tell if they're being friendly or they're being aggressive. If the hair goes off on the adult dog and the tails not wagging and they start walking stiff legged, you'd probably better off to stop right there and separate them and go to the separate ways for a little while, a couple of hours later come back and do the same thing again. If you're getting into a problem and you're going to make a commitment to this dog that you're bringing into the household, it might be worthwhile if there is a problem and there's some aggressiveness being shown by either one of the dogs, it needs to have a professional trainer come and help you with it 'cos they can read the dogs a lot better than you can and you can prevent an animal being hurt by another animal. So, again try to bring them in and do what we call successive approximations, you bring them nose to nose and then you take 'em apart, let them think about it for a while, another hour and you come in and do that again and you have to kind of be able to read the dogs a little bit. If they're wagging their tail and they're acting real happy and they're not stiff legged and their hair is not up on their back then things are going well and you can keep proceeding but if it looks like somebody might get hurt you should get a professional dog trainer to help."