How to Add a Dog to the Pack

Video Transcript

"Hi my name is Teena Patel with University of Doglando in Orlando, Florida. Today's segment is going to be on how to introduce a dog to an existing pack. So we are going to have Stash, who is our new dog over here. Although we normally go through, in a daycare setting let's say, we would normally do a full temperament assessment on the puppy before we introduce them to the pack, but we are going to skip that part just for this segment and I am going to show you how to introduce our existing dogs to the old dog. Contrary to how many people do it you definitely do not want to take the new dog and throw them in with the new dogs, or the older dogs. What you want to do is have the new dog come explore the environment, become familiar with the environment, loosen up, get to know what they are about, where they are, they can learn a lot about the other dogs just through the pee and the poop on the field so, once the dog has had an opportunity to do that I will take one of our most stable dogs, the adult dogs, a mature dog who has gone through this repetition frequently, and I will start off with her. Once she is introduced to Stash I will bring in another dog and so on and so forth until all the dogs have been introduced to the new dog. So let's begin by introducing Dakota. And basically we will just let Dakota go in and she could either be interested in Stash or not show an interest, Stash could show interest in her, but we will just give them a little, to give them a moment just to get to know each other, and if they do not show any interest that is exactly what you are looking for, awesome, good stuff. So I will introduce the second dog, and here comes Linus. And some dogs may ignore the new dog, some dogs may not. As you can see this puppy is trying to get to know them by following them around and just sniffing them, but our older dogs of course have no interest in him which is a good thing. So, as long as you have some sort of stability stability like this it is very easy to introduce your new dog to the existing pack. I would strongly recommend you always start off with a more stable, the confident one, the one who is very reliable, had has a good recall if you have to call the dog away, and then build up from there. And this is how you would introduce a dog to an existing pack."