Originally Posted by
Nobody
I recently fostered, of sorts of a new dog. The owner is dying. It might be next week, might be next year, so she is getting all her affairs in order. So this visit was to allow the owner to go into the hospital for a procedure, while seeing how the dog is in my home and with my cat. This will be my first male(all others had been females) and the dog has some bad traits and minor abuse from the owner's developmental cchallenged daughter(who you can't blame). So the dog doesn't like hairdryers, or trash bags, and will bark.
But my previous dog was abused. She was a happy pee'er. When she was happy, she would pee. This is a trait that most dogs will grow out of it. The old owner, when this happened, would get upset, and then she would pee again, exacerbating the problem. It was a vicious circle and the old owner didn't understand that. where when we got her, i suspected they chased her with brooms, locked her in a laundry room, shot the water hose at her and did bad things. She reacted all violently towards those things, biting a brrom for example.
A lot of it, we found out afterwards. The peeing, was remedied by immediately letting the dog outside upon greeting(she would be happy to see you come home & then pee) and doing the greeting & peeing outside, to mitigate the peeing and to save the mess, as well as not showing anger when a mistake happens. After 8 years she got remarkably better to the point where she barely ever did it anymore. Suffice to say, behavior can be changed, but requires time, patience and understanding.
So give it time and love.