Jacob Morgan shows how play helped Rue, a nervous Romanian rescue dog with stranger anxiety, build confidence. Structured games let her stay close to her owner while learning to handle new situations, and involving other people in play made introductions less scary.
Chapters
Can play help my nervous rescue dog? Yeah, absolutely. So my dog Rue, for those of you that don't know or haven't met her, she is a Romanian rescue. She obviously arrived not really knowing how to play. She never had played. Um, she also has, being a Romanian rescue, a lot of stranger danger. So I really use play to help her build her confidence with, with people, with being in the environment. Some dogs are nervous about having that bit of conflict with someone, or like being in a person's personal space. Being that close can be a lot, especially for a nervous dog, especially for a nervous rescue dog. So doing something fun together where the dog can be in my space but nothing terrible happened, and we had this bit of a to and fro, and they can realize like 'Oh, I'm strong, I'm confident, I can do hard things, and actually it was fun and I really enjoyed that.' Nurtures your relationship with your dog and can really help them to see that they can do hard things and they can overcome them in a really fun way that's constructive for you and relationship building. It's also really helped me with her in terms of strangers, so playing games where I can get other people involved finding the game that she actually likes and getting other people involved in that game to bring new people into her life in a way that she can have fun and be a bit silly with it. So yeah, absolutely, we love play for helping nervous dogs.
