Understanding your dog (an invitation)

A dog trainer, Mike Tan, visited our booth yesterday, and after checking us out (!), he offered to help us with his skills and expertise.  

Here’s his proposal (below).  Please read it through.  We would like to invite all of you who are interested in learning a bit more about canine behaviour so that you can deal better with your own canine pets (sorry, Mike only does dogs, and not cats) and/or increase the chances of your fostered dogs to be adopted.   

I am personally very impressed with Mike.  He’s not talking about your usual “sit, stay, heel” commands.  He goes way deeper.  It is about truly understanding your dog, as far as we can, and developing a bonding that is beneficial to both owner/fosterer and pet. 

Yesterday, Mike taught Terry and Denzel a thing or two about handling Socks, our extremely boisterous little gal. 

Here’s Mike’s proposal for AnimalCare.  We invite you to join us.  If you are interested in attending Mike’s training, which is FOC, please write to me personally.  We have not set a time, day or venue yet.  Details to be worked out later, after we know the response.

Mike is very experienced. 

Proposal for AnimalCare volunteers and friends:





Many shelters start out with the best intentions to improve animal welfare. Sometimes, such shelters work well and raise sufficient funds and garner much need support to keep them going for many years. For others, they experience quick rejection and face high attrition rates of failed adoption requiring re-homing. Once this begins to pile up quickly – the cost of more work, time and resources starts to undermine the role of the shelter or adoption agency.






The inevitable result is loss of morale and objectivity of the fosterers and shelter staff






To counter this, there is a movement toward a more open adoption process, where the role of the shelter or adoption agency is as much to educate and inform prospective adopters about proper pet care and training as it is to interview and screen them for the best match. Needless to say, not only more animals get good homes this way, but shelters and foster organization are then also in the position of being a resource to their community to help everyone become the best owner – which is, after all, the main objective.






What I am proposing is two-fold. First, to help the group improve the likelihood of adoption of stray dogs (my expertise is mainly with canine).






Issues for adopters


1) What is the best time to adopt dogs?


Answer: There isn’t one. Adoption of a new friend/pet is always stressful for the new adopters and fosterers, as well as for the dog. If we cannot totally eliminate the stress, we can at least minimize it.






2) Pre-adoption Checklist


Preparing the home and potential lifestyle change for the adopters and fosterers.






3) Process of adoption – questions to be answered by rescuer


✦ Why was the dog given up? (Not be applicable for strays).


✦ What background information, if any, do you have on the dog?


✦ Is he/she spayed or neutered? Is she up to date on all vaccinations? Does she appear to have any health problems?


✦ Has the dog had any training? Does she appear to have any training or behavioral issues? Is she housetrained?


✦ Has she shown any signs of aggression toward other dogs? Other pets? Or people?






The last two questions are, possibly, where Mike can offer the most help in terms of training the fosterers of animalcare.my evaluate the dogs. And this ties-in with the second area — to help the fosterers of dogs in your group to develop a stronger bond or relationship with their dogs.






Working with Adopters and Fosterers


In the world of shelters and pet rescue, the greatest threat to adopters and fosterers is aggressive dogs.






In many shelters, aggressive dogs are simply put down. This is a very sad and unfortunate practice.






When adopting, many people think the worst problem they could bring home is a dog who isn’t, or can’t be, trained to go to the potty or avoid breaking living-room furniture. From a trainer’s viewpoint, however, this is a simple and easily fixable problem. A biting dog, on the other hand, is not a small problem and is almost impossible to cure.






Professional dog behaviourists or trainers might have to be called in to help solve the ‘family problem’. On occasion, this creates friction with the adoption agency and the new adopters. At the very least, this incurs additional cost for the new adopters.






Of course any dog trainer and professional behaviourist is delighted to get a client who complains of house-breaking problems or destructive behaviour. These are basic training problem, and can be simply resolved. But its every behaviourists and trainers nightmare to be hired by new adopters or owners to handle an aggression problem – because aggressiveness is a temperament or character problem, NOT a training problem.






I would like to help fosterers and adopters understand canine character or temperament – not just for evaluation before adopting, but also for problem dogs that might be given-up for adoption or, alternatively, discarded by the existing owners.






The answer to an aggressive dog lies in having a good bond or relationship with the dog, even potentially dangerous ones. In order to do this, humans have to understand canine chararacter.






About the trainer, Mike Tan


Mike has spent nearly 30 years working with dogs, privately and professionally. When not doing his day job, his interest is in the emerging science of canine cognition. Mike has lived and worked in Hong Kong, Singapore, the UK and Australia.






His intention to help shelter or adoption agencies is to improve the daily relationships humans have with their pet dogs, or help humans create a relationship with their pet dogs if there isn’t one. Having done this previously, his suggestion is that only individuals willing to have honest discussions participate in proposed groups.