08/01/2025
A well written, thought provoking piece whether you have welcomed a street dog into your home or not, it is always good to have a think about the breeding history of any dog before you consider offering it a place into your home and heart.
Doing your very best to research as much as you can before bringing a dog home can save a lot of heartache for the dog as well as you and your family. 🐾🐾
✨ Wisdom Wednesdays ✨
Today is one for the adopters of ex street dogs amongst us. Let’s have a chat about these often complex dogs and why they aren’t as straightforward as they may seem.
I’m gonna get a bit nerdy to start off with and talk about epigenetics. Put VERY simply, epigenetics can be behavioural traits passed down family lines. There was a study done on rats that showed that fear can be passed down as many as five generations and the same likely goes for dogs. So if your dogs great grandfather was beaten by a man wearing orange with a stick, your dog COULD carry this fear too, despite never having encountered a man with a stick wearing orange before. Epigenetics are POWERFUL. This is of course a gross simplification of the process but it holds true. Epigenetics exist to aid the survival of the animal, and if ancestors can ‘warn’ you about danger, you’re more likely to survive.
So what does this have to do with street dogs?
Street dogs are vastly different to pet bred dogs in many ways, but the main thing is that even if your street dog was born in captivity or ‘rescued’ early on, their parents, grandparents and great grandparents and so on will likely have lived a semi feral life where survival was a much higher priority than your pet bred golden retriever.
These genetics DO pass down. I see many street dogs adopted from Romania, Cyprus, Turkey, Portugal and many more places. I recently worked with a dog from the meat trade. All of these dogs have two things in common:
- A strong dislike of being on a short lead.
- A hypersensitivity to change in environment.
This is epigenetics at play. You cannot escape threat when you are trapped and you must be aware of your environment in order to survive.
Training CANNOT and WILL NEVER change genetics. It’s a bitter pill to swallow. Your dog ‘saved from the streets’ will likely NEVER be the same level of social, relaxed and easygoing as a Golden Retriever purposely bred and raised for generations to be those things.
If you’ve got an ex street dog. You are possibly experiencing;
- Lack of lead skills
- Sound sensitivity
- Fear of people or other dogs
- Resource guarding
- Generalised anxiety
These things, for a dog living on the streets, are NORMAL. If your dog lived on the streets for a while, these ‘behaviour problems’ kept your dog alive. They were repeatedly reinforced by the very act of surviving another day and all of their grandparents genetics are laid out to aid that survival. They aren’t ’bad dogs’ or ‘problem dogs’. They are exactly what they are meant to be and when they were shipped to a two bed town house in a different country, the comfy sofa did not immediately erase everything the dog is.
A few years ago I received a call at 9pm with an older lady desperate for help immediately. Her family had adopted a street dog for her to ‘guard her house’. Yes, some questionable ethics on all counts there especially the rescue organisation! The dog had been driven in a van over days, and deposited in her house in the middle of a town. She had never met the dog, the dog had never met her. She had read that a stuffed Kong can help dogs relax and suddenly the dog was ferociously guarding the Kong and she couldn’t get into her own sitting room. She was distraught. The dog was explosively stressed. None of what played out was surprising. I did that emergency visit that night and took the dog out of her home and took him to a kennels where the rescue then re placed him. I don’t know what happened to him after that and I wonder often.
So what can we do? This isn’t about whether I think rescuing from abroad is appropriate or not and I want to keep that out of this discussion. What do we do if we find ourselves living with such a dog?
We honour them. For who and what they are and what their generations before created. Honouring them means seeing exactly who and what they are and not trying to force them to be what they aren’t. It’s a humbling process.
The first thing is that they need a lot of time. Space to just be. They often don’t want a person up in their grill trying to drag them down the street on a lead on day one. They need often weeks or months just to acclimate to the home environment.
Typically ex street dogs do not do well with the family trip to the park on a busy Sunday. Everywhere there is threat. This stacks up. Even if they don’t react to everything on the walk, they get home and guard their food bowl with incredible intensity because it’s all they CAN control now. Or they bark at anything that looks suspicious because that’s what kept them alive (or their parents alive) for years.
My favourite, really simple thing to do with street dogs, is a harness on, long line walk and explore of grotty back alleys, industrial estates, wasteland and environments like that. Mimicking that environment they came from and survived in is a real key to their hearts. When you explore those environments together and delight in the discovery of gutter snacks or an interesting p*e smell with them, that’s where they come alive.
Street dogs were not born in the UK. They were not born to run around the park playing with everyone. They were born to survive. Of course there are exceptions and I’m fully waiting for the comments of ‘my street dog isn’t like that’. Many are though.
The single biggest thing we can do is to honour everything that they are and stop trying to fit a round peg in a square hole. Meet them where they are at, and accept that they may not be what you expected. They are still very much trainable, but the process is likely to look very different to a ‘normal’ dogs progress.
Do you have an ex street dog? How has your experience with them been?
- Kahla
