09/18/2025
🚫 LITTERMATE SYNDROME FACTS 101 ❌️
Why We Don’t Adopt Sibling Puppies Together
We’ve had a few heated messages about adopting 2 from our current litters and even some on our Jesse and James post, so let’s clear something up.
❤️ Yes, Jesse and James have a heartbreaking story but rescue work isn’t about warm fuzzies and “awww they love each other.” It’s about long-term animal welfare, rehabilitation, and implementing documented behavioural practices. If we keep applying our own emotions on to dogs, we would fail.
🐾 What is Littermate Syndrome?
When two siblings are raised together, instead of bonding with humans and learning independence, they bond primarily with each other. Sounds cute… until it isn’t. Symptoms can include:
❌️Aggression toward each other, especially when high-value resources (food, toys, your shoes 😬) enter the picture
❌️Stunted social development and inability to cope with new environments
❌️Training difficulties (because they tune each other out and ignore you)
❌️ Fights to the death. This has happened more times than people realise.
And here’s the kicker: it doesn’t usually show up at 8–10 weeks. It rears its head around 12 months old, when hormones leap. That’s when we get the desperate calls.
📊 Our Reality
Every single year we take in 40–50 dogs suffering from littermate syndrome. And that’s not counting the ones we didn’t have room for. This isn’t a myth. It isn’t a scare tactic. It’s a brutal, documented fact we deal with on the ground.
🙅🏽♀️ “But I had siblings before and they were fine!”
Good for you, truly. Some people can juggle knives blindfolded too, but that doesn’t make it a good policy for us to hand out knives at puppy preschool. Just because it worked once doesn’t make it ethical or safe for us to roll the dice with every pup.
Would you let your child learning to drive a car, learn with no seatbelt? You know the risks but YOU haven't had an accident yet therefore you're living proof that it's ok right? Or would you always apply practices to PREVENT as much damage long term as possible?
💔 About Jesse & James
They’re siblings, yes. But they’re also trauma survivors. Puppies from abusive situations don’t need to cling to each other, it wont help them heal. In fact, it does the opposite.
They need confident role models (older, stable dogs) and humans who can give them individual guidance. Keeping them together reduces their chance at rehabilitation and adoption. They wont come out their shell because both exhibit the same trauma response. They need to watch another dogs healthy reactions and copy them.
If we let human emotions override logic and evidence-based practice, we’d be running a sham organisation. That’s not who we are. Dog welfare comes first, always. The comments on the Jesse and James post were out of passion and heart, we know that but when people start coming into our inbox with abusive messages, we will draw the line.
✨ Our Policy (and your attitude)
Circle back to examples like this one here who we politely declined to adopt 2 from the same litter and we gave the explanation of littermate syndrome.
We won’t adopt littermates together. It’s that simple. You can be upset about it, but being rude to us won’t change the fact that science, logic, and welfare outweigh “but they look cute together in photos.” Also using your work email to be rude was a bold move before I've had my 3 earl greys.
We’re here to do what’s best for the dogs, even when it’s unpopular. And if you truly love Jesse, James, or any rescue pup, you’ll understand that putting their future first sometimes means making the hard calls.
