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Summary: Learn what changes you need to make when owning two or more dogs in this free dog care video from our pet health professional.
Views: 1,150 | Tags: dog, dogs, pets, veterinarian, canine, animal, behavior, pet-care, pet-owner, pet health care
About the Expert
Elise McMahon Elise McMahon has a Ph.D. in animal behavior, and has been working with both domestic and wild dogs since the early 1990s. She began studying domestic dogs in... read more
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Questions & AnswersSo what kinds of things can change and shift once you start adding more dogs to the equation? One of the things that you might notice if you’re living in a multi dog household is that the reactivity level of all the dogs might raise, so for example, things like having people come into the door, people, guests, coming into the house, with one dog it might just be a fairly quiet greeting scenario, once you start getting two, three and more dogs, the whole activity level, the reactivity of all of them will increase and sometimes its actually just unmanageable to have multiple dogs at a door when somebody’s coming in. Another thing that might shift is they’re vying for attention; sometimes you’ll have a dog who is quite relaxed, who will lie down and not pay that much attention to you, you start putting more dogs in the mix and they start getting a little bit anxious for attention. You want to watch that, when that starts to happen because you could actually get some competition going on. Uh, another thing that might change is space, so I’m sitting at a funny angle here on the couch; um, I’ve got three dogs sitting around me, space is a big thing, especially with big dogs like this, when you’ve got multiple dogs, you’re going start having to be thoughtful of where you’re putting your body, where the dogs are, how much room you have for multiple dogs in the house.
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