Handsome Dasher came to the rescue program when he was two years old. His former owner died, and the daughter had to move to an apartment and Dasher was too active and “barky” to live there—mainly because he had received no education or training. At that point, the daughter contacted us to surrender Dasher.

 

 Our wonderful trainer, Mary Swindell, evaluated Dasher and and advised that we needed to give this dog about five months of training so he could learn to be crate trained, follow basic commands, and learn that people served a purpose. While friendly, Dasher really didn’t understand the purpose of interaction between people and dogs. Mary helped us develop a “mental exercise” program for Dasher, which consisted of a repertoire of tricks. He loved learning these and began connecting the dots as far as doing something and getting a response/reward from humans. He learned to go to his mat, push a “talking button”, ride a skateboard and several other tricks.

 

Dasher made steady progress in five months, and a former adopter expressed interest in him. We explained that Dasher would always need (in addition to physical exercise) to maintain his mental exercise of doing tricks for 5 minutes each day. Our adopter agreed that she could commit to doing that. We took Dasher for several short trial visits and one overnight trial visit to help him gradually settle him.

 

Finally, after Christmas, Dasher went to his forever home and has settled in well. His adopter has maintained Dasher’s routine which has made a big difference. Many times, in our rescue program we get dogs who are friendly but who are simply uneducated and under the advice of our trainer, we give them the training and time they need. This helps ensure that when they go to their new home, they will be successful.

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