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New Puppy causing issues with smaller, older dog. Don't know if we should keep him.

689 Views 9 Replies 5 Participants Last post by  DaySleepers
Hi,
I joined to post this question as my SO and I are at wits end and we don't know what to do. We have 13-week old puppy that we brought home about 8 days ago. He's a Shepherd\Lab cross and seems to be a happy, playful and very rambunctious little guy. Our other dog is a 14 year old Chihuahua cross. She is generally pretty anti-social with other dogs but we've had 2 previous large-breed dogs (both older rescues) that she has co-existed with without any problems. The issue is that the new puppy wants to play with her SO BADLY that he generally loses his mind whenever he's near her, and due to the fact that he is already about 3X her weight and is all paws, we're afraid he's going to inadvertently hurt her. She is not a playful-type dog, and will actually leap and bite at him, but he just stands there when she does that, so we don't think he'd intentionally hurt her, but she's not in great physical health and the few times we've tried to get them together, he's all over her, pawing and jumping around. At the moment we have our house divided into "his and her" spaces, but we cant keep living this way. Does anyone have any experience with this kind of situation? Any tricks or methods we could try to get them to coexist? If we cant solve this we're going to likely end up having to rehome him. It's just not fair for her (and us) to be cordoned off in what was her (our) home.


Thanks all.
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I have the same situation in a kinda sorta way. A puppy dying to play with my older dog, and an older dog who is, not smaller, but plagued with health problems that make him nothing but a misery. Puppies like him do not back off. My older dog has disciplined him enough that he's stopped and thought about it for a few minutes, then he's right back. Maybe another dog who would discipline him more thoroughly could make him stop it, but mine is a soft dog. And I don't want the puppy hurt either. So I keep him separate.

At least in my case the puppy is smaller than the older dog and won't grow bigger, so he can't really hurt her physically, just make her miserable.

You aren't going to train puppy rambunctiousness out of a puppy, and if you keep letting yours plague the older dog, the older dog will get hurt. Your choices are to separate or to rehome.
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