How Animal Communication Can Help Your Dog Pick Their New Friend
By Shannon Cutts.
As pet parents, we worry. Or at the very least, we wonder – is my dog lonely? The reality is, most of us juggle multiple responsibilities and a rather lengthy to-do list on a daily basis. We are busy, often absent, and we get concerned our dog is bored at home alone.
In these situations, it is only natural to come up with the idea of getting our dog a canine companion. Finally, they will have a friend who is always available to play, to snuggle, to explore and enjoy life with.
There is just one tiny issue with this strategy. Our dog might not agree with our decision!
Perhaps you have added a new dog to the family only to discover your existing dog doesn’t seem to like their new friend. Maybe you inherited a second dog from a friend or relative and your original dog isn’t on board with the concept of your newly expanded “one big happy family.”
Every week in my work as an animal communicator I talk with pet parents about these exact types of thorny situations. The truth is, it can be quite challenging to sort out interspecies friendship issues once commitments have been made.
This is also why my favorite kind of “add a friend” conversation is the kind where the new friend hasn’t been added yet.
How dogs pick their friends
Regardless of species, we all give off vibes – vibrations. These vibrations make up our auric field, the subtle extension of our nervous system that emanates up to three feet beyond our physical skin.
The vibes we give off represent the sum total of our sensory life to date – emotions (energy in motion), choices, relationships, ever changing neurochemistry, even physical health.
If you have ever met someone new and felt a good vibe or a bad vibe about them, this is why. If you have had experiences like this, it also means you know exactly how it feels to get a vibe about someone without having any logical, rational explanation for it.
As properly socialized human animals, we have learned polite ways to navigate vibes-mismatches – whether by making small talk, pretending to like one another or simply putting some distance between us.
Our animals, however, tend to be less restrained in making their likes and dislikes known.
This is where I wind up on the phone or Zoom with a distraught pet parent who can’t unravel why the chemistry is off between two dogs in their family. Sometimes, the situation is unsettling. Occasionally it is outright dangerous.
If you are thinking about getting your dog a new dog friend, I want to help you avoid this situation.
Your dog wants to pick their own friends
One thing the animals have taught me – they like to choose their own friends just like we do.
As human animals, we make new friendships with varying degrees of awareness and discernment. But at the end of the day, we tend to take our ability and right to choose who we associate with for granted.
Imagine for a moment you are your dog. You have no say in who gets added to (or removed from) your nuclear family. You might not even want a new friend, playmate or family member, but since you can’t tell your people this, they might get one for you anyway.
This means the only choice our dogs are typically left with is to respond reactively to the friendship choices we make on their behalf. Sometimes we get lucky and the two dogs like each other. Other times we wind up with a vibes-mismatch and that is often when I get invited to the conversation.
Yet as a caring pet parent, the last thing you want is to force your dog to spend all their time with a friend they don’t really like.
So let’s talk about how to discover whether your dog truly wants a new friend.
Does your latchkey dog want a dog friend and playmate?
As our pandemic memories slowly fade and we return to a more typical pattern of daily life lived outside our four walls, the reality of the “latchkey dog” has become more common again.
Without careful observation and consideration, it is easy to assume two things:
- Your dog is lonely while they are home alone.
- Adding another dog will fix that.
Let’s take a look at where each assumption might arise from.
One of the most common errors we pet parents make is to mistake our own preferences and feelings as our dog’s preferences and feelings. Is your dog truly lonely while you are gone? Or are you assuming that since you would be lonely in their paws, they must be lonely too?
How can we go about answering this question?
You could certainly install one of those doggie cams inside your home to learn more about what your dog does while you are away.
You could invest in doggie daycare to learn more about how your dog reacts in a more social environment. Do they enjoy playing in large groups? Do they make one friend and stay alone if that friend doesn’t show up on a given day? Do they tend to keep to themselves even when there are lots of dog friends around to meet and mingle with?
Or – this is my favorite way as well as the simplest – you can simply ask your dog!
How dogs respond to being asked if they want a dog friend
When I am talking with a dog and their human wants to know if they want a dog playmate, I typically get one of the following three responses.
- Yes!
- No!
- I don’t understand what you are talking about?
Here, approximately two-thirds of the time, I can get a clear yes or no response just by asking one simple question. What makes my task even easier is that typically your dog knows as soon as you do that you are thinking about getting them a dog friend. (How do they know? That is a topic for a completely separate blog post, so stay tuned.)
But when a dog tells me they don’t understand what I’m asking, typically I am talking with a dog who has come into their new family through a rescue situation.
In other words, this isn’t a healthy, happy, well-adjusted dog who was properly weaned and socialized right from puppyhood with nourishing food, all the right veterinary care and rehoming at just the right moment into a loving permanent forever home.
Dogs that don’t understand the concept of canine friendship often come to my human clients through abandonment, relinquishment, hoarding, puppy mills, third world street dog populations and similar situations – the types of conditions where friendship is truly a luxury when you are fighting just to survive.
Ironically, these are also the dogs my pet parent clients are the most likely to want to get a dog companion for. Anxious dogs. Fearful dogs. Reactive dogs. Timid dogs. Crate-averse dogs. Destructive dogs. Aggressive dogs.
The thinking here is often a type of surrogate parenting mindset, where the new dog is (ideally) well behaved and well socialized and can teach their lonely, scared, bored or aggressive rescue pup the ropes of how to be friends and enjoy life.
As you can probably discern, there are all kinds of ticking time bombs embedded in this type of well-meant but poorly thought out strategy.
Further, these traumatized rescued dogs might well enjoy having a dog friend….later. But right now, their nervous system still thinks they are fighting for their life. So we have some work to do first – an important stable foundation that needs to be laid – before we can ever take a look at adding a dog friend.
Dogs need help reprogramming their nervous system after trauma
Just like us, a dog that has endured trauma has created a neural pathway that now sees danger around every corner. We can’t just erase that pathway overnight by adding a new dog friend and playmate, especially when the dog in question doesn’t understand what we mean by “friendship” or “play.”
Here, a far more effective strategy is to do the legwork required to repattern the dog’s nervous system through holistic care and socialization training and then revisit the question about getting a dog friend. (See my article on “Help Your Dog Feel Better Fast with Tapping for Trauma Relief” for one such holistic option to help your dog.)
Sometimes when I ask a dog who is still healing from past trauma whether they would like a dog friend or playmate, they respond as if I am talking about some fantasy world where other dogs can go but not them. This indicates the dog is still stuck in an activated sympathetic nervous system state that they haven’t been able to overcome through their own best efforts.
How to help your dog choose their new friend
By now, it probably won’t surprise you to learn that new canine friendship comes in all ages, life stages, sizes, breeds and species.
One pet parent client I worked with recently discovered a perfect “vibes match” between her older adult rescue dog and the little rescued puppy she promptly took under her paw. Another client of mine fostered a rescued cat only to watch her antisocial adult dog fall head over heels in love.
Thinking creatively and paying attention to your own pet parent intuition can go a long way towards offering your dog important friendship opportunities without making a permanent commitment before the chemistry is clear.
A newer trend in pet rescue is the extended home visit, where you can essentially foster a potential new animal friend for up to a month before making a firm commitment.
This gives your dog (and you!) time to manage and observe interactions in all kinds of different environments and situations – outside the home, inside the home, with eating and sleeping arrangements, toy sharing, types of play and dynamics when you have visitors or guests.
Most importantly, the extended home visit gives your dog breathing room to show you through their behavior and responses whether the newcomer’s vibes are a match with their own. It also gives you breathing room to experience the potential increased responsibility and workload of caring for an additional animal so you can be sure the timing is right for everyone.
Shannon Cutts is a professional animal sensitive and intuitive, Reiki Master and animal communication teacher with Animal Love Languages. Shannon’s global client base seeks her out for help with pet trauma, pet anxiety, highly sensitive pets, pet grief, pet reincarnation, interspecies family dynamics and more. Request her free guide to healing pet trauma holistically: https://www.animallovelanguages.com/pettraumaguide
