Wednesday, May 31, 2017

[Help] Can I ever trust this dog around cats?


My fiancee and I adopted a wonderful dog a few days ago. It was a really rushed decision for this particular dog because the shelter didn’t do trial periods, just day-long holds, and someone placed a hold right after ours. But my fiancee sold me on it since she seemed like such a perfect dog for us. So far she seems very gentle, trainable, protective, mostly nondestructive, and loves hiking.Now that it’s been a few days, I’m beginning to worry. I have a slightly mentally disabled cat who my parents are keeping until December, and then I’ll pick her up when we’re moving back to another state. I just found out that though the dog wasn’t marked as “no cats”, the shelter does NOT cat test the dogs…. unlike every other shelter I’ve been to and volunteered for. I was actually really surprised to find out that not all major shelters do this!Our neighbor kindly let us introduce the dog to his cat, and I’m still unsure about this. She seemed very alert and curious, and went up to sniff the cat. Not aggressive so far, but I don’t believe she’s ever interacted with a cat before. My concern is that she is a husky/Australian Cattledog mix (though we suspect there may be lab somewhere in there), which I’ve learned are both notorious for not getting along with cats. I’m terrified that as soon as she sees my cat run, her prey drive will kick in and my cat will get hurt or even killed.I don’t know what her prey drive is like either, since we’ve only had her for a few days… she gets very alert and focused when we pass by a bunny while she’s on her leash, but she doesn’t pull hard on the leash and moves on fairly quickly.If our dog is cat aggressive, I would rather know sooner than later because the town we’re moving to is rather remote, and I know the local animal shelters are pretty terrible. She also managed to break out of her first kennel (a wire one), and I'm nervous that even if we leave her kenneled with my cat, she'll be able to escape. via /r/dogs http://ift.tt/2rpngwD

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