About Libby

After adopting our first Dachshund, a beautiful red smooth female named Lily at the age of 2.5 years, I was dismayed at the lack of information about socializing older dogs. Since our dear Lily was a puppymill dog she had received hardly any attention from humans whatsoever and the attention she did get was often gruff, a whack on the cage to tell her to “shut up”. She lived in atrocious conditions, on the bottom of a stack of 6 wire cages in a dirt basement where her kennel was filled with the filth from other dogs atop her.

After reading several books on the subject it seemed that a new reference was needed to show that dogs could be trained and socialized at any age. I was discouraged after reading book after book, website after website telling me time and time again how important it was to socialize a dog before its 12 week birthday. Clearly those were of no use to me as Lily was well past that stage through no fault of my own. I felt doomed to failure since every book on the subject talked only of socializing younger dogs, exposing them to everything, not of dogs that have been exposed to nothing and are now adults with socialization problems as a result. I have learned that you can train and socialize dogs at any age and dogs can rebound from almost any situation to become lovable, faithful companion animals.

Dogs are nothing if not resilient. Thousands of years of specified dog breeding directed by humans has produced a truly new species forming a special bond between humans and dogs. Several studies were done at the University of Pennsylvania that showed that dogs were more able to understand what humans asked of them than chimpanzees. A surprising result as chimpanzees are consider closer to humans genetically. The researchers eventually attributed this to the 1000s of years of specialized breeding of canines. Therefore failure to acquire a dog that has been properly socialized cannot nullify the thousands of years of socialization and specificity of breeding. Dogs are designed by us to be our best friends. I wanted this website to prepare new families for their adopted canine member and to try to give them as much information as possible to have the pair work as flawlessly as possible.