How Social Are Dogs

It’s a common question, especially around the holidays and summer vacations…. How Can I Get My Dog To Get Along with Visiting Family Dogs.

My Answer is — You don’t need to.

For a short visit, there is no need for them to meet and greet or try to become friends. Take a crate, keep them separated and take each out for off-leash fenced-in time alone.

You can take them on a pack walk together with separate handlers and leashes :-)

Dogs do not generally do well with new visitors in their homes or entering the home of an established pack. Even at my house, we make very slow introductions when friends come with their dogs. Crates and leashes are used and lots of supervision for introductions.

If they don’t seem compatible, we don’t even try to mingle.

It depends on the dogs. They get to choose.

Problems can exist between senior dogs and younger dogs, big dogs and little dogs, resource guarders, two males, two females, or any combination thereof. Problems you have never had before can surface simply because your dogs are getting older & may not feel up to the chaos. Your dog may have a problem with the kids or with grandma.

You need to have realistic expectations. Slow things down and realize that they may not get along… and your best bet may be leaving Fido at home for vacation.

Why Do We Expect Dogs To Socialize? There wolf friends don’t.

The wolf packs of the Greater Voyageurs Ecosystem as seen from GPS-collar data! This map shows the territories of 16 wolf packs based on 135,525 GPS-locations from collared wolves.

Wolf pack territories in the GVE have remained relatively similar from year to year, likely due to geographical features such as lakes, rivers, and roads that provide natural territory boundaries. Of course, there is variation and small shifts from year to year but by and large things have not changed dramatically over time.

Notably, we used data from several different years to put the map together and illustrate where territories are. This is primarily because we have never had a year where a wolf in all of these packs were collared at the same time so we couldn’t make this map if we only used one year’s worth of data.

Wolves are undoubtedly territorial but there can be substantial territorial overlap at times. For example, the Paradise Pack is the “purple” pack in the middle of the map. That pack carved out a territory at the nexus of 4 other territories and thus had substantial overlap with neighboring packs.

Note: the white outline in the map is the boundary of Voyageurs National Park