India is making great progress since arriving at our facility.

Thanks to the hard work of trainer, Anthony at The Mutt Hutt, who has been donating his time and expertise to train India on basic obedience we are seeing great progress. With the guidance, and the dedication from SHM board member and volunteer, Amanda Love, for graciously taking India to daily training sessions since she arrived we have seen a huge improvement already in a short amount of time. India was very ill at Gateway Animal Clinic just two weeks ago, fighting for her life, before we agreed to take her in. We saw the posts from Cleveland Animal Control that she was at risk of being returned to the kennel after receiving her medical care, and we had to do something so we agreed to step in and take responsibility for her.

In most cases the dogs that are admitted into our program are already socialized with other dogs. Because we operate a cage-free facility it is critical that all of our Secondhand Mutts get along with large packs of dogs. We quickly learned that India was going to test our policies and we determined she needed “detox” time and training right away. She has been living in our quarantine space, getting load of attention from humans, daily walks from volunteers and lots of love. Fast forward two weeks and she is now able to sit, stay, heel, down and come on command. She was able to walk side-by-side with our founders dog, Crab Cake, during a training session last week. And today she was able to sit in a stay with Anthony’s dog Cheese. 

We expect India to come around and although she may never been pack-social, we are confident she will be dog-friendly when accompanied by her owner/handler. We look forward to an upcoming meet and greet scheduled with an applicant later this week that would like to train her to become a certified service dog. 

Paws crossed for India!