Loving the Difficult Dog

What My Reactive Rescues Taught Me About Unconditional Love

von Jennyfer Tan

158 Seiten, Taschenbuch

Kurzbeschreibung des Verlags

Loving the Difficult Dog: What My Reactive Rescues Taught Me About Unconditional Love is a memoir and practical framework for anyone living with a reactive dog. Written by certified Family Dog Mediator and Professional Dog Trainer Jennyfer Tan, it combines Kim Brophey's L.E.G.S. framework (Learning, Environment, Genetics, Self) with Tan's own Four Pillars approach (physical foundation, mental engagement, emotional security, and relationship) to help readers understand why their dog behaves the way they do, not just how to manage the behavior.Your hands are still shaking. You just apologized to a stranger who looked at you like you're failing. You can still feel the jolt of the leash. This is life with a reactive dog, and if you're reading this, you already know that no one else quite understands what that life looks like.This is not a training manual. It won't offer a protocol or a step-by-step fix. Instead, drawing on years of lived experience with her own two reactive rescues, Rosco and Rei, Tan helps readers see reactivity as communication rather than misbehavior, and shows how genetics, early learning, environment, and a dog's individual temperament combine to shape the dog in front of them.Readers will learn why the same reactive dog can behave completely differently in different contexts, how their own nervous system affects their dog's, and why progress with a reactive dog rarely looks the way they expect. The book also addresses the emotional toll of reactive dog guardianship: the isolation, the hypervigilance, the grief of a relationship that didn't turn out as expected, and the guilt that often comes with it.Tan writes with the authority of someone who has lived this both personally and professionally. As guardian to two reactive rescue dogs and parent to a child with autism, she draws parallels between understanding neurodivergence in humans and supporting reactive dogs, offering readers not a cure, but a clearer way of seeing.This book is for dog guardians who have tried standard training protocols without lasting success, who sense something deeper is at play but lack the language for it, and who want to understand their dog rather than simply control them. It will also appeal to readers of dog behavior and welfare titles, memoir readers drawn to stories of caregiving and transformation, and professionals working with reactive dogs and their families.Reactivity may not be something you fix. But it is something you can understand. Loving the Difficult Dog offers readers a way to see their dog clearly, and in doing so, discover the transformation they didn't know they needed.

• Themen: Lifestyle, Hobbys und Freizeit Sachbuch Haustiere Hunde als Haustiere
• ISBN: 9781067884901
• Sprache: Englisch
• Erscheinungsdatum: 01.07.2026
• Größe: 216 x 140 mm
• Verlag: Jennyfer Tan