Description
Oswald is a wonderful, loving, 11 month old German Shepard Husky cross (shepsky). He’s always excited to see us and loves receiving affection. His favourite hobby is chasing flies around the house and garden and playing in water.
We are unfortunately having to rehome him due to my unexpected health issues and Oswald’s demanding nature.
Oswald has anxiety issues and reactivity. And due to this, it’s our priority to find him a home with loving people who are comfortable and competent to train and work with him on his issues.
He’s extremely anxious and reactive with both people and dogs. On walks, as soon as anyone enters his line of sight, he will lunge and bark, and his focus will remain on the stranger until they pass.
Inside the home, he barks and is anxious whenever he believes someone is outside the house. We believe much of his anxiousness is caused by protectiveness over myself, and dislike of unexpected movement.
We only walk him where we’re sure they’ll be very few people because of these issues, so it’s essential any prospective owners will have somewhere to walk him like this while he’s working on his reactivity.
He is used to being left home regularly for 1-4 hours while we’re at work and doesn’t have any destructive tendencies while home alone. However, he becomes upset and barks whenever we go somewhere in the house where he isn’t allowed to follow.
Despite his behaviour issues, he is a really wonderful, curious dog who can be obedient when there’s nothing causing him to be anxious- he knows “sit” very well, and mostly knows “lay down”, “shake” and “spin” commands when using combined vocal and visual cues.
He also knows to wait for our command to eat and doesn’t tend to beg for food. His recall is also improving, again, as long as there’s nothing big distracting him. He’s very well toilet trained and hasn’t had any accidents since he was a small pup around March.
Oswald will bring with him a bed, all his favourite toys and blankets, a harness, lead, muzzle and halti (he’ll need some further training with the muzzle and halti as he doesn’t like wearing them), as well as a pack of his current kibble and some of his favourite treats. EVERYTHING you need for him to be all set up.
Meeting Oswald before adopting him is fine, but, as explained, he is very anxious of strangers, so he will likely bark and be concerned of new people. We’ve found that he often completely calms down once myself and my partner have left, however, which has been our experience when taking him to the groomers, to families houses etc.
All in all, he’s an amazing dog that just needs loving owners that know what they’re doing and have experience with anxious dogs.