Cuban had a hard life in Romania before being rescued and adopted by his family. It quickly became clear that Cuban’s trauma from the past was impacting everyone, particularly him; it stopped him from thriving in his new loving family.
We adopted Cuban from Romania in January 2021. We don’t know much about his background other than he was previously a Romanian street dog housed in a kill shelter before being brought to the UK to find his forever home. He was extremely reactive to / scared of many things (dogs, cars, bikes, runners, and anything that moved quickly or was noisy). We began working with Laura in March 2021, and after our initial video call to assess Cuban, we began seeing Laura on 1-2-1 sessions.
In the first few sessions, Laura determined that Cuban just wasn’t ready for socialisation; he was reactive to a dog across an entire field and too stressed to be trained. She suggested Cuban might also benefit from medication to help with his high anxiety levels and enrichment activities to do with Cuban at home to ensure his days were as calm as possible.
We returned to Laura a few months later, and under her guidance, Cuban gradually became more comfortable seeing and smelling Laura’s dog from afar. Equally as important (or perhaps more so), Laura taught us how to behave and manage situations to prevent Cuban from becoming stressed. As a team, we progressed to the point where Cuban could remain calm whilst only a few metres away from Laura’s dog.
After a few months of 1-2-1 sessions, Cuban graduated to group classes! Initially, Cuban found these very challenging as he wasn’t used to being around so many dogs (there were usually around eight dogs in the class). However, over the past year, he has reached a point where we can gain his full attention (most of the time!), and he is even relaxed enough to perform tricks while standing in a ~20m circle of dogs.
Cuban’s journey with Laura is incomplete, and we are regulars at the Saturday morning group classes. Recently Cuban has even been able to make friends with a couple of dogs in our neighbourhood! We look forward to making more friends in the near future!
