With all the stress dogs face in shelters, dogs who are scared, bored or just excited to see someone new get labeled as aggressive as they jump and bark behind kennel walls. But after a seminar on animal socialization, the Habersham Animal Shelter is giving dogs a chance to become the playful, friendly and adoptable animals they are.
“Two weeks ago, the Humane Society of Northeast Georgia hosted a seminar from a group called Dogs Playing for Life, and that is a class that focuses on letting dogs be dogs,” Habersham County Animal Shelter Care and Control Director Madi Nix says. “Part of the [class] was that they [the humane society] said that we need to have our dogs socialize when they come in here.”
Nix says the shelter deals with a good bit of fence-fighting in between the kennels, making some shelter dogs seem like aggressive animals.
“A lot of dogs act like they’re going to be animal-aggressive, and we are way too quick to judge them,” Nix says. “I have been guilty of that as well, going, ‘Well, that dog looks like it wants to kill somebody walking by it, so it can’t live with other dogs.'”
The workshop taught Nix and the volunteers about canine body language and discussed some body language that we typically categorize as aggressive, such as the dog’s hair standing up. Nix says this isn’t a sign of aggression at all, it can mean a lot of things, like fear, excitement or being otherwise stimulated, just like when we humans feel our hair stand up at the back of our neck.
After the workshop, Nix and the rest of the shelter team set up a space and a schedule for their dogs to get regular playtime together.
Habersham Shelter volunteer Rosa Allen says that 30 minutes of playtime for these dogs is equivalent to a two-hour walk in terms of their mental and physical health. By the time those thirty minutes are up and the dogs return to their kennels, they’re happily exhausted.
“Every single dog in here on the adoption side has at least one buddy that they can go out and play with, and just do dog stuff,” Nix says. “We don’t intervene unless there’s something that needs to be [done], but it’s just been really cool.”
The dogs typically play in groups of five or six, and Nix says that dogs they hadn’t thought would respond well to socialization have made breakthroughs. Their goal is to have every dog used to socialization with humans and animals, and with every playtime session, they get closer to finding a forever home for every dog.
All the dogs featured in Madi Nix’s TikTok video have found homes thanks to the socialization program.
You can check out the shelter’s adoptable dogs on their Facebook page here.
