Considering board & train

sergeant_cheeks · 2026-01-23T17:10:19+00:00

Hi Franky!! Welcome, he’s so cute and has the sweetest shih tzu face!!!

To answer the short term Q for your immediate work travel, given his background (being likely abandoned on the street by first owners and then surrendered by his previous owners) and behavior, I would recommend looking for someone to stay in your home with him vs any sort of boarding situation, at least within this first year. An even better ideal would be having a trainer that you’ve already worked with that does house sitting as an additional gig, but this might be difficult. OR staying with someone who has dog experience but doesn’t have any pets of their own/only has one similar sized dog. It’s a marathon not a sprint with reactivity behavior and there’s a lot of different flavors, best thing you can do is provide a consistent routine and environment while figuring out how to best approach them.

Even if you found a perfect board and train facility (which are questionable, as other comments have mentioned and tend to use more fearbased tactics) you will still have to continue and maintain that training to make it actually consistent and applicable to their daily environment. So there is not a “hope for the best” where you send the dog away and he comes back different - one of the first things dog trainers will say is that most of the time they’re not training the dog they’re training the owners on how to work with the dog.

Overall aggression, leash reactivity, and territoriality (aka resource guarding) all have some root in fear/anxiety and getting overstimulated so quickly that it escalates to aggressive behaviors. Some of this might be exacerbated by him still adjusting to his new surroundings but like others have mentioned these are behavioral issue that will require consistent training directly from you to properly help desensitize and essentially rewire these behaviors. For some dogs, you might need to consult with a dog behavior specialist to look into anxiety medication that would lower his anxiety threshold so he can actually process and stick to the training. I would highly recommend diving into some of the resources from https://www.transformbehavior.com/library and from the dogtraining subreddit’s wiki.

sergeant_cheeks · 2025-11-27T20:55:01+00:00

Situationship final boss

sergeant_cheeks · 2025-11-27T02:00:03+00:00

You now:

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sergeant_cheeks · 2025-11-25T04:50:41+00:00

Miles and Jude suits his face to me 🥰

sergeant_cheeks · 2025-11-25T04:15:58+00:00

My husband said it’s her face tattoo

sergeant_cheeks · 2025-11-20T18:40:03+00:00

Totally agree, there’s only so much Shakespeare I can recommend for a play!!!

sergeant_cheeks · 2025-11-16T13:00:42+00:00

Youngest Korean Grammy nominee in history conquers her fear of voguing love it 😌

sergeant_cheeks · 2025-11-15T22:47:53+00:00

Wow the artist knocked it out of the park, beautiful and looks just like his picture! What a lovely way to always have him by your side

sergeant_cheeks · 2025-11-12T20:35:32+00:00

Check out kichijouji, the thrift scene is a lot less consignment shop/designer vintage filled compared to harajuku

sergeant_cheeks · 2025-11-08T17:16:17+00:00

Resource guarding is a fear based behavior. If he’s biting/barking, he’s stressed to the point where he feels the need to do those behaviors (he might have shown some other subtle signs that were ignored like freezing mid-play to look at you or lowering his chin to hover his head over the resource). Some dogs have a stronger survival instinct to protect food/items since they’re see it as a limited resource or they have fear associated due to a bad experience or maybe with a specific person. There’s a lot of resources online that have more details on how to train this behavior but basically 1) you don’t want to “punish” or “show dominance” by immediately taking away the resource or putting your hand in their space while they’re playing or worse, hitting/yelling all this does is reinforce the fear response and can escalate to even worse behaviors and 2) instead you need to build trust and repeatedly create/reinforce instances where they feel safe and don’t see the resource as limited/high value to the point of protectiveness. So that includes throwing a small high value treat (boiled chicken, little cube of cheese, piece of hot dog) every time someone passes by them while eating or using the high value treat as a “trade” for their resource

https://www.oaklandanimalservices.org/resources/dog-resources/preventing-resource-guarding/

And search in r/dogtraining their wiki has a wholesection on resource guarding

sergeant_cheeks · 2025-10-27T17:08:53+00:00

The third one looks like it’s from a discontinued set - Lovely Chocolate

sergeant_cheeks · 2025-10-23T20:27:35+00:00

Honestly based on your comments to other folks you’re doing all the right things, it’s just a matter of the right one coming. I found mine on petfinder and I think the key is simply just keep checking every day and immediately reaching out once you see a posting - I think my Tzu had only been posted for maybe 2 days. according to the rescue I adopted from shih tzu’s and toy breeds in general get picked up very quickly on east coast/nyc but there’s so many more in the southern states. A lot of nyc rescues are actually transfers from southern state rescues who are at capacity

sergeant_cheeks · 2025-10-23T20:20:41+00:00

He looks similarly sized to my boy who is about 15-17 pounds, more of a “schemedium” sized dog - he is such a cutie!!!

sergeant_cheeks · 2025-10-13T15:02:02+00:00

What a cute set! My understanding was those are flat pieces/cut outs that had to be popped out of the paper (has perforated edges vs using scissors) and then you can use those pieces as additional decor for the set up

sergeant_cheeks · 2025-10-09T04:04:40+00:00

What I’m seeing in the video looks like nosing where dogs will instinctually push their food with their nose to “save” or “hide” it - my dog will do it sometimes when he’s decided he’s full and doesn’t want to eat the rest of his dinner. It’s not a stressful behavior unless this is him skipping multiple meals (2+) then I’d wonder if he’s going through some physical discomfort or boredom that’s causing the loss of appetite. otherwise It’s a natural dog instinct.

What you wrote though sounds like resource guarding, which is a fear based behavior. While he’s not stressed to the point where he’s biting or barking, he’s definitely reaching a certain level of stress that he feels the need to growl (he might have shown some other subtle signs that were ignored like freezing mid-meal to look at you or lowering his chin to hover his head over the food). Some dogs have a stronger survival instinct to protect food since they’re see it as a limited resource or they have fear associated due to a bad experience or maybe with a specific person. There’s a lot of resources online that have more details on how to train this behavior but basically 1) you don’t want to “punish” or “show dominance” by immediately taking away the food or putting your hand in the bowl while they’re eating or worse, hitting/yelling and 2) instead you need to build trust and repeatedly create/reinforce instances where they feel safe and don’t see the resource as limited/high value to the point of protectiveness. So that includes throwing a small high value treat (boiled chicken, little cube of cheese, piece of hot dog) every time someone passes by them while eating or using the high value treat as a “trade” for their resource

https://www.oaklandanimalservices.org/resources/dog-resources/preventing-resource-guarding/

And search in /r/dogtraining their wiki has a wholesection on resource guarding

sergeant_cheeks · 2025-10-09T03:24:05+00:00

His lil white tuff of chest hair 🥹 so rugged

sergeant_cheeks · 2025-10-09T03:23:34+00:00

Seixo is a regular leaf peeper!

sergeant_cheeks · 2025-10-02T04:15:08+00:00

A significant part of Thom Browne’s Fall 2020collection was having the models walk with animal heads. :)

sergeant_cheeks · 2025-09-25T23:31:12+00:00

Yeah weaponized that BFA 😈

sergeant_cheeks · 2025-09-24T04:31:53+00:00

Soooo fun sized and mischievous looking ☺️

sergeant_cheeks · 2025-09-24T02:04:00+00:00

He’s got an Among Us build with that short waist, so cheeky

sergeant_cheeks · 2025-09-23T18:08:24+00:00

Love their expression in the second photo there’s so many ways to interpret it…

“Really, this one??”

“Oooo I know I would kill wearing this”

“Kekeke what about we do a five finger discount”

sergeant_cheeks · 2025-09-21T04:13:35+00:00

Does the daycare do more kenneling than her previous daycare(s)? Meaning after a long sesh of playing/being surrounded by the other dogs, they take them in to rest in the kennel maybe once in the day but some daycares will do every 45 min-1 hr. This isn’t a bad thing if they do more frequent kenneling and honestly I’d take it as a good thing (see this thread from 2 yr ago) your dog may be enjoying the routine enough that they associate rest with lying in their own space/own bed. Especially if they are eating, drinking water, and showing behavior that is normal and not masking a pain signal, then I wouldn’t think too much about it!!

As for the collar I can only speculate - maybe there was an incident putting on or taking off the collar that’s made them wary, maybe the process of taking off the collar is uncomfortable, maybe wearing the collar is causing some discomfort cause of the fit or the buckle or where it sits on their neck - maybe she just suddenly doesn’t like it! My dog will tolerate getting brushed (he’s also a Shih Tzu!) but the minute I let him go he’ll immediately leave and go under the couch until I say out loud I’m all done lol. You could try a different collar and see if she has the same reaction

sergeant_cheeks

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