...and please be indulgent with a first-time multiple dog owner.
Original dog is a sweet, passive Corgi-lab mix, female, about a year and a half old. We've had her since she was about eight months.
New dog is a beagle (vet says pure-bred), male, very rambunctious of course, about eight months old. We've had him going on 3 weeks.
Both were SPCA rescues that came to us from multi-dog foster homes.
The female seems to be dominant, for the most part...she flips the puppy when she chooses to engage in play-fighting, to the point of mounting him on occassion. She was never a big one for playing, and usually freaks out (i.e. cowers on the ground) at the dog park, so we were glad to see her exert her will a little bit.
However...the puppy also has some dominant behaviors - hoarding the toys, occassionally mounting the female, constant nipping and mouthing....and the female doesn't generally seem interested in fighting back, only in looking at us pleadingly.
At first, we tried to reinforce what we perceived as the female's dominant pack position - for instance, she has always slept on the bed, so she's still there, the puppy came to us crate trained so he goes in the crate at night. She still gets walks by herself on her usual schedule, she gets fed and greeted first, that sort of thing. But by sticking so rigidly to her routine, are we subverting the natural order of things?
Or is the puppy just being a puppy?
Also - you might imagine that a beagle puppy hears the word "no" quite a bit, a word the female heard rarely if ever before the puppy came, so now we worry that she thinks we're disciplining HER, only because she's always around when we're disciplining the puppy. Will we give her a complex of some sort?
You can tell, perhaps, that we were incredibly spoiled by our first rescue, and now find ourselves a little unprepared for what to do next. Any advice welcome!
