The New Car Feeling Will Ruin Your Dog

by: Nicholas Thompson - 2/19/2026                                          https://www.pitties.org/

There is a specific kind of excitement that overtakes a person the moment they drive a new car off the lot. The windows go down, the music goes up, and suddenly every errand becomes an opportunity to be seen. You want to take it everywhere. You want everyone to witness what you've brought into your life. It smells incredible, it feels incredible, and the world deserves to know about it.

Bringing home a shelter dog feels exactly the same way.

You've just rescued a living creature. You are, in this moment, a hero. The dog is beautiful and nervous and perfect, and your phone is already open to Instagram because the world needs to see this. You want to take them to the park, to the coffee shop, to your friend's house, to everywhere, immediately, today. The feeling is intoxicating and completely human and it is also, without question, one of the worst things you can do for your new dog.

Put the leash down. Close Instagram. Sit on the floor.

The first three months with a new dog are not a celebration. They are a negotiation. Your dog has just left the only environment they knew, surrounded by smells and sounds and people they had grown accustomed to, and they have been placed into an entirely foreign world with a stranger who keeps trying to take photos of them. Everything is new. Everything is uncertain. And how you handle these three months will quite literally shape who this dog becomes for the rest of their life.

The work of these early months is quiet and unsexy. It's sitting near your dog without demanding anything from them. It's learning what their ears do right before they get uncomfortable. It's noticing that they yawn when they're anxious, not tired. It's figuring out what makes their whole back end wiggle versus what makes them go still. This is trust-building, and it cannot be rushed, and no amount of good intentions can substitute for it. You are two strangers learning a shared language, and that takes time.

Meanwhile, outside of your living room, something is going wrong at scale.

When we skip this quiet foundation in favor of the 'new car feeling,' we aren't just being impatient—we are contributing to a national crisis. Fatal dog attacks in the United States have been climbing with the kind of consistency that should be generating headlines and demanding serious conversation. 56 deaths in 2022. 63 in 2023. 66 in 2024. 82 in 2025. These are not random tragedies. These are the predictable result of a culture that has fundamentally misunderstood what dogs are, what they need, and what humans owe them.

The conversation always stalls in the same place. Someone mentions breeding. Someone else shuts it down. And yet the evidence that breeding shapes behavior is so thoroughly documented that arguing against it requires a kind of willful ignorance that should embarrass anyone making the claim. A mouser dog, with zero training, will hunt mice. A pointer will freeze and extend toward objects because its nervous system was literally engineered over generations to do exactly that. Retrievers retrieve. Herders herd. We accept all of this without controversy until the behavior being discussed is aggression, and then suddenly genetics becomes irrelevant and it's all about how you raise them. This is not a defensible position. It is a comfortable one, and there is a difference.

Breeding matters. Training matters. And what passes for training in millions of American households is not training. It is punishment. It is dominance. It is a newspaper rolled up and swung at a confused animal who does not understand what they did wrong, only that the person they depend on has become a source of pain. Rubbing a dog's nose in an accident doesn't teach them not to have accidents indoors. It teaches them that you are unpredictable and frightening. It teaches them to hide. It teaches them nothing useful about where you'd actually like them to go to the bathroom.

If your child wasn't doing their homework, you wouldn't punch them in the face and expect academic improvement. The idea is absurd when applied to children and it is equally absurd when applied to dogs. Yet this is what gets passed down through generations of dog ownership as conventional wisdom: dominate them, show them who's boss, make them afraid of the consequence. People see a dog flinch and comply and they call it training. They got the result they wanted without understanding that the method is producing an animal living in chronic stress, and chronic stress in dogs, especially in certain breeds, is a pressure cooker.

Positive reinforcement is not soft. It is not permissive. It is not for people who don't want to put in the work. It is, in fact, significantly more demanding than punishment because it requires you to actually understand your dog well enough to know what motivates them, to catch them doing the right thing, and to communicate clearly enough that they can connect their behavior to your response.

I have dogs who have been with me for twelve years. Twelve years of potty trained, settled, integrated life. And every single time they go outside and do their business, they hear "good boy" or "good girl" and they get a treat. Every time. Without exception. Not because they still need to learn where to go to the bathroom. They mastered that before they even became my dogs. But because positive reinforcement is not a training phase. It is a relationship. It is an ongoing conversation that says: I see you, I appreciate you, and you are safe here.

That is what a dog needs to hear every day of their life.

The new car feeling fades on its own after a few weeks. The dog, if you gave them the space and the time and the patience they deserved in those early days, will still be incredible. Better, actually. Because now they know you. And you know them. And that is worth infinitely more than any photo you could have posted at the dog park in week one.

Slow down. Your dog is not a moment to be shown off.

They are a relationship to be built.

Build it right.

https://www.pitties.org/ruleof3.php - A Survival Guide for the First 90 Days

https://buymeacoffee.com/pittiestrong/ - Provided ad free, throw me $1 or $2? Gracias!