hi all! we are first time dog owners and recently (6 days ago) adopted a korean rescue dog. he was with a foster in korea for a few months prior to being flown here, and that foster described him as exceedingly independent, not craving human touch, and able to be alone in a crate or outside of a crate for several hours at a time.
when we brought him home, we decided to make his “safe space” our bedroom, because it had the least wires on the floor and was the easiest to close off. we put a crate in the the bedroom. when he arrived, i let him sniff around a bit, and he immediately gravitated towards our bed. we don’t mind having him on the bed, so we let him on, but now he is extremely attached to it. he can only be truly calm when he’s there, and the real issue is that he needs us to be on the bed with him in order to calm down. he appears to be very fearful of the crate. we are working from home for the next few weeks, and so are around, but we can’t clean the house or use the kitchen without him freaking out. by “freaking out” i mean he begins to shake and pant very intensely. he doesn’t really have “accidents” or do anything destructive.
we’ve started sort of “pushing through the pain,” which is to say, we’ve been using the other rooms in the house for 5mins-1 hour at a time. because he’s not doing anything destructive, this hasn’t resulted in anything bad happening to the house, but we’re sort of accepting the panting and the shaking as a necessary effect of this approach. are we pushing him too hard? should we continue this approach? any advice would be welcome!
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