I want to preface this section with two caveats:

I want to preface this section with a couple of notes:

# '''Dogs are not perfect.''' ''Nobody's'' dogs are perfect. When I first started getting seriously into training, I thought that professional trainers' dogs must be impeccably behaved near-robots who never barked at strangers, always executed their cues with total precision on the first request, and probably didn't even shed. Yeah, no. Turns out they bark and blow off commands and leave hairballs everywhere, just like my mutts. Dogs are dogs. Expect them to act like it.

# '''Dogs are not perfect.''' ''Nobody's'' dogs are perfect. When I first started getting into training, I thought that professional trainers' dogs must surely be impeccably behaved near-robots who never barked at strangers, always executed their cues with total precision on the first request, and probably didn't even shed. Yeah, no. Turns out they bark and blow off commands and leave hairballs everywhere, just like my mutts. Dogs are dogs. Expect them to act like it.

# '''Most troubleshooting in foster care is about management.''' The dogs that come through WAGS generally do not have serious behavioral issues. Most of what you'll be dealing with is relatively simple stuff: chewing, counter surfing, nuisance barking, and so forth. These issues are best dealt with by not giving the dog a chance to practice bad behaviors, i.e., by managing his environment to keep him out of trouble. That's really all you have to do; nuisance behaviors tend to die out on their own if the dog doesn't have the chance to practice and get reinforced for them.

# '''Most troubleshooting in foster care is about management.''' The dogs that come through WAGS generally do not have serious behavioral issues. Most of what you'll be dealing with is relatively simple stuff: chewing, counter surfing, nuisance barking, and so forth. These issues are best dealt with by not giving the dog a chance to practice bad behaviors, i.e., by managing his environment to keep him out of trouble. That's really all you have to do; nuisance behaviors tend to die out on their own if the dog doesn't have the chance to practice and get reinforced for them.