**TLDR:** I chose to save my marriage by rehoming my reactive soul-dog and can´t cope with the thought of giving her up.
Hi everyone,
My wife and I have a 3 year old wonderful and incredibly loyal German hunting-terrier-mix (80%), that is highly reactive to new people in our apartment and most dogs - mainly when I'm not around. We've tried training, lots of training, with multiple coaches, all specialized in dog behavior.
When that alone didn´t work, we added medication such as SSRIs, under medical supervision of course. That worked to greater extent and our dog is much calmer in most situations - but not reliably so when I´m not home.
We got her from a rescue shelter, when she was 8 months old - she had been passed around by 6 families prior to us. We didn´t meet her before she was brought to our hometown by the rescue, the rescue also never mentioned that she had strong hunting dog traits. We live in a crowded city and were looking for a dog as first-time owners. Lots of things went wrong with the shelter communication and with the adoption process in itself, but here we are.
I love her to death and she loves me just as much. This is my soul-dog. She listen to every word I say, is obedient in 99% of situations and gives me nothing but joy. For my wife, it´s the other way around. Our dog mainly bonded with me , mainly due to me being naturally more drawn to the idea of having a dog and putting in much work with training. With my wife, you can see her being insecure as my wife is insecure in handling her and simply has given up on training due to a psychological blockade. I can see how sad and exhausted my wife is, and I don´t want to keep this burden on her.
I fully understand my wife's emotions as well. She wanted an easy-to-handle dog and got a dog that requires lots of management and consistent training. Our dog only weighs about 10kg but is still not harmless once reactive. She never bit anyone in her life but snapped at my mother-in law and friends in some stressful moments, seemingly out of nowhere.
My wife had days and weeks of bad experiences with her when I was on business trips and simply can´t take it anymore. She loves to host guests and can only do so when I´m at home, as our dog is uncontrollable for her when guests are around.
We´ve been fighting a lot about this and have a reached a point, where it´s either divorce or we rehome our dog. I love my wife so much and want to share the rest of our lives together. This choice killed me however, as my dog is pretty much one of the two reasons I get out of bed every day. I cry even thinking about giving her up and can´t take the thought of her feeling abandoned or left alone. She is insecure and has experienced serious trauma, it took months for her to open up.
I have now decided to put my wife first , even though I can´t imagine living without our dog. Giving her to a shelter is a hard-no for me, as our dog would not be able to recover from that. Instead we're currently actively looking for families without children and other dog-experienced individuals that might want to adopt a dog.
Did anyone in here experience a similar situation and might have some perspectives to share? How did you cope with giving up your soul-dog? I´m seriously scared what life is going to be like once she is gone. Will our dog forgive me for all this?
Thank you guys for reading this, I´m a bit of a mess right now.
DISCLAIMER: I somehow can only see one of 8 comments, all the other comments aren´t shown to me - maybe due to the rules of this subreddit, I also had to accept them first in order to write a comment. Thank you for all your time and compassion!!