While my initial experience seemed good, it very quickly became apparent that I had been misled. I had been told that I was getting a calm, well-behaved 2ish-year-old dog. Obviously with a dog that was found as a stray it's hard to get an exact age, and he may have been between 1-2 years old, but for all intents and purposes what I got was a puppy. A hyper, untrained puppy. I should have asked what "well-behaved" meant specifically, but this dog didn't meet any reasonable definition.
He sort of had a basic idea of "sit", but didn't know it meant four on the floor. He didn't know "down", "stay", "come", or the all-important "off" and "no." He didn't know to sit or at the very least hold still to be leashed for walks, he thought it was ok to jump on people, and he thought it was ok to jump up and try to grab treats out of my hand. It took him a week to learn that he wasn't allowed to sleep in my bed. He had no manners whatsoever. I do realize that sometimes dogs will "test" a new person to see what rules they'll enforce, but they usually try a behavior just a couple of times until they're sure they have an answer. They don't test the same behavior over and over and over for weeks. This dog really didn't know.
I did call the rescue for help one time, and was given what I consider inappropriate advice. I was told to use a penny can (on a dog with known noise anxiety, see below) or to put him in time out in his crate. I had always been told that a crate is never to be used as punishment, and doing that with a dog who was new to crate training (see below) seemed like a terrible idea. I did put him in timeouts in the kitchen, which seemed to help for a couple of days, and then had no effect at all. I did manage to teach him some basic commands, and after ignoring his jumping or walking away from it many times over several weeks, he finally figured out that this attention-seeking behavior didn't get him attention from me. But he still needed a lot more work.
I was told that he had "mild" thunderstorm anxiety, which again is open to interpretation, but I don't consider alternately running around in circles and curling up in a shaking ball in the hallway to be "mild." I got him a Thundershirt, which helped a little but not enough, so I took him to the vet to get some sedatives. I had to play with the dosage (with the vet's guidance, of course) and eventually figured that one out.
I had also been led to believe that he was crate-trained (again, I should have asked very specifically), but he clearly was not. While I worked on crate training, I tried to keep him confined to the kitchen area with gates (yes, I got the "extra tall" ones.) He did know better than to jump them while I was in the house, but he apparently jumped over them as soon as I left. I did manage to get him crate trained, and everything seemed fine for several weeks, until he broke out of the crate. I was about ready to give up on him at that point, but he and my other dog seemed to like each other so much that I felt bad about separating them. But after there was an incident in which my (much larger) dog somehow ended up with a puncture wound all the way through his face as well as contusions and lacerations on both sides of his jaw, while this other dog didn't have so much as a scratch, that was the last straw. And of course when I returned him, I was a jerk who didn't want to put any effort into working with the dog. Hilarious. Even more hilariously, this same dog, now up for adoption again, is being touted as a "couch potato" who is "100% sweetness." Oy vey.
If you do decide to adopt from this (or any other) rescue, ask very specific questions about the dog's training and behavior issues, and get it all in writing and signed. read more