Our first challenge after getting Segan home was introducing him to Axl, our two year old male American Pit Bull Terrier. This was to be no small chore as Segan, also a male, is most certainly a Pit mix. First and foremost we were worried the possibility of a fight could endanger future attempts to either acclimatize these two dogs to one another or to others down the road.
Upon reflection we may have rushed this process despite the fact that no ill came of it. I had read a bit on the subject here as well as here. The consensus among the resources I have come to respect is that this process can take up to a month!
We "knew" from Segan's paperwork that he got along well with others. Our experiences with Axl had been generally positive as well so while we could have certainly been more cautious we felt comfortable proceeding as follows:
We first introduced them on neutral ground, away from our house. A friend of mine and I walked the two dogs in a figure eight pattern across a ball field. This approach allowed the two dogs to gradually "meet" one another via smell and prevented them from approaching each other directly. After 30 minutes it had grown dark so we proceeded to individually bus the dogs home.
We elected to introduce Segan to the house first without Axl there to allow him to range freely and get to know the place. He was given 20 minutes to do this and then crated when we brought Axl in. At this point we learned Segan had never been crate trained. He bit at the door out of what seemed to be extreme frustration. My plan to "crate-n-rotate" thus quickly fell apart and we needed to find another way to cohabitate the dogs while carefully controlling their environments.
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