My boyfriend [24M] and I [28F] are having a lot of trouble with our dog [3M]. I'm unsure if we should rehome him or break up.

My boyfriend and I been dating for a little over 5 years now and purchased a male GSD during our second year together. We are both first-time dog owners, but everyone around us said that raising a dog was a great experience and we were beyond thrilled to bring our puppy home together for the first time. I have two cats, so we chose to go with a puppy from a breeder to be able to raise our dog around the cats safely.

During the first year, we did our best to be great dog parents. We signed up for puppy classes, took him to dog parks, attended meetup groups, bought him toys and tons of chew options, went on hikes and daily walks together. I purchased a house with a backyard to be able to give our dog space to play as we lived in a 1-bedroom at the time. I had recently graduated and my boyfriend was taking online classes, so we had tons of options for being around our dog at all times.

After the first year, we started slacking. My career has progressed way faster than expected, so my boyfriend began taking on more and more responsibility for the dog as he was home more often. However, without me around he began to rely on what I would consider to be neglectful methods. My boyfriend would leave our dog in the crate for 12+ hours a day when I thought he was coming home at lunch, so I started taking the dog to daycare during the week. He stopped training the dog to respect cats and instead began shutting them in a separate room, which caused them to be unable to use a litter box throughout the day and destroy the carpets in my house. It's at the point now that we can't have our dog around the cats at all as he gets too excited and huge fights break out between the 3 of them.

I've read that we're experiencing is super common and issues with reactive dogs are all solvable. The struggle for me is that I'm unable to be around to address them. On the weekends, I research a ton of ideas and give them to my boyfriend so that he can try them out when he's around the dog during the week. He'll do them for a few days, then go back to old routines. If I bring home a bag of bully sticks and begin reintroducing the dog to the cats in a safe way, my boyfriend will go back to shutting the cats in another room the next day and training never continues until I bring it up again.

I completely understand that this is stressful on all of us and I'm struggling to know what to do. I feel terrible about the idea of rehoming our dog, but I don't think we're the right fit. He's a great dog and I feel like we've made his life worse due to the confusing training, lack of socialization, and constant scolding. Our dog has developed anxiety to the point that if someone comes to the door or he sees another dog while walking, he'll completely freak out and bark at them non-stop. There are days that I come home and see that there's mud everywhere in the house or the dog broke an expensive planter because one of the cats walked past and I end up losing it. I've talked to my boyfriend about this so many times and he'll always reassure me that he can do better, he'll start contacting trainers, he'll work on teaching commands again, he'll do something that we haven't attempted multiple times over the last three years and it always ends up with nothing happening. I feel like I've been given the choice of devoting all of my energy to this dog or my career and I'm completely exhausted.

I feel like a complete asshole whenever I bring up rehoming the dog because it's clear that my boyfriend loves him and that we can resolve any issues, but I feel that this is because he's not the one who faces the consequences when things don't work out as expected. Since I own our house, it's me who ends up paying for everything when the dog damages another part of it. My boyfriend can't afford the massive cost, so I'm the one paying hundreds a month for daycare and training classes without seeing any results. It's clear that nothing is getting better and I just want to be able to come home to a stress-free house. What should I do?

TLDR; I purchased a GSD with my boyfriend and it's becoming too much for me to handle. Numerous issues with being around our cats, anxiety, and costly home repairs. Should I push for rehoming the dog or break up with my boyfriend so that he can keep him?

Submitted February 22, 2020 at 03:02PM by mezhgorye https://ift.tt/39ZL6Cu