I don’t know what to do right now

Didn’t understand the concept of backyard breeders and what that entails when getting a new Shiba, now I feel we are paying for it. If I would’ve known about puppy mills and what not I never would’ve gotten our Shiba puppy, but now that we have her we can’t abandon her now. But we are really struggling. First off, we understood fully going into this that Shibas are stubborn independent and cat like behavior, which we were completely ok with. We admire the quirky personality. But we’ve had our Shiba puppy almost 2 months now and she has not gotten better. And when I mean better that means she has been acting like a rescue that has gone through years of abuse and trauma, which isn’t the case for her. We got her from a Mennonite family had lots of kids and when we visited, the place they had her looked like great conditions, and even our Shiba puppy was happy there and prancing around. But as soon as we brought her home, it was a complete 180 and now she is literally terrified of everything. I just figured she was still getting acclimated to her new home but it’s been almost 2 months and no sign of improvement. I’ll list all the issues we are having.

-she basically won’t eat her food we have to hand feed her a lot

-she won’t go outside to bathroom on her own we have to literally pick her up and place her out on the grass and sometimes she will try to run right back to the door to get back inside

-Taking her for a walk is like pulling teeth

-she snapped at my 5 year old daughter once and constantly growls at her if she gets close (we’re working on teaching our daughter how to act around the puppy)

-she growls and aggressively barks at new people that come in

-She stays in her crate all day and refuses to come out unless we drag her out (which I hate doing because that’s her safe spot)

-never greets us or even wags her tail or showing any kind of excitement (that’s more of a Shiba thing though)

-constantly scared and trembling/shaking especially when picked up. If I step on a leaf, she will start shaking even more and heart racing.

Is this normal behavior even for a backyard breeder Shiba? And does it get better? I don’t know what to do at this point. I don’t want to give up on her but I don’t know how to help her now. Would socialization classes/training fix this? Is it even fixable? It’s so depressing :( I wish I was more educated on all of this before we dove in.

Posted Aug 8, 2025, 9:06 PM UTC

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