How you treat a dog that can’t tell anyone is a pretty honest résumé.

Behavior toward anyone who cannot report you is the cleanest evidence available, because nothing is being managed. An animal has no social standing to offer and no way to complain, so what happens is uncontaminated by strategy. Patience there is real patience. Cruelty there is not an accident of circumstance.

Pay attention to how you handle the creatures and the people who cannot answer back, particularly on a bad day. That is the record. Fix it there first, since everything else runs downstream of it.