You will know what to expect from the first weeks with an adult animal, and how to read behaviour without knowing its history.
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An adult animal arrives with habits already formed and a history nobody will tell you in full. The first weeks are there to find out which of the two matters.
A shelter passes on what it knows, and it often knows very little. A stray has no history; a surrendered animal has the history its previous owner chose to give.
Take what can be checked: identification, weight, treatment given, date of arrival. Set aside what is merely told: it dislikes men, it was beaten, it hates children.
Those lines are not always wrong. They cannot be verified, and they make you see what you were warned about instead of what is in front of you.
An adult has already learned something about doors, bowls, sofas and cars. You inherit those settings, good and bad.
It cuts both ways. Plenty of adult animals are already house-trained, already used to being left alone, already calm indoors. That is the least advertised argument for adopting an adult, and the most concrete one.
The habits that bother you can be changed, more slowly than in a young animal. The ones that suit you, nobody had to build.
Many adopted animals are quiet, biddable and almost invisible for the first days. Then they start barking, getting on the bed, asking for things, testing.
Nothing has gone wrong. An animal letting its guard down is showing you what it is, and that is good news. What you saw at the start was an animal sizing things up.
The mistake is concluding too early, either way: deciding you have a perfect animal, or deciding you made a mistake.
An animal can live with you for three weeks without trouble, then panic at an umbrella, a vacuum cleaner, a man in a cap or a metal staircase.
That is not a decline. It is the first time the trigger has come up. Until you have met a situation, you know nothing about how it reacts.
Keep a list of what you find out, with the date and the context. It beats memory, and it is directly useful if you ever seek advice.
Before you teach a sit, check whether it has one. Plenty of adult animals have had training and answer to words you have not tried.
Test somewhere quiet, once, without repeating the word. If it answers, you have just saved weeks. If it does not, you have lost nothing.
The word may also be a different one, or a gesture. An animal watching your hand rather than your mouth may have been taught with signals.
An adult can arrive with early arthritis, poor teeth, a sore ear or extra weight. None of that necessarily shows in the first days.
The initial check is not only about treatment. It fixes a starting state, weight included, that everything later gets compared against.
Behaviour that looks mental is sometimes pain. That is the first explanation to rule out before anyone talks about training.