The key topics in this article are:
· What is separation anxiety?
· Why your dog feels separation anxiety
· Don’t ask too much of your dog
· Exercise: Extending the anxiety ‘time threshold’
· Exercise: Establishing a routine
· Exercise: Set your dog up for failure (when you’re training)
· Exercise: Don’t set your dog up for failure (when you’re not training)
· Exercise: Don’t reward relief greetings
· Exercise: Retraining a shadow dog
· Exercise: Don’t teach your dog a signal to worry
· Exercise: Don’t reward bad behavior
· Consider enrolling in dog classes
· Final Words

What is Separation Anxiety?

Dogs experience separation anxiety when they become stressed at being isolated, or separated from their usual packmates or littermates.  Separation anxiety is a state of mind in the dog akin to a psychosis or phobia and often lasts from several minutes before the separation occurs, to many minutes after the separation has ended – not just during the period of separation.

When a dog is feeling separation anxiety this often shows itself in their behavior as:
· Restlessness – including circling, pacing, salivating and panting.  These things show the overall state of mind of the dog which can be summed up in one word: stressed!
· Destructiveness – including digging, chewing, tearing things apart (dissecting), pawing at things or harassing other dogs in the area endlessly, or even self-mutilation tearing out fur or licking themselves to the point of bleeding.  These behaviors are often releases for the stress and tension a dog feels when left alone.
· Vocalising – commonly barking, howling and whining.  This can go on for second, minutes, hours or even days.  The exact kind of call each dog uses can vary but they are all trying to achieve one thing, and that is to call their pack mates to them and re-establish contact.

Separation anxiety, like any dog behavior, can also become stereotyped, meaning that the dog can continue to show symptoms even if they no longer feel anxiety from the separation itself, and owners often report this by saying the behavior has become ‘ingrained’ in their dog.  If your dog is doing this you should consult an animal behaviorist as it is often an indication of a very poor state of mind in the dog.

Why Dogs Feel Separation Anxiety

Dogs evolved under the guidance of human kind as social animals, and were born and bred to spend time with humans and with other dogs.  We demand a lot of them by asking them to tolerate spending time alone, particularly at very young ages before they are 12 months of age.

A dog is hard wired to try to remain with its pack and there’s nothing we can do about that.  It’s not a fault with your dog that they experience separation anxiety, their social nature is as much as part of their being as their ears, legs, paws and claws are.  The worst mistake we can make is believe that the dog has any other motive for their separation anxiety other following their than natural instinct, and they are not trying to get our sympathy or play on our emotions by howling endlessly when they leave.  Separation anxiety is often made worse by boredom, something that affects almost all dogs to some extend these days as we rarely have time or opportunity in our modern lifestyles to make them an integral part of our daily lives.

A good way to understand why separation anxiety occurs is to consider life from the dog’s point of view.  If they are confined to a back yard behind high fences every day, they are by definition dependent on us for survival.  They have no opportunity to find food for themselves, and any dog in this situation will instinctively be acutely aware of this dependence whether we ourselves are or not.  Without the food and water we bring them they would die.
 
We know our dog is not going to die in our back yard because we know we’re coming back at the end of every day to feed them, and that there is plenty of food in the cupboard for them.  Dogs have no such understanding that we will return, so naturally they start assuming that when their primary source of food disappears, they are in physical danger.  Well perhaps not physical danger, but certainly a situation they are not comfortable with!

 A dog will learn to tolerate being separated quite well when:
· They learn to trust the daily cycle of their existence, and hence trust that you are coming back.
· They are emotionally balanced in the rest of their lives and don’t crave human contact because they have other interesting things to do during the day to keep themselves busy, and they get enough human contact during the times when we are around.

Consider this: If one morning someone forced you into your room and locked you in there, when could you reasonably assume you would be let out?  Chances are unless you knew exactly who had put you in there, why you were there, and when they were coming back, you’d have no idea if you were going to be there for one minute or one year.  And in this case you would probably immediately start worrying and start to look for your own way out – perhaps through another door or window.  Of course this example is not entirely fair, our motives for wanting to escape are generally different to those of a dog, but it’s worth thinking about what your dog makes of things when you push them into the yard in the morning, lock the gate, and disappear down the road for a whole day.

Don’t Ask Too Much of Your Dog

Very few dogs younger than 12 months will tolerate being left alone well.  This is one of the reasons why whole-of-life training programmes such as Delta Society Canine Good Citizen do not accept dogs for CGC assessment under 12 months of age.

If your dog is young, then they have a right to be all the things a young dog is: impatient, energetic, silly and undisciplined.  Their maturity will come with time, and most dogs only mature into adult mental patterns at around 2-3 years of age, or even older in some large dog breeds.

Don’t ask a 6 month old puppy to tolerate being separated for 8 hours a day.  Accept that if you do demand this of them, then they will fret, and you will have to work at all these exercises to ensure their anxiety does not become stereotyped.

Also don’t ask your dog to change overnight.  Sometimes a new training routine shows immediate results but is a very rare occurrence.  Most dog owners expect their animals to learn like humans do, but they don’t!

Dogs are situational learners and come to understand the world by experiencing it and extrapolating directly from those experiences.  They also don’t generalize, and just because they learn to tolerate you being away when they’re locked inside does not mean they will tolerate you being away in the same manner if you lock them outside.

There are some very important things that are worth knowing about the process of dog training that you should take into account in your separation anxiety exercises:
1. It takes a while for an untrained dog to understand what training is.  Once they do their learning will accelerate as their focus will be on you far more, and this is what you want.  Effective training often gets off to a shaky start because the dog hasn’t yet learned to recognize the patterns you are showing it.
2. Training is a process of shaping, so don’t demand your dog do everything perfectly right away.  It’s okay for them to improve gradually over time and with behavioral changes this time period can be months to years.  In fact the most reliable behaviors are shaped this way, and the dog will then have them for life.
3. While a dog is still learning their training will seem to lapse every now and then.  They will go through bad patches, but then pick up again.  Don’t be frustrated by this, it’s an important part of the dog learning what it is you want from them, by testing the alternatives.  Dogs are smarter and better at this than we give them credit for, although of course they do it all instinctively and don’t reason through what they’re doing like we do.
4. Just before a behavior gets reliable, it often gets worse – much worse.  In behaviorism terms this is called an extinction burst and is sometimes perceived as a period of ‘frustration’ or ‘rebellion’ in the dog, after which they seem to ‘give up’ and stop doing that behavior.  If you actively look for this extinction burst, you will see it happen, and when it does you’ll know you’ve made a breakthrough because it usually marks the end (extinction) of a behavior – at least for a while!

Exercise: Extending The Anxiety ‘Time Threshold'

Every dog has a time threshold beyond which they will fret at being separated.  For some dogs it’s seconds, for others it’s hours, for others still, it’s days or longer.  To treat separation anxiety you need to work at increasing this threshold until the dog will tolerate being alone for hours during the day.

First, find out what your dog’s threshold is.  Leave them alone in a location where you can watch them secretly, through a window, through a crack in a doorway, from around a corner, or even through closed circuit TV if you have to!  Note the time it takes for them to fret.  If it’s 15 seconds, then that’s your dog’s threshold.

Now start training from within that threshold time.  Start at half the threshold if you have to, and set up a pattern of leaving and returning within that time.  Only leave when your dog is calm and settled.  If your dog’s threshold is 15 seconds, maybe try starting at 10 seconds and working from there.  Whatever point you start from you must make sure your dog is comfortable with that time span, and if they’re not, use something even lower.  If you have a dog that can’t be left alone for 5 seconds, then you’ll only be leaving the room for 4 seconds at a time to start with!  The exercise is to leave the room (out of sight), then return within the time period you’re working to.  Each time you return wait for your dog to be calm and sitting or lying down before walking up to them, saying “Good dog!” and perhaps patting them or rewarding them with a treat.  If at first you can’t even leave the room, start by even turning your back on the dog for a few seconds as a kind of pseudo-separation and work from there. Of course if your dog didn’t even notice you were gone and never moved, you can start extending the time you are away immediately.

Over several training sessions, slowly extend the time you are away, and each time when you return look for signs your dog is calm and still sitting or lying down.  If they got up, barked, whined, moved around or showed any other signs of anxiety, then the time you were away was too long, and you need to go back to a shorter time again.

It is critically important that you don’t increase the time you are away each time too quickly.  At the start, increase it by only a few seconds each time.  Count the time as “one one-thousand, two one-thousand, three one-thousand” etc, to mark off seconds.  Do this kind of training in short sessions several times a day, until you have worked up to being able to leave for some minutes while your dog remains happy and calm.

It may take a week, maybe even two for your dog to become accustomed to even these short separation periods but don’t despair – these short time periods are the most critical to cover, and extending to longer time periods usually happens very quickly after that.  Again be patient with your dog and even if you don’t think you’re seeing progress, stick with it.  Always stay within your dog’s tolerance threshold.  If they ever become anxious at the time you are away you must go back to a shorter separation period and start increasing slowly from there again.  Every time the dog becomes stressed, the training session has failed so it’s important not to increase too quickly.

Once you’ve graduated to having your dog tolerate several minutes of time away from you, you can start extending the time in 30 second or 1 minute increments.

Once they’re happy with 30 minutes alone, this is usually the point at which their separation anxiety is all but cured, as most dogs have little concept of time continuity over a period as long as 30 minutes.  Of course don’t just immediately jump from 30 minutes to 8 hours, still try to take a few steps along the way to make sure your dog is comfortable – and if the training ever lapses and they start feeling anxiety, go back to shorter periods once again.

Exercise: Establishing a Routine

Your dog needs to trust you are coming back.  In fact they need to trust you in many things in life, and you have to earn that trust.  If your dog frets while you are away there is a very good chance it’s because they don’t understand (trust) that you are coming back.

Do things the same way, at the same time, within the dog’s tolerances, for a period of 1 or 2 weeks:
· Get up at the same time
· Feed the dog at the same times (this one is critical)
· Toilet the dog at the same times of day (also critical)
· Walk the dog at the same time
· Play with the dog at the same time
· Go to bed at the same time

Your dog will read your routine like a book and they have far better awareness of our schedules than even we do.  Dogs are among the best observers of behavior in the world and they will very quickly learn patterns by observing things.

Once you have a routine, stick with it, and work on the other separation anxiety exercises until your dog is happy to be left by themselves.  Once you feel their anxiety is under control you can start to vary your routine bit by bit again until you have a well adjusted dog that can be left alone at any time of day in almost any circumstances.

Exercise: Set Your Dog Up For Failure

This exercise is a training exercise and never use it unless you are actively training your dog and can devote your whole attention to them.

There are often undesirable behaviors associated with separation anxiety such as destruction.  To combat this, you can set your dog up for failure, which means putting them in the situation while you observe from a hidden location, and when they start to do something you don’t like, such as chew inappropriate things, burst back in saying “No!”, and immediately give them something else to do. That something could be a “Sit” command, a trick such as “Shake” or even an appropriate chew toy or treat they can focus their energy on – anything except what they were doing.  Then leave the room again.

Never punish your dog either when using this technique.  Your goal is to interrupt your dog’s undesirable activity and replace it with a desirable one.  In doing this your dog will learn what is allowed and what is disallowed, and if both options are available to them they will start to prefer the allowable activity exclusively.

Please never ever use this technique as your only means of solving separation anxiety.  By itself it will not work and in fact can make the behavior worse when the dog learns that destruction brings you running back with treats.  But if you use it along with all the other techniques it can prevent the destructive aspects of your dog’s behavior.

Also, you must make sure your dog has a good alternative to the undesirable behaviour available at all times.  If they don’t then all you’re doing is punishing them for bad behaviour which will end up destroying your trust relationship with them.  Make sure your dog has suitable chewables and toys around at all times so that they can focus on these things rather than destroying your valuable furniture.

Exercise: Don’t Set Your Dog Up For Failure

In this case the technique applies when you are not actively training your dog, and it means don’t leave your dog alone when they in a situation that would naturally be stressful if you can avoid it, as this will set you back in your separation anxiety training.

Don’t leave your dog alone and expect them to behave if they have primary needs, i.e. if they are hungry, thirsty, need toileting or have just woken up from a nap and are full of energy they need to burn off.  If you leave a dog alone at these times they are almost guaranteed to become stressed.  It’s worth mentioning that dogs are most active in the morning and evenings, so if you’ve been away all day try to get back before evening as your dog will wake up, want exercise and start to fret when they find you are still not around as this primary need grows.

Some rules about leaving your dog alone:
· Don’t leave them alone just after waking up.  Worse still, don’t wake them up to say goodbye, and then leave right away!  Try to leave your dog when they are tired or have just had a good dose of mental stimulation.
· Ensure your dog is not hungry.  The best time to leave them alone is about 10 to 30 minutes after a meal.
· Ensure your dog is not thirsty.  This is an obvious one but is sometimes overlooked with indoor dogs, make sure they are left with plenty of water and have drunk before you leave.  A stressed dog will tend not to drink enough which can make the problem worse.
· Play with your dog before going out.  There is a very good chance your dog will tire of playing before you, so wait till they go off and do something else before leaving.  The worst thing you can do is rev them up with a game of tug of war, then leave half way through.  If possible, wait till your dog ends the game.
· Give your dog something interesting to do to keep them occupied in the first few minutes after they are alone.  Buster cubes, stuffed kongs, raw bones and other toys make great diversions for a dog, but make sure you vary or rotate the items regularly.  The same distraction will not keep work day after day.
· Come back to your dog again before they next become hungry, thirsty or energetic or need toileting again.

Exercise: Don’t Reward Relief Greetings

In many cases this is the number one mistake people make with their dogs that makes separation anxiety worse.

A relief greeting is something your dog does when they are reunited with you after a period of separation.  It starts when you first see your dog and can last several minutes, sometimes up to half an hour.  It can include barking, running around (getting the ‘zoomies’), licking, jumping up for attention, whining and in bad cases, submissive peeing, destruction and nipping.  The period of separation anxiety started before you let, and continues until the relief greeting is finally over.

Don’t reward relief greetings.

Many owners inadvertently reward their dogs relief greeting by patting them, talking to them, or even the act of acknowledging their dogs existence before the proper time.  An important rule is that your dog does not get any attention unless they are doing exactly what you want them to do, and in this case when you return home you want your dog to be sitting or lying down quietly, not making any noise and ideally not even panting.  The problem is we as humans love to feel needed by our pets and we sometimes take a dog’s relief greeting as a wonderful validation that we have been missed and are loved.  Actually these kinds of dog behaviors are more about social pack bonding than love in the human sense, so don’t fall into this trap.  Be strong and ignore your dog until they have settled down after you return.

If your dog will not sit still when you come home, barks at you, whines, paws at you or does any other behavior to try to get your attention when you first return – you have to ignore it.  Don’t look at your dog, don’t talk to them, don’t pat them, don’t even acknowledge their existence until they have calmed down, and this can take several minutes, which often feels like an eternity.  Just keep going about your business and let the dog just observe you.

If your dog is on the other side of a door, don’t open the door until your dog is calm.

If your dog calms down after a few minutes of you returning, but then gets excited all over again when you finally turn to greet them, immediately turn away again and wait for them to calm down again.  Keep doing this until they are perfectly calm as you approach them, and only get excited when you invite them to greet you.

If you don’t have time to wait for your dog to calm down completely, as an interim step it’s okay to ask your dog to do something like sit or lie down in order to earn your acknowledgement.  But don’t forget to take the time wherever possible to do the full exercise, waiting for complete calm.  Each time you return to your dog is a golden opportunity to continue improving their separation anxiety by ignoring their relief greetings.

If you follow this exercise, eventually your dog will probably not even get off the couch when you come home, until you have put down your groceries, changed your shoes and come back to sit on the couch – and invited your dog to greet you.  And when you do invite your dog to say hello, you’re guaranteed to get a wonderful loving greeting!

If you can extinct (eliminate) your dog’s relief greeting, then they will accept your coming and going much more easily because they will no longer be marking the exact time you disappear and return again.  In effect you will have eliminated your presence as the cue that triggers their separation anxiety.

Exercise: Retraining a Shadow Dog

A shadow dog is one that follows you around endlessly wherever you go, and is a dog that’s very likely to suffer from separation anxiety.  A well balanced dog will bound up to greet you when you call them, play with you for a few minutes, but also be content to wander off nearby and do other things whilst you’re around.  A shadow dog has to be eighteen inches from you at all times and can actually be an annoyance after a while.  Shadow dogs will also sit next to your chair, under your legs on the couch, next to your bed at night, follow you from room to room and will never be more than a few feet away from you at all times.

Try to train your dog not to be a shadow dog with a simple exercise.  When you are at home in the evening, allow your dog to move around and follow you as they want.  If they settle down next to you, wait until they are sitting or lying down, then get up and walk away.  If they follow you, that’s fine, keep walking.  Go into the next room, and then back into the first room.  Keep walking between the rooms until the dog gets tired of following you and just stands and watches you.  This usually takes around three trips between rooms but eventually your dog will see that all you’re doing is walking between rooms so they don’t have to follow.  When your dog stops pacing after you, you can go back and sit down and resume what you were doing.  If your dog immediately comes up to you and sits next to you, repeat the whole exercise again.  Keep doing this until your dog is happy to stay a few metres away from you.  When they get to this stage they will have learned there’s no point being right next to you because that triggers you to move away.   In this way you’re training for a separation distance, and you can keep increasing the distance over time until you get to the point where your dog is happy for you be in the next room, or futher.

Exercise: Don’t Teach Your Dog a Signal to Worry

If you have the same routine every time you leave the house, in a very short period of time your dog will come to recognize the signals that you are about to leave.  When this happens your dog will start worrying about you going even before you have left!  Some of the signals dogs pick up on include you putting on shoes, switching off the TV, reaching for the car keys, saying parting words to the dog, closing of the front door, and the sound of your car driving off down the street.

You can accidentally train your dog to start worrying by taking these signals as a sign that you are about to leave.  To combat this, try some variations:
· Leave by a different door
· Park the car down the street and walk to it so your dog doesn’t hear the sound of the engine pulling away.  Return in the same manner so your dog doesn’t hear the garage door open.
· Don’t always talk to your dog before you leave, just exit silently and without ceremony, don’t even look at your dog – just leave.
· Change your routine when you leave – put on your shoes first and have your keys in your pocket long before you leave so these cues become distanced from the act of leaving itself.

The aim is to desensitize your dog to the cues that would otherwise start them fretting.  If you can do this then your dog will learn to accept your coming and going much more easily and hence their anxiety will be much less while you are away.

Exercise: Don’t Reward Bad Behavior

When you do leave and your dog starts barking, whining or howling, be very careful not to reward this in any way.  The surprising thing is what constitutes a ‘reward’ in your dog’s eyes.  If you do any of the following when your dog is making noise, you are in fact rewarding your dog:
· You appear at a window where they can see you, to look at them
· You open the door and come out to see if they are okay
· You yell at them to stop it, from near or afar
· You come back to them at all whilst they are howling

The best policy is that if your dog does howl, only return to them when they are not howling!  Every time you return to them whilst they are making noise will make the problem worse in the future.

If your dog is a constant howler, then they may only be silent for a few seconds between howls.  This is good enough to begin with, just make sure you don’t reappear to them until they’ve actually stopped making noise.  Over time, and by following all these exercises, even a bad howler will improve to the point where they stop howling for minutes at a time.  It’s during these silences that you can return without accidentally rewarding the unwanted noisemaking.

Consider Enrolling in Dog Classes

Many people think dog classes are about teaching your dog tricks such as Sit, Stand, Stay and Down.  They’re not!  They are about communicating effectively with your dog, bonding with them, and shaping their personality through increasing attention span, focus and motivation.

Don’t miss the chance to improve your whole lifelong relationship with your dog simply by dismissing dog classes as being only about the tricks.  If you take a few four-week courses, one hour per week, you’ll find your dog’s behavior will improve all-round, and as an added bonus they’re sure to learn some marvelous tricks!

The kind of behavioural changes owners see in their dogs once they take them to dog classes include:
· Better socialization with other dogs
· Better recall as the dog learns to focus in on your voice
· A much better trust relationship as your dog starts to really enjoy interacting with you
· A quieter dog when you are not training because they’ve had loads of mental stimulation attending classes with you.

There is a phenomenon in the dog training world: to train a dog not to bark, you first have to train them to bark on cue.  It’s the same with all behaviours: if you can get the dog to do it on cue they are far less likely to do it if you don’t ask for it, and even if they do, you can tell them “No” and they will understand exactly what you are telling them to stop.

Only ever attend dog training classes that use positive reinforcement as their training method.  Never use any punishment in your training as this is guaranteed to erode the trust you build with your dog, and does not lead to reliable behaviours.

Talk to your vet about dog training groups active in your local area.

Final Words

Dog training, whether it be for tricks like Shake and Stay – or for life skills such as separation anxiety and aggression – takes time and patience.  However as little as five minutes a day, every day, will see your dog’s behavior change in a matter of weeks, and that’s a small price to pay for the next ten years of happy living with a calm, settled, well-behaved dog.

Once a dog has learned a basic behavior such as Sit, Stay or to tolerate being alone for 30 seconds, you can improve the behavior in five main ways.  These ways are known as the Five D’s:
· Distance: ask the dog to repeat the behavior when they’re further away from you
· Duration: ask the dog to do the behavior for longer
· Diversity: ask the dog to do the behavior in a multitude of situations
· Dependability: train the dog to do the behavior reliably
· Distractions: help your dog be reliable even in the face of interesting distractions

When it comes to separation anxiety, extending the threshold period is an example of training for Duration.  Not teaching your dog a signal to worry is an example of training for Diversity.  Note that dogs are situational learners, which means if you teach your dog to tolerate separation whilst indoors this doesn’t automatically translate to them being comfortable with separation while you are out of doors.  Un-training a shadow dog is an example of training for Distance.  Taking the time to do all these exercises regularly is training for Dependability.

No single exercise is a cure-all, and all of the exercises will need to be done regularly to ensure your dog continues to improve with their separation anxiety.  You can see improvement in a matter of days but sometimes it takes weeks or months depending on the age of your dog.  However long it takes, remember that once they learn good behavior, if you remain consistent, they’ll keep it for the rest of their lives.

Don’t be dismayed if your dog doesn’t seem to be making progress, it takes time.  They are living creatures and take steps forwards and backwards like the rest of us.  They will improve over time and even the most troubled cases of separation anxiety can be brought back into balance very quickly with these techniques.