Bad Behaviours in Humans Creating and Supporting ‘Bad’ Behaviours in Dogs. Part 4 – Separation Anxiety

There’s blood up the door frames.  The fly screens are all torn apart.  The glass doors are filthy with paw prints.  Most of the doors in the house have been scratch and chewed, there are holes in the walls and the crazed looking dog yapping at ear piercing levels outside is throwing itself at the back door repeatedly as I attempt to hear, let alone focus on, the conversation with my new client.

You guessed it, we’re talking Separation Anxiety.  One thing many of you will find quite surprising is the fact that every dog has a form of Separation Anxiety.  It’s what makes them a pack animal, historically keeping them alive.  Separation Anxiety in a dog is a survival instinct.  In many cases a dog will very nearly or actually kill itself trying to get to some form of company.  Unfortunately many humans take this as some kind of a Romeo & Juliet type love and are heavily flattered by the dogs constant anxiety whenever they leave.  “Oh he misses me so bad, such a mummies boy, can’t stand to be without me…etc. etc.”

In actual fact, this is simply your dogs ‘programming’ to help him stay alive.  If he’s separated from his pack, he’s probably going to die, so the best option is to do everything in his power to get back to safety with his buddies.  Whatever the closest thing to a pack he knows, he will try to get to, whether that’s his human family or his doggie pals.  However in our non pack lifestyle, we have to temper this little instinct, as unlike his ancestors, being alone does not mean he is in danger. In fact, whinging for being alone is a much bigger threat to his life than actually being left alone is ever likely to be.  Learning to be left alone happily is one very big and important part of living in a human family.

One of the most popular lines I hear while training on the Sunshine Coast is ‘I know this is a popular issue with (insert breed name here)…’  I will make one thing very clear;  regardless if your dog is a Border Collie, Cavalier King Charles Spaniel, Dalmation, Cocker Spaniel, German Shepherd, Golden Retriever, Labrador, Pug, or Rottweiler; Separation Anxiety is a universal and very common problem.  I would find it impossible to distinguish a particular pattern being more popular in any particular breed.  When it comes to Separation Anxiety, it’s all about dogs.

Your Bad Behaviours Promoting Separation Anxiety;

1. Opening Doors for whinging, whining, barking, scratching.

The biggest reason people are so quick to allow their dog inside / outside for whining, whinging, and or scratching on doors is because it’s very interactive.  At first.  They genuinely feel like their dog is talking to them and it’s pretty cool if you can all live like little mates helping each other out right?  Hmm yes in some ways, but not in this one.  As explained earlier, Separation Anxiety is a survival instinct.  Survival instincts are very easy to reinforce, so allowing your puppy out for whinging just once is enough to set you back…wait for it…easily a whole weeks worth of patient training.

2. Puppy’s first day home.

You’ve just picked up the new family toy, and everyone’s dying to play with it.  When it comes down to it, until your relationship together matures over the next few months and years when your dog is more of a chore and less of a toy, everyone treats their new puppy like the latest fun thing in the house that it is.  Not the way they intend on going on for the rest of their life together.  The puppy is pretty happy with all this attention coming from it’s new litter mates.  Until night time.  Then of course the puppy discovers the gap between us and dogs where we generally put the puppy outside or in the laundry.

Suddenly alone with no preparation.  Puppy whinges the house down until someone finally decides to yell at it, ‘settle’ it like a baby by constantly putting it back in its bed with admonitions to sleep, and finally when all else fails the puppy usually ends up in the bedroom if not in the bed.

The first priority upon bringing a new dog or puppy home should always be teaching it to be left alone.  And this is not being left alone with another dog, this is alone alone.  Being left alone with another dog will simply mean you now have a mini dog pack in  your back yard that ignores you more than ever.  Because they understand each other way better than you do.

3. Responding vocally or physically to whinging.

Recently I was working with a young family with a Cavalier King Charles Spaniel from Caloundra on the Sunshine Coast that had quite severe separation anxiety to the point the poor mum was having to drop the dog off at her mums house every day just to go to work without the dog destroying neighbourhood relations with all his noise.

One thing that had to be picked up on very early was the children’s responses to the dogs whinging and needy behaviour.  Everything else would be going very well, but as soon as the dog whinged, the little girl in particular would rush over and give the dog an attention overload, which very strongly reinforced the problem.

This particular dog would walk around the house whinging most of the time as the behaviour had already long ago been solidified with the amount of attention it got in the beginning.  Though the family was relatively used to this in light of the dogs other far ‘squeakier wheels’ (annoying behaviours) this still needed to be handled to support everything else we were aiming for.

Not all situations are the same, but one thing is for sure, rewarding your dog with attention for whinging whether that is in the form of picking it up, smacking it, death staring at it, yelling at it, or having a quiet discussion as to why it should not be whinging, is only going to make the problem worse.  As a rule of thumb, any attention needs to be seen as good, or positive, attention.

4. Lack  of time spent in ‘alone areas’.

Because Separation Anxiety is such a big part of many dogs temperaments, it’s crucial a dogs handler makes the time to temper this problem on a regular basis.  Even after the dog appears to be all fine with being separated from its family, if you then spend 24/7 with your dog, you’re likely to have an element of the problem pop back up again.  Because he’s a dog.

A lot of dogs have this ‘yo-yo’ type of behaviour because of the handlers lack of forethought and insight into the dogs temperament.  After the school holidays, the dogs barking, whinging, and ‘misbehaviour’ levels change depending on what happened differently over the previous 3 weeks.  If the dog has been around hyperactive children for 3 weeks, its behaviour will reflect that.  In the case of Separation Anxiety, if the dog has been around its family a whole lot more than it normally is, the dog will be stressed when things go back to the normal amount of alone time.

What handlers fail to do is look ahead, see a possible problem, and train against it.  It takes a whole lot less time than fixing the problem after the fact.   For instance, ensuring the dog is regularly isolated regardless what’s going on in the family.  Falling for the guilt trip of ”I don’t spend enough time with the dog so I’ll throw 200% time at it now and then 25% later” is another really big emotionally driven trap which consistently sends the dogs behaviour all over the place.

Common Cross Training Mistakes

1. Toilet Training / Whinging.

In those first few months, toilet training is a very important task, however, a balance must be found between toilet training, and reinforcing Separation Anxiety unnecessarily.

Remembering the fact that just one response to whinging is likely to set you back a long way, get your proactive thinking cap on and consider options where you don’t need to let your puppy out for whinging, or be prepared to do the newspaper on the floor option until your puppy gets better bladder control.  For the record, that’s putting newspaper on the floor for your puppy to wee on, not whacking  a rolled up newspaper on the floor in attempted punishment!

Puppies whinge for all kinds of reasons, the idea that you can let it out to go to the toilet for whinging accurately without reinforcing the whinging / Separation Anxiety problem is ridiculous.  You think you are toilet training your puppy, but in actual fact your puppy is just whinging to be back with its friends and you are reinforcing Separation Anxiety

3.  Attempting to ‘dominate’ the problem away

A rather popular way to attempt to train specific problems based on humans unfortunately taking certain very entertaining TV shows a little too seriously and attempting to apply what they see to their own dogs.

They say kids shows affect kids adversely, well it appears dog shows affect many dogs adversely because the amount of dogs I get through where the owner has been bitten and the dog has become more aggressive over time after attempts to ‘dominate-like-its-mother-would’ good behaviour into the dog is a little disturbing to say the least.

I think it’s pretty safe to say I have worked with nearly every different type of training technique at some stage or other enough to thoroughly known what I am talking about when I say pushing your dog on its side and holding it there for Separation Anxiety is most definitely not going to help you.

You think you’re solving a problem, one tiny wrong move and not only have you already rewarded your dog with attention for whinging, you’re actually going to make your dog very hard to handle.  Hello grooming problems, aggression, and muzzles at the vet!

4.  Attempting to ‘exercise’ the problem away.

Exercise is a very important part of everyone’s lives, however exercising your dog for hours and hours a day in an attempt to get it to calm down is of course going to get your dog very fit, possibly even mask the problem for a few days, however in the end your dog is going to be very fit and still have the problem because, don’t forget, it’s a survival instinct.  You haven’t actually done anything to inform your dog that being left alone is OK.

Training correctly mentally exhausts a dog.  After a reasonable 15 minute training session I often find a dog will sleep for 10 times as long as simply going for an hours walk or run anyway.  Dogs are funny with exercise, though this does often depend on breed, in general they don’t seem to have the endurance issues we have.  I take Storm for a 10k run, and he’d be happy to go out again in a matter of minutes.  Myself on the other hand…!

If you are struggling with this issue with your dog, you are probably at a loss as to what to do to solve it.  In general these issues get so big, no amount of internet research, reading, or watching of tv shows will solve the problem.  You need someone with an outside perspective on the issue that knows what they’re doing to help you get over this as soon as possible.

Don’t over think it.  The term ‘Separation Anxiety’ makes it sound like a mental health problem.  However your dog is not special, with special needs; in actual fact it’s normal for your dog to be struggling with this if you haven’t correctly tempered / trained against it.  Of the hundreds of cases I have seen exhibiting everything from mild to extreme Separation Anxiety behaviours, I can count on one hand the ones that were from an actual abnormal issue with the dogs mental state.  Chances are, this isn’t your dog.

If you are correctly training against this, you should be seeing results in your training immediately, with the majority of behaviour at a normal level within no longer than 6 weeks.

Happy Training!

-Melissa Bruce & Storm