Dog Separation Anxiety: A Treatment Protocol

Treatment protocol for dog separation anxiety.
By Laure-Anne Viselé, October 2010

Tackling separation anxiety in dogs: a DIY approach

Courtesy of oaks.nvg.org

A friend of mine asked me for remote advice on separation anxiety as she does not have a local behaviour therapist. Please find below the detailed DIY protocol I wrote for her. Feel free to use it, but if you have the remotest opportunity to get in touch with a qualified therapist for a more controlled treatment, do so.

No, not every dog has separation anxiety

Not every sep-anx-like group of behaviour is the real deal. There is a whole continuum in intensity, and, technically speaking, it can be recognised by some (but not necessarily all) of these symptoms:

• Anorexia: The dog leaves any food untouched in your absence.
• Elimination: The dog is otherwise house-trained.
• Timing: Behaviour is worse in the first half hour after your departure.
• Extreme and intensebehaviours:
  • Vocalisation: Not just whining, but full-blown yelping and/or barking and/or howling
  • Destruction: Not just mild chewing, but evidence of frantic attempts to destroy any physical barrier between the dog and yourself (e.g. deep scratches at the front door, detached claws or other paw injury from pawing and scratching the door, mouth wounds from panicked biting at the crate wiring)

Of course these symptoms could start light, and gradually intensify, so I would encourage you to nip it in the bud at the first sign. Better safe than sorry and all that.

Please note that if your dog has full-blown separation anxiety symptoms, you really should consult a local behaviourist. I can help you if you are based in The Hague or region. This is my process.

At-risk circumstances

Some circumstances will make your dog more at risk of developing separation anxiety:

• Anxious dog;
• Dog that follows his owner around the house (I have one of those, and believe it or not, some dogs are happy to hang around in another room);
• Dog used to near-continuous presence of owner, then a change of circumstances (e.g. period of unemployment or sick leave or maternity leave or holiday ceases);
• Dog that is attached to one person, disproportionately to all other members of the household;
• Dog was recently adopted from the shelter. The transition can be tough for them;
• Dog was left home alone through very stressful circumstances (e.g. New Years’ eve in Holland: hours of loud fireworks);
• Dog has suffered a trauma (e.g. burglary, bereavement, etc.);
• Dog has recently lost a pet companion;
• Dog has recently returned from a pension; and/or
• Dog got separated from its mother before 8 weeks.

Protocol

The general idea

Courtesy of Long Beach examiner Feb 22, 2010

The classic two-pronged approach counter conditioning and desensitisation comes in handy here. The general idea is to help decrease the contrast between the owner’s presence and the owner’s  absence:

• Gradual desensitisation: Gradually introducing alone periods starting with very short periods that the dog can handle; and
• Counter-conditioning:
  • Now allowing the presence of the owner to mean constant, intense, unadulterated, systematic fun and companionship; and
  • Associating the absence of the owner with pleasant experiences (e.g. a toy stuffed full of food)

During training sessions, the dog should under no circumstances, be exposed to stress. Besides a humane concern, it would have a real detrimental effect  on the treatment’s effectiveness.

The protocol makes room for inevitable owner absences during the early period of treatment (see I have to leave the dog alone…), although these should be restricted to the absolute minimum.

Equipment: a Kong

Courtesy of Cherrybrook.com

Before starting, buy a new “comfort toy” for the dog. It has to be new, as you must exclusively use this toy for this sep-anx protocol and at no other time. The reason for this is that we are going to try to make the dog associate the toy with an absence of manageable length.

The toy must be:

• Durable and resistant (won’t fall to pieces through long sessions of tough chewing), and
• Able to contain food that the dog has to pry out.

The ideal comfort toy is a Kong. If the dog already has one, buy a new one of a different texture and/or size preferably, so that the dog clearly distinguishes its comfort toy from its everyday toy.

Therapy step 1: Jiggle those keys

Courtesy of sxc.hu

Think as a dog: what are the clues to your boss’ impending departure:

• Getting his coat,
• Jiggling his keys,
• Wearing dressy clothes,
• Getting up at a specific time,
• etc.

To decrease the associative strength of these events with your departure, the idea is to frequently expose the dog to these stimuli, and then not leave the house. This is textbook Pavlovian conditioning: the dog has developed a conditioned reflex (anxiety) in response to a stimulus (e.g. the sound of your keys). To decrease the dog’s response, you should jiggle your keys several times a day (and put your coat on, etc. etc. etc.) without following it with your actual departure.

When exposing your dog to these clues:

• Stay casual: do not fuss or pay inordinate attention to the dog;
• Watch out for the smallest sign of stress and respond by decreasing the resemblance of your pretence departure with a real one (e.g. casually sit back down).

When the dog barely reacts to these pre-departure clues, you’re ready for step 2.

Related good lifelong habit: Once the negative associations have nearly disappeared, you must keep them at bay: keep playing the “fake departure” game once in a while throughout the dog’s life.

Therapy step 2: Leave the room

As inconspicuously as possible (i.e. avoiding too many of the previously mentioned departure-clues such as jiggling your keys or ostentatiously getting your coat), give the dog his comfort toy (previously stuffed with edible goodies) and leave the room (the room, not the house). Return in less than a second.

If the dog tries to follow you, do not really look at him and casually close the door behind you without a word, nice and breezy. The idea is to:

• Desensitize the dog to your departure through:
  • Behaving casually when leaving and returning. In the dog’s mind: “Boss coming and going = no biggie“, and
  • Coming back immediately. In the dog’s mind: “Boss going through that door doesn’t always predict boss going  away“
• Associate your absence with getting a juicy Kong to chew. In the dog’s mind: “Boss going through that door means juicy treat”

When you return, do not make a fuss (but do not sternly ignore him either. Just keep it relaxed). Instead, casually go about your own business and take the comfort toy away from him. If he has resource guarding issues (Dog growls if you take things away from him), just swap the toy for a nicer treat. Thorough treatment for resource guarding goes beyond the scope of this work.

Courtesy of Dreamstime

Gradually increase the length of your absence from the room (room, not house). When you have reached 5 minutes with no sign of stress, start mixing short and long periods (never exceeding the longest manageable time. e.g. 5 minutes) to introduce an element of random.

For the longer absences, you’ll have to start being clever in stuffing the Kong, so that it keeps the dog busy prying the food out for more than a few seconds.

Over the first few weeks, try to work your way up to 30 minutes. Half an hour is an important milestone. That is the period of time during which dogs typically display the most extreme symptoms. If they can get over that period of time alone in a room and remain reasonably contented, the prognostic is extremely good.

Related good lifelong habits:

• Aim at spending around 30% of the time you spend in your house in a different room from your dog (and not interacting with him in any way). If you keeping this up, you can help proofing your dog against recurrence by contributing to weakening the contrast between your presence and your absence. What I do is, after sharing the room for a while, I move his bed to another room and make any other possible comfortable sleeping spot in my room inaccessible. I then give him a chew or a bone in his bed in the other room. That teaches him to be contented to be in a different room even when I am home.
• No longer allow let the dog follow you around every single room (some people let their dogs follow them to the toilets!). Once the dog can take short absences in a different room, introduce the new no-follow rule consistently and firmly when you visit another room for a short period. Just close the door behind yourself and return a few seconds later.

Therapy step 3: Leave the house

You can start this protocol when the dog can stay alone in a room for about 1/2 hour without signs of stress.

Courtesy of migration portal

With as little departure clues as possible (remember step 1 and those jiggling keys? Well, don’t jiggle now), and as little fuss as possible, give the dog his comfort toy (pre-stuffed with goodies, of course) and leave the front door. (Calmly, no fuss) throw the toy a little distance away from the door so that the dog does not focus on your departure.

Come back home within one second or so, again, without fuss. Casually go about your business until the dog has settled a little. Then feel free to acknowledge him a little more (but stay low-key. The last thing we want is a fanfare every time you return home.).

Repeat this until the dog barely fusses before and after your one-second absences. At that stage, gradually increase the periods of absence in small increments.

Remember to always give the comfort toy before your departure and to always take it back upon your return. Ultimately, the dog will associate the comfort toy with an absence for a comfortable period of time (a manageable absence). This is why it is important to use a comfort toy exclusively for this treatment.

After a few weeks, hopefully, you’ll feel comfortable leaving the dog alone for 1/2 hour. You can then increase your increments more drastically until you’ve reached your ultimate objective.

Related good lifelong habit: Take the habit of keeping your departures and returns very casual and low-key.

Tricks you can use in parallel

For an increased chance of success, please work on the following in parallel:

• Get the dog to be less exclusive in his affection to one person. Get another person to give the dog whatever it considers enjoyable (e.g. treats, walks, games, etc.) more often than you;
• Do not sleep in the same room as your dog: Again, introduce this very gradually and do not let the dog get stressed. This will decrease the contrast between your absence and your presence from the house;
• Never make a fuss when you return home. The idea is to blur the contrast between your presence and your absence. I am not saying you should sulkily enter the room and sternly ignore him, but leave yourself the time to casually take off your coat and drop your bags before a calm sober little hello.
• When you come home, get on with your own business until the dog has stopped fussing and whining. Then feel free to give him some calm one-on-one attention.
• When you are home, do not systematically and directly respond to your dog’s call for attention. Once in a while (say, 1 time out of 4), gently ignore his request for attention. Your presence should not mean intense, constant and systematic entertainment and companionship.
• Take account of specific circumstances and adapt the protocol to them. e.g. Get your postman-reactive dog desensitised and counter-conditioned  to the postman’s visits as a side help to the main sep-anx protocol.
• Recruit help: try to find out about cheap dog sitters or volunteers among your family/friends who can fill in for you for periods when you really have to leave the house for the first phase of the training.

I have to leave the dog alone for longer than he can manage

If you are in the middle of treatment and your dog has to be alone longer than you know he can manage:

• Give the dog a chance to think and work in your absence:
  • Use a Kong (an entirely different one to the comfort Kong),
  • Hide treats throughout the room,
  • Stuff cardboard boxes with treats, etc.
• Place your dog in the room where he can do as little damage to himself and your property as possible;
• Ensure that the room is comfortable, to prevent the unfriendly surroundings contributing to the dog’s stress;
• An extremely separation-averse dog will avoid a room he associates with being alone like the plague. Invest time and effort in preventing such a negative association with the room by frequently having the dog spend time in the room while you are in the room and/or in the house.
• A webcam is ideal to monitor your dog’s behaviour. It can allow you to ask a neighbour to intervene should things get out of hand. Besides, a recording of the timing and intensity of the behaviours can be extremely useful for remote diagnosis and treatment advice.

Using a crate for separation anxiety?

Courtesy of Gothunts.com

I would not advise the use of a crate on a dog suffering from sep-anx, as he may develop a negative aversion for the crate, and could injure itself trying to get out. If you must really use a crate, please follow a humane crate-training protocol, and never plan on  leaving your dog alone in the crate for hours on end.

Getting another dog to help with separation anxiety

Save yourself the hassle and financial burden of another dog purely to tackle your current dog’s separation anxiety. There is no guarantee that it will help, and it can even lead to a whole new set of behaviour problems.

Using medication to tackle separation anxiety

In many cases, separation anxiety is so severe that it cannot be tackled humanely without medication. Should you feel medication is required, please consult a veterinarian for advice. I would never recommend using medication alone, so please always tackle the problem with a behaviour protocol as the one indicated above (with or without medication).

The medications that would get used are the equivalent of modern human anti-depressants for veterinary purposes. Alprazolam, for example (= dog version of Xanax) is quite popular.

Do plan ahead as:

• Anti-depressants can take a few weeks to be effective, and
• It can take a few weeks for the veterinarian to find the ideal dose for your dog.

Beware of prescription sedatives. They are the equivalent of exposing your dog to its worst nightmare, and then paralysing its legs. It will appear outwardly calm but may be suffering intense stress (take a look at a panicked, but sedated, dog’s eyes and you’ll get the picture).

Therapy don’ts

• If the dog has made a boo-boo in your absence (e.g. incontinence, destruction, etc.) do not punish him. He has carried out dozens of other behaviours since then, and he could link the punishment with any one of these randomly. Worse still, he will gradually learn to associate your return with a random chance of punishment, compounding his state of stress.

Some owners insist that the dog “knows it did wrong” as it has a  “guilty look”. Despite the fact that this smacks of anthropomorphism, a more proximate explanation is that the dog is showing submissive signs to pacify your possible outburst.

Courtesy of Smart.com

• Do not jump before you can walk. The beginnings will show little gain (increments of a few seconds), but remember: lay down the foundations solidly, and you shall claim that much more ground later. So please resist the urge to jump a step without testing your dog;
• Follow your dog’s rhythm: Some will fly through the alone-in-a-room steps and take more work to get through the home-alone steps;
• Do not use the comfort toy outside of the sep-anx protocol. The toy has to be a predictor of an absence for a manageable length of time. If it is also used before long and stressful absences, its calming and reassuring influence will be weakened; and
• Very few dogs can happily stay alone for 10 hours in a row. If you cannot cut your absences shorter, arrange for a break in his day (e.g. hire a dog walker, ask a neighbour, etc.).

Separation anxiety: prognostic

Although the treatment of separation anxiety has a relatively good prognostic, the more intense the problem, the thinner the chances.

On the opposite end of the spectrum, mild cases of intolerance to separation can resolve themselves spontaneously. This is often the case where the dog has just returned from a brief pension stay and needs a few days to feel secure in your absence again.

Some ex-shelter dogs may also need an adjustment period after arriving to your home, and could show a temporarily predisposition to separation anxiety. In that case, provided the sep-anx is not allowed to take hold (by using some of the protocol preventively), the issue can be managed relatively easily as the dog settles into its new environment.

Please always consider your dog’s quality of life when tackling a severe behaviour problem. If the logistics of your life do not allow you to accommodate your dog’s needs, and if you see no improvement after a few weeks, please consider re-homing your dog to an home with a matching lifestyle. It is a difficult decision, but giving the dog away can be the biggest gesture of love.

Comments

Are you coping with a dog with some form of separation anxiety?

Are you a therapist dealing with sep-anx cases?

Have you tried a successful approach to separation anxiety?

Whatever your comment or question, I highly value your input to the discussion. Don’t be shy, and write a quick comment.