Understanding Separation Anxiety SA1

Understanding Separation Anxiety
SA1
In this blog series, I will talk about separation anxiety.

Dogs with separation anxiety show distress when left alone. That distress may result in a dog barking excessively, having house training accidents, doing destruction to property, or being destructive to themselves. There are several degrees of separation anxiety, and several ways dogs end up with this problem. There are also a lot of human behaviors that can feed into creating the problem in dogs, as well as dog traits that create a predisposition or perpetuate the problem. What that means is that separation anxiety is an issue which can have a variety of triggers and can create different degrees of distress in different dogs. Some dogs have mild separation anxiety and may only chew something up on occasion when left alone. Dogs with moderate separation anxiety are more consistent about showing distress when left alone. While dogs with severe separation anxiety may destroy parts of the house and sometimes injure themselves in a frantic effort to escape being along. Because dogs can have a diversity of ways they act when suffering from separation anxiety, there needs to be more than one way to help dogs learn to cope with being left alone. In this blog, I’d like to review a few ways to deal with separation anxiety, as well as look at causative factors for this issue.
    Since leaving the dog alone leads to separation anxiety events, it is important to realize what defines alone for one dog is not the same for another dog. For example, a rescue German Shepherd that I worked with was fine as long as she had a companion dog with her. But, if you removed the companion dog, this Shepherd displayed severe separation anxiety. She didn’t care if there were people around, she didn’t want to be the only dog. Another case involved a Boxer who had three other companion dogs with him. The presents of other dogs didn’t matter to this dog. If his owner left, he’d display separation anxiety. I’ve also known of two dogs who had some separation anxiety when their owner left. But, if the dogs could be with each other, they were less likely to react to their owner’s absence. Yet another dog didn’t care how many people were present in the household. If his primary owner left, that dog had an anxiety episode. What all this means is that what can trigger a separation anxiety event can be different for different dogs.

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Peggy Swager is a behaviorist and dog trainer. She has authored several books and many dog training articles. Two of her articles won awards. More information is available on Separation Anxiety and her other works at her website www.peggyswager.com.