If your dog howls, chews the door frame or wets the floor the moment you leave, start by recording what happens when you go, because the footage tells you which of several different problems you have. Build absences up from a length your dog already handles calmly, stop the full-blown episodes happening while you work, and uncouple your departure cues from your actual departures. Get a vet to rule out medical causes for any soiling or night restlessness. Do not punish anything you come home to.
That last instruction matters more than it sounds, and so does the first. Researchers who study this are increasingly uncomfortable with the term "separation anxiety", because it describes a group of signs that occur together rather than a single condition with one cause. If you are starting from scratch with method, our guide to dog training in India is the place to begin.
It Is Four Problems Wearing One Name
A 2020 study in Frontiers in Veterinary Science surveyed 2,757 dogs showing one or more separation-related signs and analysed the pattern statistically. Fifty-four signs proved useful in describing the problem, and they resolved into seven underlying components, which the researchers named exit frustration, social panic, elimination, redirected frustration, reactive communication, immediate frustration, and noise sensitivity.
Those seven components then divided the dogs into four groups: exit frustration, redirected reactive, reactive inhibited, and boredom-related problems.
The practical consequence is large. Two dogs both described as having separation anxiety may be experiencing entirely different things. One panics at the loss of an attachment figure. Another is frustrated at being unable to follow you through a door. A third is simply under-stimulated. Your CCTV footage might look much the same in each case, while the treatment each dog needs is completely different.
The paper makes a deeper point about the whole category. A syndrome is being treated as though it were a diagnosis, and the relative significance of fear, frustration and panic matters enormously for choosing a treatment. If a general plan has not worked for your dog, that mismatch is often why.
The researchers are also blunt about how poorly the field has measured this. There is no diagnostic test that identifies an underlying biological mechanism, and where published estimates of frequency disagree, they judge different case definitions the likelier explanation rather than real variation between populations. So anyone quoting you a precise percentage is quoting one study's definition of the problem.
The Advice That Can Backfire
Search for help with this and you will be told to leave your dog a special chew toy or a food-filled toy when you go out. You will separately be told to desensitise your dog to your departure cues, so that picking up keys or putting on shoes stops predicting your absence.
The Frontiers researchers point out that these two pieces of advice contradict each other. Giving a special toy only when you leave makes your departure more predictable, and the toy becomes a departure cue in its own right. You are undoing the desensitisation with the other hand.
Food toys are not useless, then. The timing is what matters. If your dog gets a stuffed toy at random moments while you are home, as well as when you leave, it stops functioning as a signal.
There is a second piece of standard advice the same paper flags. Pet parents are frequently told to ignore contact-seeking behaviour, on the theory that the dog is over-attached and needs weaning off it. The researchers note that if the behaviour is actually a sign of anxious attachment, ignoring it can be predicted to antagonise the situation or create a more insecure attachment. Advice built on the assumption that your dog is spoiled can make an anxious dog worse.
What Makes It Worse
How you handle the rest of your dog's life feeds into this. A 2018 study in PLOS ONE surveyed 1,564 dog owners and found modest associations between willingness to use forceful training methods and a range of behaviour problems. Separation problems were among them: the odds rose by about three quarters for every one-point increase in that willingness score.
The authors caution that the direction of causation is unresolved, and a dog already destroying the house plausibly provokes harsher handling. Even setting the arrow aside, punishing a dog for what it did while you were out achieves nothing useful. The behaviour happened hours ago in a state of distress, and your dog cannot connect your anger now to the door frame then.
The method principles behind all of this sit in our guide to dog training in India. If your dog also barks when left, that overlaps with a separate problem worth reading about in how to stop dog barking, particularly once neighbours have started complaining.
Where to Start
Find out which problem you have. Record your dog when you leave. Look at whether the distress starts immediately or builds, whether it focuses on the exit point, and whether the dog settles at all. That footage is also the single most useful thing you can hand a vet or a behaviourist.
Rule out the physical. Wetting indoors can have medical causes, and so can restlessness and vocalising at night. A dog whose behaviour has changed recently deserves a health check before a training plan.
Stop the rehearsal while you work. Every episode of full-blown panic makes the next one more likely. If that means a neighbour, a family member or daycare covers the hours you are out for a few weeks, that is the treatment working.
Build up from a duration your dog can already handle. If your dog is fine for forty seconds and falls apart at two minutes, you start at thirty seconds.
Uncouple the cues. Pick up your keys and sit down. Put on your shoes and make tea. Do it often enough that the cue stops predicting anything.
Get help early. This responds better to structured work than to improvisation. Look for someone whose work centres on fear and frustration, not on obedience drills, and take any question about medication to a vet who has examined your dog. You can find a vet near you on PetMap.
Dogs that struggle alone are often fearful in other contexts too, and fearfulness had the strongest association with aggression of anything measured in a Finnish study of over 9,000 purebred dogs. If your dog is showing both, read dog aggression, causes and training alongside this.
Frequently asked questions
How do I know it is separation anxiety and not boredom?
You may not be able to tell without footage. The Frontiers research identifies boredom-related problems as one of four distinct groups within this category, so both answers can be correct for different dogs. A bored dog usually settles eventually and the destruction looks exploratory. A panicking dog focuses on exits and does not settle.
Should I get a second dog to keep the first company?
Do not do it as a treatment. The research distinguishes between distress at being alone and distress at losing a specific attachment figure, and a second dog only addresses one of those. It also leaves you with two dogs to work with if it does not help.
Is crate training the answer?
For some dogs a crate becomes a safe place, and for others it adds confinement panic to separation panic. If your dog is already distressed by being shut in, a crate makes things worse. Introduce it slowly and separately from any departure, or skip it.
How long does it take to fix?
Recovery takes longer than most people expect, and the timeline depends on which of the four sub-types you are dealing with. Measure progress in the length of absence your dog handles calmly rather than in whether the behaviour has stopped altogether.
Sources
- de Assis LS, Matos R, Pike TW, Burman OHP, Mills DS (2020). Developing Diagnostic Frameworks in Veterinary Behavioral Medicine: Disambiguating Separation Related Problems in Dogs. Frontiers in Veterinary Science 6:499
- Dodman NH, Brown DC, Serpell JA (2018). Associations between owner personality and psychological status and the prevalence of canine behavior problems. PLOS ONE 13(2): e0192846
- Mikkola S, Salonen M, Puurunen J, Hakanen E, Sulkama S, Araujo C, Lohi H (2021). Aggressive behaviour is affected by demographic, environmental and behavioural factors in purebred dogs. Scientific Reports 11, 9433
