Treating Separation Anxiety in Dogs

Separation distress can severely reduce the quality of life for both you and your dog and is a common rationale for owners abandoning dogs at shelters.

Ethologists believe separation anxiety is caused or exacerbated by congenital factors, excessive isolation from the dam or littermates during early developmental periods, a lack of preparatory isolation from the dam or littermates during early developmental periods, and traumatic experiences that occur when a predisposed dog is isolated and/or confined, or any combination of the preceding. In addition, rescue dogs, dogs exhibiting other forms of anxious or phobic behavior, and excessively “clingy” dogs are more predisposed toward developing separation distress behavior. To a lesser degree, dogs owned by clingy or cloying owners and dogs that lack training or structure are also more predisposed toward developing separation distress behavior.

II. Solutions

Separation anxiety/distress can be a difficult behavior to resolve. Nevertheless, there are solutions that often provide significant improvement. To maximize effectiveness, the solutions need to be implemented conjunctively, which provides synergies that raise the probability of successful behavior modification. The goal of the solutions is to increase predictability where a lack of predictability creates an anxious emotional state, to create unpredictability where predictability creates an anxious emotional state, to create diversionary and displacement behaviors that reduce the severity of the anxious behavior and/or the dog’s focus on the owner’s departure, and to psychologically, physically, and physiologically create a state of relaxation.