Well hello there and welcome to another episode of the Fixing Separation Anxiety Podcast.
I'm your host Julie Naismith and this week I'm going to be talking about the solutions that you
hear people rave about, the ones that they swear by as having been the solution that got their dog
over separation anxiety, but solutions which in fact may not be working either for them
or most especially for their dog.
Hello and welcome to the Be Right Back Separation Anxiety Podcast. Hi I'm Julie Naismith,
dog trainer, author and full-on separation anxiety geek. I've helped thousands of dogs overcome
separation anxiety with my books, my online programs, my trainer certification and my
separation anxiety training app and this podcast is all about sharing my tips and
tricks to help you teach your dog how to be happy at home alone too.
People write about this stuff all the time whether that's in the Facebook group that I run,
on social media where I see comments or in blogs. I hear it all the time, this thing,
this process, this tool, this whatever, this works for my dog and quite often I feel really
sad when I hear that phrase because what works for us doesn't always work for our dogs and I
don't think we're taking a dog-centric enough approach to treating separation anxiety.
Now let's have a look at the few or a few of the things that I'm often hearing in quotes,
air quotes here, work. The first one is bark collars. I almost hate even to go there because
there's just something to me about this whole notion of fixing a fear-based condition,
separation anxiety, with something that induces fear and pain, a shock collar. There's just
something about that that I just, it leaves me aghast. I just think why can't people wrap
their heads around this? You cannot fix fear with fear. So what does a bark collar actually do and
why does it, air quotes again, work or seem to work? Well as I said a bark collar induces fear,
it does that through giving your dog an electric shock. The electric shock is unpleasant, it's
painful and the dog decides to stop whatever it was doing, possibly, possibly stop, I'll come on
to why it might not stop, the dog decides to stop what it was doing because the shock was so horrible.
So you may hear people say, I put a shock collar on my dog while I was out and the barking stopped.
People don't normally say shock collar, they will say bark collar. Sounds cozier, doesn't it? Sounds
less scary. So I put this bark collar on my dog and the dog stopped barking. If that happened,
then the dog was frightened into suppressing its behaviour. If a bark collar stops a dog
vocalising while you're out, it is not changing how your dog feels about being home alone,
it's just causing the dog to suppress the behaviour that it thinks might be causing the shock.
Now oftentimes the shock won't even stop the barking, so the dog gets a shock but doesn't
understand why it's getting a shock, it doesn't connect it with the barking and so continues
barking. Quite often it's not even working to suppress the behaviour, so the dog's getting a
shock, it doesn't know why, it doesn't connect it with the barking, it keeps barking, it keeps
getting shocked. So kind of worst of all worlds, not only does the barking not suppress the unwanted
behaviour but it's also inducing more fear in your dog. And here's the thing, what if you put a
shock collar on your dog every time you go out? Is your dog going to feel better or worse about you
going out? It's going to feel worse, it's going to feel way worse. It's potentially going to feel
even more frightened about being home alone because when it's home alone it gets a painful electric
shock. So bark collars definitely don't work, they don't work for you, they don't work for your dog.
The next thing that I hear works, works for my dog would be crates, indestructible crates in
particular or some manufacturers call them anxiety crates. I can't get my head around that.
Anxiety crates for a dog who hates being confined. Yeah actually anxiety crate might be the right
term because if your dog is crate-phobic and you put it in an indestructible crate that it cannot
escape, you will increase its anxiety. So maybe anxiety crate is actually a really good term for
these crates. Crates don't get dogs over separation anxiety, crates don't make dogs feel better about
being home alone. At the very best crates will, just like bark collars, stop the problem behaviour,
maybe suppress the behaviour, stop the things that you're concerned about like
pooping and peeing and chewing and destroying. So at best you might get that result.
The problem you face though is that if your dog is afraid of being in a crate, which lots of
separation anxiety dogs are, you're going out, you're leaving your dog home alone which is
frightened of anyway, then you're putting your dog in a crate from which it can't escape and now you've
increased the dog's fear of being left home alone. So you create a problem with a crate,
it feels like you're fixing it in that moment when you come home and there's no destruction,
it feels like you're fixing it. But you are not creating a dog who feels happy home alone
and I've seen it time and time again. I've seen dogs destroy themselves in indestructible crates,
I've seen dogs who get a condition that lasts way longer than it needs to by being shut with
their fear into an indestructible crate. But of course you need to stop the destruction and I'll
come on to later in this podcast how you can do that because I totally understand. Like the barking,
you need to stop the barking, you don't want to be kicked out of your home. Okay one more thing
that I hear people talk about as working and that's anti-chew sprays. Now if you don't know
what these are, these are sprays that you would put on anything that you don't want your dog to
get to, you don't want your dog to chew or to destroy. So maybe that's the door, maybe it's
furniture legs or whatever. People will say I use an anti-chew spray and it stopped my dog chewing.
It worked to stop my dog chewing. Sprays are no different in the way they work from bark collars.
The goal of a spray is to be so disgusting that your dog will not go near the object that the
spray has been used on. It's a stomach turning response from your dog. It would be like me,
and sorry this is going to be gross, but it would be like me pouring vomit over your dinner to make
you diet. You would not want to eat if I did that to your evening meal. This is what a spray does.
So it's not nice, it's not kind, it is not humane, it is not working for your dog. It may temporarily
offer you some relief but it is not working for your dog and most likely it won't work for you
in the longer term. That's the irony of all of these so-called solutions that work. They might
temporarily hide the problem but they do nothing more than suppress it. So they aren't actually
working for you either and more often than not, particularly bark collars and indestructible crates,
they make things worse. They can make a dog more anxious about being home alone. But I get why they
are so popular. The marketing is slick, they promise quick fixes and outside looking in, if
you do not understand what's going on with these devices, these crates work. But there is no quick
fix for separation anxiety. It does not exist and I know that's bad news because you're getting
letters from neighbours, you're coming home to a house that looks like a murder scene. I get it
but there isn't a quick fix. If there was, I would tell you about it, I promise. Searching for an
immediate fix, all that does is it results in you losing time and money and a tonne of emotional
energy gets lost. Most of the time these quick fixes work by luck. They are acting on the problem
symptoms, they are not changing the behaviour underlying those symptoms. So what do you need
to do? Well instead of trying to stop the symptoms of your dog's panic, whether your dog barks, chews,
defecates, whatever your dog's particular thing is, instead of trying to stop that outward sign of
panic, you need to stop your dog from panicking in the first place and then you need to teach your
dog that being home alone isn't scary. The two big things therefore that you need to get onto
one, you do have to stop leaving your dog, especially if you've got neighbours complaining,
especially if your dog's destroying your house.
If you stop leaving your dog today you are going to stop the problem barking, you are going to
stop the chewing, the destroying, the soiling or whatever it is your dog's doing. Now I know it
seems ridiculous that people say to you, you need to stop leaving your dog because if you could do
that separation anxiety wouldn't be a problem would it? And I remember feeling that way. If
you're feeling crestfallen or angry or frustrated or you want to cry, I remember feeling that way
too. And I remember saying I can't do it, I just cannot find a way to do it. We lived in a really
small town, there was no daycare, the nearest daycare was in the city, 100 kilometres away,
70 miles away, so there were no options. But equally I had no option but to find a way
not to leave my dog. So I put an advert in the local online classifieds and found some wonderful
people who were more than happy to come and spend a few hours lounging with my fearful dog,
taking him out for a walk if he wanted or frankly just sitting on the sofa with him. It always
seems impossible until it's done. Oh I love that Nelson Mandela quote,
it always seems impossible until it's done. And trust me there isn't an owner out there I don't
think who hasn't thought this is impossible, I cannot find a way not to leave him. And sometimes
it seems like there are people who have these amazing unicorn lifestyles, I call them unicorn
lifestyles because they're so imaginary, they almost don't exist, but they have this perfect
lifestyle that's accommodating of a separation anxiety dog and we kind of think that our life
is somehow totally different from that. But I work with so many people in so many difficult
situations who I think there's no way they're going to be able to do this, not leaving their
dog and they do. Even people who are retired or work from home, you might look at them with envy
and think that's fine, that's okay for them. But I don't know about you, I found actually the more
difficult times to get help, it wasn't during the day, it wasn't during the day when people who
work from home have the luxury of having their dog around, it was the stuff like going somewhere on a
Saturday night or popping out on Sunday lunchtime. So people in your similar situation do find ways
to do this even if it seems impossible now. Are you a cold turkey type when it comes to change
or are you an incremental, I like to change bit by bit? Because if you're the latter and what you
can do on this suspending absences thing is you can say, all right, next week I will leave my dog
for one hour less or maybe one day less. Just commit to that much change and then see if you
can eke that up a little bit the next week and so on. So maybe you can't go cold turkey on this,
maybe it's too difficult, complicated, expensive right now but try to leave your dog a little bit
less next week and keep doing that until your dog has company as much as it needs. That's going to
stop the neighbours, stop the disruption but it's also going to set your dog up for training success
and set you up for training success because the second thing you're going to do is use training
to teach your dog that being home alone is fine. And how do we do that? We use sub-threshold
training which means we keep our dogs comfortable, anxiety-free and under threshold while we
gradually expose them to alone time. Usually we start with tiny, tiny amounts, seconds, sometimes
less than seconds, sometimes no seconds, sometimes just opening and closing the door
and we progress as long as our dog is comfortable with what we are doing, as long as our dog
is anxiety-free. So we go at our dog's pace, we don't go too far, we don't go too fast.
And the great thing about this process, not only is it evidence and science-based and tried and
trusted and you can read about success stories either in my Facebook group or my Facebook page
or in my book, it's tried and trusted but it works not just for you, believe me I want this for you,
it works for your dog as well. It's kind, ethical and humane on your dog. So isn't it great to have
a process that works for both you and your dog? Now I'm not going to lie to you, this training is
going to take time and you need to think months and months, yeah I did say months and months,
not even weeks and weeks, but if you are still standing or sitting and you haven't fainted,
if you are not in floods of tears and I hope you're not, if you are not feeling like I just
punched you in the stomach, then keep listening to me. The reason it takes this long is because
you're helping your dog recover from what is essentially a deep psychological disorder,
deep psychological trauma and that kind of change, whether that's changing a person who's gone
through a terrible sequence of events or changing a dog, helping a dog to change, that kind of change
is a long haul process. Brains don't change very easily. We're not teaching our dogs to sit,
we're helping them get over trauma. That's why it takes as long as it takes and if we rush it,
we don't make progress. You have to go slow to go fast with separation anxiety training.
So if you're still with me, let me tell you that I know you can do this, I really know you can.
You wouldn't be on this podcast if you weren't the type of person who can get this done
and I'm here to do whatever I can to help you. There's lots of ways I can do that,
you could go and get my book which has how to train, it has how to survive separation anxiety,
you can find that on Amazon, you can dive into the free Facebook group Dog Separation Anxiety
Support, join one of my paid programs where, especially in my Separation Anxiety Heroes Club,
people get a ton of attention from me, a ton of time and from one another as they work through
training together and of course I can help you through this podcast. There are so many ways I
can help you. So I need you to tell me, are you in? Are you up for this? Because if you are,
I'm here for you. Okay, I want to say thank you for listening because that's it from me for now
and I am so grateful for you tuning in because I know you've got a ton of options for
listening and I will see you on another podcast very soon. Bye for now.
Thank you so much for listening to this episode of the Be Right Back Separation Anxiety Podcast.
If you want to find out more about how I can help you further, head over to julienaysmith.com.
Meanwhile, if you enjoyed listening today, I would love it if you would head over
to wherever you listen to your podcasts and consider rating my show. Thanks so much,
good luck with that training and bye for now.