Hello, and welcome to another episode of the Fixing Separation Anxiety Podcast. I'm your
host, Julie Naismith, and I help dogs and owners around the world to overcome separation
anxiety so that you can get your life back on track and your dog can have stress-free
home alone time. Okay, let me ask you a question. Has anybody ever said to you that you're the
problem? Has anybody suggested that you either caused your dog's separation anxiety in the
first place, or what you're doing is making it worse, or you didn't do enough to prevent
it? Well, if that's you, you need to listen to this week's episode, because I'm going
to bust one of the biggest myths of all, that you didn't cause your dog's separation anxiety.
But more importantly than that, I'm going to spend some time talking about what, if
anything, we could, should, and might have done to prevent separation anxiety happening
in the first place.
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.
This week, I'm talking about whether you caused your dog's separation anxiety, and could you
have prevented it? I talk about this topic a lot, particularly that did you cause your
dog's separation anxiety? And honestly, I don't think I can talk about it too often,
because I see your comments, I hear what you're saying, you all feel like it's your fault.
So, I'm just going to keep on banging the drum about the cause of separation anxiety
and your involvement in it, because I don't want you to feel this way.
All right, let's talk about causing and preventing separation anxiety then.
One of the reasons why I wanted to talk about this topic is not only do I see it coming up
all the times in my groups, and I hear my clients talk about it, but the other day,
something happened that made me think, ah, that's interesting, because we don't think
that way with separation anxiety. Let me tell you what it was. I live in the mountains,
it's a beautiful place to live, I'm very lucky. One of the things that we get in the mountains
is a lot of snow. So, a few weeks ago, a couple of weeks ago, we had tons of snow, massive,
massive amount of snow, but we also had weird wet snow. I won't bore you with the details.
Apparently, there are people who know this stuff, they're called snow scientists, but
those sorts of snow conditions cause avalanches. Now, we live near the mountains,
so avalanches are not cool in town. What happens, therefore, is that we get avalanche prevention.
Interestingly, avalanche prevention, and what that involves is bombing. So,
avalanche prevention team drops bombs from a helicopter and the noise
creates an avalanche, but it's controlled, so it's preventing an unexpected avalanche.
And that got me thinking about two things. One, first of all, I expected my dog, Tex, to react
to the avalanche bombs, because about two years ago, he started with thunder phobia
from nowhere. He was five years old, he'd been fine, suddenly started with thunder phobia,
so I was expecting him to react to the bombs, and he didn't, and I was so proud of him.
He started to react to thunder two years ago, I started to respond with some training and some
medication, and it seems to have helped him get through it. So, that was one thing.
And why, what's the connection between Tex's fear of avalanche bombs and, or thunder,
and separation anxiety? Well, no, I've told lots of people about his problems with thunder phobia
and with avalanche bombs and how much better it's getting, but nobody's ever said to me,
well, that's because you, or that's because you didn't. And I just thought, well, wait a minute,
because my separation anxiety owners, my clients get this all the time. Well, your dog's got
separation anxiety because of this, because you did that, or you didn't do this, or you're doing
this, or you didn't do that, or you're not doing that. But with lots of other behavioural problems
that dogs get, we don't get the same grief. Yeah, maybe sometimes people will do a little
bit of blaming us, but for the most part, we accept that dogs get frightened of things.
They get frightened of loud noises, and it's not necessarily because we are a weak leader,
or whatever that means. So, there was that going through my mind, but then there was also this
thing about, you know, really sadly, people do get caught in avalanches, and they can take all
the precautions they like, and they would still get stuck in an avalanche. We don't go around
blaming them. If they've taken all their precautions, we just say, what an unfortunate
turn of events. So, those two things got me thinking, so why do we accuse separation anxiety
owners of causing their dog separation anxiety? Why do we do that over and over again? Dogs fear
things. They just do. They might fear going to the vet, or maybe your dog doesn't like having
its nails done. Maybe it's frightened of clippers. Maybe your dog is frightened of being in the car.
If you say to your family and friends, oh my goodness, he's developed, you know, Roy is about
to have a really crazy fear of being in the car. I don't know what's going on. I don't know what's
happening. Nobody, well, I hope not, I suspect not, nobody is telling you it's because you're
a weak person, or because you gave Roy too much affection, or because you let him go out the door
first. They accept. He's got a fear of the car. But separation anxiety, no, we don't get the same
credit. We don't get the, nobody cuts us the same slack. I don't know why exactly. I don't know why
they blame us so much when my dogs have separation anxiety. Maybe it's because there is that link
between us and our dogs, and it's relationship based, and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. I don't
know why people are so quick to judge, though, when they have no evidence for us causing separation
anxiety in dogs. Quick refresh, what do we know about what causes separation anxiety in dogs?
It can be many things. It could be a change later in life. It could be genetics. We think that's a
really big factor. It could be an early life experience. Maybe your dog had a really bad
experience when it was a puppy. Maybe its mother had a really bad experience when she was carrying.
There can be lots of reasons why dogs develop fear and why they develop separation anxiety,
but the answer is we don't exactly know why. That being said, it doesn't stop anybody from accusing
you of causing your dog separation anxiety, particularly all those armchair experts out
there. Lots of people will tell you that this might not be their first dog. They may have had
a dog before, so if it is relationship based, if it is down to what we are doing, why doesn't
somebody end up, they have 10 dogs in their life, why haven't all 10 dogs got separation anxiety?
It just doesn't make sense. It's not what we're doing. There's more, way more going on. So people
can have 5 dogs and 10 dogs and never act any differently with those dogs, and yet those dogs
don't end up with separation anxiety. But let's then talk about this prevention thing, because I
know that's why you're on, that's why you're listening. How do we prevent problem behaviours
in dogs? Let's start with that generally. So overall, what do we do to prevent problems
developing in dogs? There's three big things that we do. Three things we've got in our toolkit.
First, we socialise. So if you've got a puppy, if you've had a puppy, you'll remember all the
guidance to socialise. What does that mean? It means we safely and cautiously expose our puppies,
our young puppies, to experiences, to the world, in a way that makes them,
that exposes them and gives them the experience of the world, but doesn't scare them. So socialisation
is about safe, controlled exposure to the big, wide world, so that as they get older and their
fear naturally builds, because they go through a period where they don't have any fear, and then
their fear naturally develops. So when that fear naturally develops, they're not suddenly overwhelmed
by things they've never experienced or never encountered before. So we gradually, cautiously,
carefully expose them to the wide world. For example, if you have a dog who, or if you have
a puppy, or any puppy, to prevent a puppy from being frightened of strangers when the puppy gets
to become an adult dog, one of the best things we can do is get that puppy to socialise with
lots of different strange people, people with hats, people with sticks, safely, cautiously,
not throwing them in at the deep end and saying, oh it's fine, he's a puppy, he needs to learn.
That's not socialisation. But that's one of the best things we can do to help prevent a dog
becoming frightened of strangers. So socialisation is just about exposure. Then the next thing we
can do, number two, we can train them. Of course we can, we can train dogs in anticipation of a
problem behaviour developing. So if you have a high energy, bouncy, young dog, then you can train
your dog, even before they start bowling people over at the door, you can train your dog that when
the door opens they go to a mat. So we can train our dogs an alternative behaviour way before the
problem becomes a problem. Just expect that your big bouncy dog is probably going to bowl people
over when they come in. So let's just train them to do another thing when visitors come to the house.
The third thing we can do is we can use what we call management, which is basically we stop a dog
from being able to rehearse the problem behaviour. While we're training our big bouncy dog to go to a
mat when visitors come round, we could, before they really land or get really solid on the going
to mat behaviour, we could use a baby gate or we could pop them in a crate when visitors come
round. It stops them rehearsing the unwanted behaviour. So we've got socialisation, we've
got training and we've got management. Stopping rehearsals is really important. It's as important
as the other factors too. But how do these three things apply to separation anxiety? Well,
first of all, let's socialise our puppies, our young puppies to safe home alone time. So things
like popping out of sight while you're doing the chores at home or you're cooking, closing doors
cautiously and gently on our puppies so that they know we might not always be around. So socialise
them, do natural things that show our puppies that we go, we come back, we go, we come back.
Interestingly, in very young children, we're talking about under twos, nine months to two
years old, kids that age, children that age can develop a form of separation anxiety, which is
what is based on a problem of what we call object permanence. It sounds fancy, but basically all it
means is that when babies develop, they don't know that when things disappear, they haven't
disappeared completely. So just because I can't see mummy anymore doesn't mean to say that mummy
has vanished forever into thin air. We know that just because we can't see something doesn't mean
to say it's gone poof. It just means we can't see it, there's something in the way. So you know that
game of peekaboo? We can teach babies that things go and come back using a game of peekaboo. And
that's a bit what we would do with a young puppy. Very safely, very carefully do some peekaboo type
stuff that shows that when we go, we come back that when things disappear from sight, they haven't
gone forever. And then number two, we can do home alone training. Now this is similar, but it's a
bit more structured. You are going to teach your puppy using a very gradual stepped approach to
alone time, you're going to teach your puppy that it can tolerate being alone. You might start with
out of sight exercises where you gradually build up the time in the house, or you might head
straight for the front door and build up time that way. And if your puppy isn't anxious, it will crack
through home alone training in no time at all. And the third thing we can do is manage absences.
Let's not let our puppies, especially our anxious ones, howl and howl and howl and rehearse the
behaviour that barking and howling is and ends to remain. So let's not let them rehearse
home alone problem behaviours. Let's manage it by keeping them calm, keeping them settled,
keeping them under their threshold if they're getting anxious. Don't just assume that they're
going to be okay. So we can do those three things. If we do all those three things, does it mean we
will end up with a dog who is fine on their own? No, it doesn't. I'm so sorry. I wish I could say
that it was. Anybody who's got a dog who's frightened of strangers or doesn't like going
to the vet anymore will tell you, or not anybody, but some people will tell you they did socialise
their dog. They did take preventative measures to stop that problem behaviour. But some dogs
are just on a trajectory. They are just on a path to end up with that problem behaviour.
And here's the really frustrating thing, especially if you've got a dog with separation anxiety.
Some people don't do any of these things and their dog is fine. Some people do all these
things and their dog isn't fine. And that seems so unfair, doesn't it? But the way I look at it,
it's a bit like if you don't want to get a cold in winter, one of the best things you can do is
wash your hands regularly and especially not touch your face when you've been near somebody
who's sneezing. But washing your hands regularly, they say, the experts tell us, is one of the best
ways we can prevent getting a cold. Does it mean we won't get a cold? No, but we might as well give
it a go. That's how I look at prevention when it comes to separation anxiety. Does it mean your
dog won't get separation anxiety? No, it doesn't. But why wouldn't you give it a chance? Because it
might be the best chance a dog's got of not developing separation anxiety. And even if you
do it and your dog still gets separation anxiety, you haven't failed. It just means your dog was
probably going to get this anyway. So never think it's your fault. Never think you've failed. It
isn't your fault. You didn't cause your dog separation anxiety. But maybe in the future,
there might be a couple of things you could do that may stop a dog from developing it.
Not guaranteed, but worth giving it a chance. Thank you so much for listening to this podcast.
I know you've got a ton of options when it comes to podcasts to listen to. So I really appreciate
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And if you don't just like to listen, but you kind of like to read too, don't forget you can
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with tons of advice on how to train, how to deal with people in your life, who might judge you for
what you do. And also it has links to resources that you can download and use real time in
training. You can grab a copy at Amazon. Alright, that's it from me. I will see you online soon.
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 julienasmith.com. Meanwhile, if you enjoyed listening today, I would love it if you
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Thanks so much. Good luck with that training and bye for now.