Hello:

I hope you are all having a great week.

I am having a hard time with my 9 month old shelter dog (a 55 lb Shepherd mix). My husband and I have trained him to sleep in his crate and he is fine when we are home. The problem is that when we leave him crated and leave the house. He barks so loudly we can hear him all the way down the block. Today when I came home, he bent the crate door like a pringle & shredded the blanket we had put at the bottom of the crate. We have tried relaxing dog pheromones, playing the radio and giving him toys to play with in the crate. We leave him in the crate for 15mins before we go and 15 mins after we get back & ignore him after he is let out. He clearly has bad separation anxiety, but I am afraid to leave him free in the house alone because we have a cat & I also don't want him to rip the place apart. We have never left in crated during the day for more than 4hours - we crate him for 6-7 hours every night while we sleep (but he doesn't seem to have a problem at night).

My dog is a total velcro dog with me, never wanting to leave my side. I love him very much and I would hate to see him injure himself. My husband recently ordered a Leerburg metal crate - but I was wondering if you had any suggestions about how to ease my Shepherds separation anxiety. It would break my hear if he hurt himself.

Molly Patterson

Bazino the Dog:

To start, are you leaving a well-exercised, tired dog?

Separation anxiety is only compounded with frustrated excess energy, IME.

That would be number one. Then number two for me with adopted dogs (and I just went through this last summer, with a senior guy who SCREAMED.... not barked, but literally screamed when I left) is to start leaving for one minute and coming back, two minutes, etc. I did that for several days. Then I started leaving and hiding outside (yes, all this was very entertaining to the neighbors) and listening for him to scream.

This was summer, and the windows were open, so I would go to the window near the crate and say "No! Oliver, NO!"

He stopped short the first time he heard my voice from outside. Probably in shock.

Then I alternated voice corrections from outside with voice corrections after coming back inside, which I had to do very fast and quietly, because I didn't want him to have stopped, and to get a correction when he wasn't doing it.

Long story short, this worked. (I spent the first couple of weeks having to get a dogsitter for every time I went out for more than a few minutes, but that was because I have neighbors close to me all around; I couldn't just let him scream.)

All that was what worked for the separation anxiety. What works for the destructive behavior (IME) is lots of exercise before he's left.

Thanks for the great advice! I love you idea about the window and will try it soon.

Molly,

My Dutch has severe separation anxiety issues, or used to, and also would destroy crates.

Are you using a plastic Vari Kennel type crate?

How I started re-training the dog to a crate was to use a wire fold kennel. He could see everything going on around him and I had one in the car and one in the house. I did what Connie did as well. He seemed way more comfortable in the wire crate and has transitioned to a plastic crate well.

I also used an aluminum airline crate as well for the "tough love" stage, which did not last too long.

He is much better about it now although I can tell if I left him alone in it for too long as he will be shaking when I go to open the door and he whines low pitched. But we have made progress although it is still ongoing and probably always will be given his background.

It was hard at times, especially the aluminum crate stage, but I stuck to my guns and he is better for it.
I am also fortunate enough to be able to take him to work with me everyday and he has a crate there also.

He now enters his crates when I say "kennel" from about 10 feet away and he will stay in it with the door open until I release him.

Keep us posted on progress.

Ed has also written up a Q&A on Seperation Anxiety here on the main site..

Other than that, the other advice here is very good.