Puppy panics for a while after we leave the house

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KoratheFrenchie
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Puppy panics for a while after we leave the house

Post by KoratheFrenchie »

I apologize for the long post!

We just brought home our new Frenchie puppy a couple of weeks ago. She and our older adult Frenchie are getting along pretty much swimmingly, every now and then the little one, Ripley, gets the "zoomies" and goes wild and so she drives our adult girl, Kora, crazy but we let them work it out as much as possible and intervene only when Kora has made it clear that she's not interested in playing and Ripley still jumps on her, nips her feet or legs, etc. It takes a few tries sometimes, distracting her with another toy or taking her to another room but she does eventually let Kora alone and play with us/her toys.

When we're home the two of them are always together, they even sleep in the same bed most of the time. But when we leave (so far max we've only left them alone 2/3 hours) we have decided to separate them with a baby gate because we're just not sure what would happen if we were not home to intervene if/when Ripley gets a bug up her butt and doesn't leave Kora alone when Kora has repeatedly lets her know that she's not interested in playing puppy games.

When we leave, the puppy is usually at the gate whining as we leave. We do try to get her to sleep before leaving but sometimes it just isn't feasible. However every time we've come home (after 30 minutes or 3 hours) we have found her asleep in her favorite spot in the bathroom, so we assumed that she got over it pretty quick and settled down. A few times we've waited and listened at the front door and the whining stopped within a few minutes, or so it seemed.

We bought a camera which we can monitor from our cellphones and out of curiosity decided to try it today, I had to leave them for about 40 minutes to go on an errand and figured it would be a good chance to test it out.

The scene was heartbreaking... Ripley went very quickly from whining/whimpering to full on wailing in a few minutes and spent 15 minutes pacing, howling, whining, jumping and biting at the gate, and basically just crying nonstop. This wasn't her usual "I want up on the bed" cry, it was a very upset sad/angry howl. Had I been able to turn around and go back home immediately I would have, but by the time I was able to turn around, 15 minutes had passed and she all of a sudden just settled herself down and went to sleep in her spot.

My questions are:
- is this normal puppy behavior?
- is 15 minutes too long to let her "cry it out"? She seemed and sounded desperate!
- how can we avoid this getting worse instead of better? My fear is that she will have these bad experiences and that it will take her longer and longer to settle in, rather than her getting slowly more comfortable being left alone. What can I do to teach her that she's okay being left along but at the same time that crying doesn't mean that the gate will be opened or we will come home.
- are we wrong to separate the two? I do think that if they were together, Ripley would be calmer and probably wouldn't have such a hard time, but I also don't want to risk a fight when we're not home. I honestly don't think that Kora would hurt Ripley, but Ripley is not always the best at taking a hint, she thinks Kora wants to play and Kora has her limits. So far she hasn't done anything to hurt the puppy, but she does growl and bark at her when she's being a total pest.

We are going to try leaving them together tomorrow and just going outside so we can see what they do together and can come right back in if necessary. I want to see if Ripley has the same reaction when we leave or if she just doesn't like being confined behind the gate (sometimes when we clean we'll put her on the other side of the gate for a few minutes and she does whimper and cry and pout a little but nothing awful, just expressing her displeasure for being on the wrong side of the gate. Before we let her back out, she has to sit (she already knows this command) and stop whining for 5 seconds, and then the gate opens, so she doesn't learn that whining means open gate.

Any advice or exercises we can do to avoid her turning into a separation anxiety mess would be so incredibly appreciated! I guess the good thing is that she did settle down on her own and stayed settled for the rest of the time I was out?
JudyN
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Re: Puppy panics for a while after we leave the house

Post by JudyN »

It's difficult to say if she would gradually improve or gradually get worse if you carry on leaving her, but there is a definite chance she would get worse.

Is it possible to avoid leaving her alone at all for a while? Then you can work within her comfort zone which is the most reliable way of getting her to be happy when left.

I think it would be risky to leave the two of them together even if she did settle down better... she could pester Kora the whole time and even if Kora didn't finally snap, literally, it wouldn't be fair on her. I would start off giving Ripley time alone practice while you are there. Make sure she's got somewhere nice to rest or play behind the stairgate and put her there, at a time when she's relatively settled, for a short time. Then it's a case of building up the time she's on her own for, and then getting her used to you leaving the house. There's an article on separation anxiety here viewtopic.php?f=20&t=20143 that goes into a lot more detail.

Hope that helps :D
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Nettle
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Re: Puppy panics for a while after we leave the house

Post by Nettle »

I agree - don't leave them together. Too risky, and very unpleasant for your older dog.
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emmabeth
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Re: Puppy panics for a while after we leave the house

Post by emmabeth »

I now (somehow by complete accident) specialise in Separation Anxiety, it is pretty much all I do now..

It is normal for a puppy to experience severe anxiety on being left by the primary care giver (you!). That is normal up to about 9 months of age, so I wouldn't recommend a program of Desensitization and Counter Conditioning just yet..

Simply (ha! because it isn't of course) - don't leave the puppy for so long that she experiences ANY anxiety at this stage.

Build her confidence, build her repertoire of learned behaviours, teach her to cope with frustration (ie, impulse control, you have to wait for a second before you can have/do/etc) and do all this at HER pace, as SHE is ready to do it...

As she matures and learns, you teach her it's ok to stay on a mat whilst you move around the room or leave the room, it's ok to stay on a mat behind a gate whilst you move around a room and leave the room and...... go upstairs... or out the door..... and so on, within her capacity to handle this.

I know it sounds horrifically difficult and limiting to not be able to leave the puppy AT ALL at the minute and for the foreseeable (a few months in all likelyhood), the reality is this.

Right now her behaviour is normal, right now getting someone in to look after her, or taking her to a friend or neighbour, is SO much easier because she's a cute puppy. Everyone also understands, puppy = baby, babies can't be left, that's normal, even non-doggy people understand this.

In 10 months time, her behaviour won't be normal, it is likely to be significantly worse, and she will be an adult looking dog (even if we all know she is still a baby just a slightly older one), you won't get the offers of help or the willingness, it will cost you a lot of money and, do not underestimate the effects of peer pressure and general lack of empathy from people who think 'its a dog, why can't you just leave her'...

To fix full blown SA in an adult dog, you generally need the services of a professional and unlike pretty much any other dog problem, that service works very differently. It's a DAILY contact session, setting criteria for training sessions each day, reviewing videos and setting new ones for hte next day and so on. As you can imagine, having daily sessions with a behaviourist is not cheap!

So a few months of not being able to leave the puppy alone is a significantly easier thing than fixing SA in an adult dog, in pretty much every respect.
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KoratheFrenchie
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Re: Puppy panics for a while after we leave the house

Post by KoratheFrenchie »

Thank you all for this helpful information.

Yesterday I did not leave her at all, and worked with her on staying behind the gate for a few minutes time while I did things without her. I tried a few times to go out of her line of sight, but she would get increasingly more agitated. The problem is that she doesn't stop crying long enough for me to come back and reward her for calming down. So in order to avoid escalations and full blown panicking which seem counter productive, after a few minutes of relatively mild whimpering I would return to the gate and stand there and only when she stopped whining (because she could see me) I would reach over the gate and pet her. Every time she started to whine again I removed my hand and she quickly learned to be quiet and settle if she wanted to be pet. I had her fall asleep on one side of the gate with me on the other, and the other times when she fell asleep in other places in the apartment, I would carry her to her spot behind the gate (with the gate open) so that she gets used to sleeping in there without us.

This morning we had to leave her alone for 20 minutes (we only have one car and my partner drove me to work), and she did not panic at all. She whined a once or twice and then went to her spot and slept, got up and ate a bit, and went back to sleep.

I am hopeful that with the right training we can avoid an adult dog with SA. Unfortunately we don't have the ability to not leave her alone AT ALL but we are lucky that for the next few months, the longest we will need to leave her is max 30-40 minutes every other day or so.

We will keep monitoring her via video and I'm sure I'll be back here for more advice, but hopefully this is a good sign that she's not already got panic-mode on automatic when we leave. I guess it just depends on her mood whether she's okay with us going or not? Hopefully scenes like the one I wrote about in my first post are the exception and not the rule.

Thanks again to all of you!
KoratheFrenchie
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Re: Puppy panics for a while after we leave the house

Post by KoratheFrenchie »

So I think we've figured out that she has this reaction when I leave. When my partner leaves she's fine, but when she sees me leave she gets agitated. If my partner is home she is calms down very quickly but if I am the last to leave it turns into the panic party I wrote about in my first post.

I have spent less time with the puppy because I've been working full time. Is it possible it is because she knows that when I leave I usually stay gone longer? The ony other difference is that I've spent more time working on commands with her (come, sit and down are pretty consistent, we've just started with leave it but she's a bulldog with a very persistent will 😂), but other than that we do things the same - same routine, same way of leaving the house.

Any training tips for us to work on this together so that when I leave she has the same reaction as when my partner leaves? Tonight when I get home I'm going to have my partner sit behind the gate with her and reward her while I exit and enter the apartment repeatedly. Anything else we can/should do?
KoratheFrenchie
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Re: Puppy panics for a while after we leave the house

Post by KoratheFrenchie »

Just wanted to update and say that after a few other panic attacks (when both myself and my partner left her, so in the end that wasn't it either), we decided to try leaving the two dogs together. We did so over a weekend where we did not have any plans and were able to leave them for shorter and then gradually longer periods together while going to the neighbors' apartment and could return in 15 seconds if needed. Happy to report that the puppy does not pester Kora while they are alone together, the most bothersome she might be is going to lay with Kora in her bed, or crawling on her, but if Kora doesn't want to snuggle she gets up and goes to the other bed, and puppy does not follow. No more panic moments, no more crying when we leave, if the puppy wakes, she will play quietly while Kora sleeps and then goes back to sleep near Kora.

Puppy just got her final booster yesterday so we are looking forward to taking her for walks outside to wear her out but in the end, for our two dogs, they are better off together than apart. Our vet suggests that since the puppy could see Kora from her side of the baby gate, that also may have added to her anxiety and panic, because she could see Kora but not go to her. So while it may not be ideal for everyone, in this case it helped tremendously to be able to leave the two together.
JudyN
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Re: Puppy panics for a while after we leave the house

Post by JudyN »

I'm so glad it's worked out for you :D Make sure you stay alert for any signs of grumpiness or anxiety between the two of them as Kora develops into a teenogre. Once she's more settled and doesn't want to play all the time you might also want to work on leaving them separately again in case your older older dog gets less tolerant as she ages.
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KoratheFrenchie
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Re: Puppy panics for a while after we leave the house

Post by KoratheFrenchie »

Kora is the 12 year old :wink: but we will definitely work on leaving the two separate every now and then once we are able to take puppy out for walks and tire her out. Also because Kora, sadly, will not live forever, and we want puppy (her name is Ripley, but I just call her puppy) to be okay with being home alone if and when that horrible day comes. When Ripley is more confident in being away from us we will start working on also leaving her away from Kora for short periods.

Just this weekend for the first time, the puppy went and napped on the balcony all by herself with all three of us (partner, Kora & myself) in the apartment, so she is slowly becoming less "shadow-like" and more independent, but she is still very young so still quite clingy, which is normal I suppose.
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Re: Puppy panics for a while after we leave the house

Post by JudyN »

Oops, sorry about the name mix-up :oops: :lol: Yes, Jasper was very clingy for a long time. They do eventually decide they don't need to follow you everywhere, particularly if they're tired and in the sunny spot on the sofa!
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KoratheFrenchie
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Re: Puppy panics for a while after we leave the house

Post by KoratheFrenchie »

So today we left Ripley alone without Kora for a short time while we took Kora to the vet, and I am happy to report that after only a few minutes of a bit of whining, she settled down and slept. We took her out for a nice long walk before leaving, so she was tired, but she did not panic at all. Small steps, but I think staying with Kora those first few weeks allowed her to realize that nothing bad happens when the humans go away.
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Re: Puppy panics for a while after we leave the house

Post by JudyN »

That's excellent news!
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Re: Puppy panics for a while after we leave the house

Post by Nettle »

That's a BIG step! Well done! :D
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Re: Puppy panics for a while after we leave the house

Post by LovelyLaura »

Reading down through all of those messages, and I was just like, yup, been there and done that (minus the "other" dog). Charlie is now 6 months old and still doesn't get left alone! Most people think I am genuinely mad when I say I can't do X cuz I have Charlie, or when I arrive to collect them with him in the car, having nipped into town on like a 15 minute round trip, but the girls here know all to well what poor Charlie went through as a baby (https://positively.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=4&t=23557), and I would be on here pretty much in tears taking any bit of advice the girls could me that would make life easier. As the girls pointed out for me, Charlie was never going to just "get used to it. We have found a great lady about 20 minutes away who looks after him for us if we need evenings or overnight and he had been going to a local day care if I needed to messages during the day, and totally at his own pace in the house, he will stay in the smaller fenced of part of our garden (he likes to watch/catch moths in the darkness) with the patio doors closed (but he can see me on the far side of the table), or he will lie on one of his various beds or blankets in another room from us. He was neutered there 2 days ago and we are (not) loving life in the cone, where I have to watch him like a hawk as he can reach past the cone and get his stitches! But once we get that all clear from that, it will be back to actual training again, as we had gotten very lazy recently! :oops:
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