Positively | Victoria Stilwell | Forum

I wanted to come back to this forum and post to say that our dog's separation anxiety, which began last year around this time when he was about 6 months old, is basically non-existent now. I remember when I was so overwhelmed with the process and feeling so hopeless our dog would ever get over it .....

One more tactic that's been helpful that I don't think I've mentioned on here. We've been training Leo to do the "find it" command by hiding kibbles all over the place. Now that he knows that well, I will often send him outside before I need to leave for somewhere. While he's out, I hide k...

Wanted to provide another update of our progress with Leo's separation anxiety. We are now able to leave him (either my husband and I both, or one of us separately) for a much longer time - we've been consistently doing between 25 and 45 minutes. The most important thing we've still found to be true...

Back with an update. We made it through the holidays! Lucky for us we were able to bring Leo along to family parties, etc. and avoid leaving him at home. We didn't do much training or fake leaves over the last week or so due to all the festivities going on, but we're back at it now. We decided to bu...

New record set today of leaving for five minutes. I'm sure I could have waited longer but didn't want to push it since our previous record was right around three minutes. When I came back inside he was laying down, actually not even facing the door. He turned to look when I came in the door but went...

Just another update here and some observations. Hope the frequent updates aren't annoying - I'm partially hoping the detail will help others who are going through the same thing and partially hoping making frequent updates of our progress will help us stay motivated. Anyway, our SA progress is movin...

Thanks for the encouragement, JudyN! Certainly funny about dogs recognizing the littlest cues ... I realized after a few times that our pup would check the kitchen table to see if my cell phone was still there when I was putting my coat on and getting ready to do a fake leave. He obviously knows I p...

Back to report on our progress. After a few weeks we seem to be going in the right direction though I can see why so many people give up on this process. It is sure tedious and requires some serious dedication. We read "Don't Leave Me" by Nicole Wilde and got some more ideas and informatio...

Thank you so much for this post - my husband and I are currently starting a training program to help our pup through his separation anxiety. Our dog is almost 7 months, a rescue we've had since he was 2 months. He's a lab mix, maybe with some Great Pyrenees in him, not sure what else. We were using ...