Almost every single person or family that has a dog can attest to the anguish their dog goes through when they are not home.
It’s incredible.
Dogs love their families so much that when we are not around, it appears that they experience some form of depression.
It’s nothing new. Families with dogs can easily attest to the fact that there is never a time that a dog loves when their family is gone, even if it’s only for a few hours.
Before I explain how to keep your dog feeling comfortable when you go out, first let me explain the psychology behind a dogs feelings which will shed some light on why they look depressed when we’re on our way out the door.
A summary of the ways you can reduce the stress on your dog when you’re not home:
- set up a home camera (to watch them and get ideas about their behaviour)
- Leave treats in random places in your home
- Walk your dog regularly
- Leave the TV on
- Pay for a regular visitor
- Leave and return at regular intervals
Dog Psychology
As every dog owner knows, dogs consider us to be their family – and we are. They consider us, and themselves to be a part of the “pack”.
What do packs of dogs do? They go out hunting and sniffing for food.
What do dogs think we’re doing when we go out? They have no idea that we’re going to the mall or work, or school or our friend’s houses, or the local store. They think we’re going out hunting and running, and they want to be included – naturally.
Being left out of “the hunt” each and every day can easily play on a dog’s emotions.
It becomes worse for your dog if while you were out you ate some food too.
When you come home you’ll notice your dog always comes close to your face and sniffs you. What they’re doing is sniffing your mouth area to see what food you ate. Once they discover you did eat, and did eat without them, that further makes them feel left out.
Dog have an amazing sense of smell so if you had a ham sandwich or steak while you were out, they know it and they feel like you left them out of the fun. How sad.
What’s worse is that if you were out on “the hunt” and didn’t bring anything home for them, that’s just going to make them feel worse.
So what can you do to alleviate some of the stress involved with your dog being left alone?
There really isn’t much.
Recent studies showed that dogs prefer their owners over other dogs or other animals in a home.
Another study showed that dogs will prefer their owners over toys or treats.
Even though our pups are obsessed with us (for good reason – we raise them from when they were babies) there are very small ways we can keep them happy when we’re gone.
Remember though that generally speaking, nothing we try is going to work. They are always going to experience depression when we’re gone but there are a few things we can do.
Read on.
Set up a home camera
If we set up a security camera system in our home we can alleviate some of our own stress by watching your pup throughout the day to ensure they are OK. This helps a lot because as dog owners we get to see if our pup is stressing out or relaxing.
Dogs do sleep for most of the day but every waking moment involves them hoping and praying you get home quickly.
But don’t be fooled. Even if your camera has two-way voice, that’s not going to help your puppy. They may recognize your voice (may) but the camera doesn’t smell like you, look like you or walk like you. They know the difference.
A security camera can let you watch your dog, but that’s more about helping you feel secure that your dog is ok being home alone.
Not only can a camera help you better understand your dog’s behaviour, but your dog can alert you to danger too while you’re away.
Leave treats in random places in your home
This is probably the best tactic and I’ll tell you why.
Get your dogs hunting when they’re alone at home.
Dogs have an amazing sense of smell. Some say they can smell things up to 300 more times stronger than the average human.
If you hide treats in various nooks and crannies of your home, you can actually give your pup something to do while you’re out.
If you’re crafty about it, you can leave treats in semi-hard-to-reach places which will force them to work a bit at getting access to them.
Caveat: do not directly give your dog treats right before you leave the house. Eventually they will associate treats with you leaving, and the mental mix-up is not going to be good for them.
If you can’t leave treats in various parts of your home for them to search out, don’t leave anything at all. We don’t want them to associate your lack of presence with treats. You can easily see why yourself.
Walk your dog regularly
Don’t be lazy. Get out and walk your dog at least twice a day, even three times a day.
Unless its excruciatingly cold out, make sure to give them a long walk and let them sniff around a lot too.
If you walk your dog regularly, they will feel less left-out of “the hunt” that we go on when we leave for work etc.
The more time you spend outside with your dog, the more they’ll feel like they are a part of the family.
As humans we leave our homes on average about 6 times a day. If they can come out with us a few times that will mitigate their feelings of being left out.
Leave the TV on
Pets don’t actually watch TV but background noise from a TV can make the very boring hours alone more interesting and distract them from their alone time.
If they hear a door bell on TV, that will get them up and about barking at the door.
If they hear another dog bark, that could also get them barking, trying to communicate.
All these little distraction-moments help your dog endure the long hours alone and if you’ve got your camera set up, you’ll be able to see it all in real time, or get alerts when certain events happen.
Pay for a regular visitor
If you do your research and know how to wheel-and-deal, you can find a nice person to visit your pup a few times a week.
If you break up the alone time with random visits by another person you can substantially reduce their stress, especially if that person brings a treat with them.
The procedure can be as simple as this: pay someone (friend, family or service) to visit your pup for at least 15 minutes.
Instruct them to pet and play with your dog for 3 minutes, take them out for a pee, and then give them a treat to chew on when they come back in.
Have the sitter sit with your dog for at least 10 minutes while your dog is chewing his/her treat and then leave when your dog is blissfully chewing their treat.
This will break up the alone time your dog has to go through and make it easier for them to be alone.
Another study showed that the longer we are away from our dogs the worse their stress becomes.
Having a regular day-break during the week will reduce the time they are left alone, period.
Leave and return at regular intervals
Dogs (and cats) have a keen sense of time. Any pet own knows their pets can tell when its feeding time, and even talking time.
This tells you that your dog also knows when you’re going to leave and when you’re going to come back and if you behave out of this schedule, it could stress them out.
If you can, try to make that trip to the supermarket after you’ve already gone home and interacted with your dogs. Doing so will contribute to substantiate the predictability of your actions to your dog.
Of course one can’t always follow a set schedule but remember the reason you got your dog in the first place – to take care of it, give it love, affection and a regular lifestyle.
The take home
You can follow some of the points in this article, and try out a few ideas of your own.
Make sure to hare this article with your friends and family members that have dogs too so they can help their dogs feel a bit better about being home alone without you.
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