A dog who cannot be left alone

In a distressed dog the peak is not at the third hour, it is in the twenty to forty minutes after you leave. Panting, drooling, raised heart rate, an inability to settle. Many then wear themselves out and end up asleep, which gives their owner the reassuring impression that all went well.

That is why a recording of the first thirty minutes is worth more than anything you can work out on your way back in.

Vocalising within the half hour after you leave, in bursts rather than continuously. Damage on a way out, a door, a frame, a handle, a window, rather than on a cushion in the middle of the room. And how long it takes them to settle when you come home without saying anything.

A shredded cushion in the middle of the floor, with no vocalising and no damage to the exits, looks much more like a dog with nothing to do. That is not the same thing, and it is not worked on the same way.

Your dog does not connect your mood to damage done forty minutes earlier, they connect it to your arrival. So you are adding apprehension to the moment of return, in an animal whose problem is already the wait for that return.

The lowered body, the flat ear and the averted gaze that people read as guilt are appeasement postures produced by your attitude right now. They prove nothing about what the dog understood of yesterday.

You never go past the threshold. The threshold is the length of absence at which your dog starts vocalising or stops settling. If that threshold is two minutes, the work starts at a minute and a half, not at ten.

Every absence that produces a vocalisation cancels several days of progress. That is discouraging to read and it is why most programmes fail: they climb too fast because nobody measured the starting point.

In practice that means arranging the absences you cannot avoid differently for the duration of the work. A dog left alone six hours every day will not make progress on graded departures of three minutes.

If your dog injures themselves trying to get out, drools enough to leave marks on the floor, refuses all food while you are gone, or if the behaviour appeared suddenly in a dog who used to cope, book an appointment before starting a programme.

Separation distress is one of the few behaviour subjects where veterinary support genuinely changes how fast things improve. On this one, a training plan on its own is not always the right answer.