Training a Husky Mix to Stay to Help Stop His Separation Anxiety

For this Omaha dog training session with 3 year-old Husky mix Alpine, we teach him to stay to help reduce his Separation Anxiety. His guardians also also asked us to get him to stop pulling on the leash.

When a dog has a case of Separation Anxiety, they go into a panic state when left at home alone. This is usually because the dog thinks it is responsible, i.e. a leader of the humans or is so insecure, it feels incomplete when left alone.

As I mentioned in this session write up for another dog who has separation anxiety, a lack of rules and structure can easily contribute to this dog behavior problem.

I suggested some rules, showed the guardians how to enforce them as well as ways to use positive dog training to help the dog start to see the humans as being the leaders. This will shrink his world and allow him to start to allow his guardians to take the lead in the home.

For dogs with separation anxiety, going from 100% to 0% access with the humans they live with is too much. Dogs need to practice skills and behaviors to be successful with them. Learning to stay home alone absolutely falls into this category.

A great way to help a Alpine practice being home alone is training a dog to stay. The stay also helps a dog develop better self control; a skill set the dog needs to be confident when left home alone.

Teaching a dog to stay isn’t hard, it just takes time and practice. I pulled out some high value treats and demonstrated how to teach a dog to stay.

When a dog learns to stay until released, the human can start practicing having the dog stay while the human leaves the room for progressively longer periods of time. This practice will be crucial when it comes to eliminating Alpine’s separation anxiety.

Increasing Alpine’s exercise before practicing being alone will help with this problem. Since the human’s are somewhat forced to stay home due to the potential for Alpine to destroy things when left alone, I recommended that the guardians try out taking him to dog day care. This will provide great socialization and exercise while also giving the humans the ability

For many dogs, learning to stay alone in another room while the humans are still in the house, combined with shrinking the dog’s world through consistent enforcement of rules and rewarding desired actions and behaviors should eliminate Alpine’s Separation Anxiety. If it does not, we may need to set up a follow up session to introduce additional techniques and exercises to stop it for good.

We finished things up by shooting a roadmap to success video covering all the highlights we covered in this Omaha dog training session.