Dealing With Separation Anxiety In Lonely Dogs
Our dogs are pack animals. They’re highly sociable creatures with a genuine need to socialize and interact. Because we humans have done such a bang-up job in domesticating our canine friends, socialization with other dogs isn’t enough for your friend: you are the center of your dog’s world. She needs to spend time with you. Of course, this is sometimes easier said than done. Life, for most of us, is pretty busy, and at times it’s difficult to find genuine pleasure in performing the most basic of caretaking tasks for our dogs. When time is short, responsibility becomes a burden. It’s even worse when added responsibilities or increased demands on our time begin to detract from the quality of the time we do spend with our dogs. If other stresses are weighing heavily on your mind, everyday pleasures with your dog can morph from a joy into a headache – the half-hour walk after work is just one more thing to get through, rather than an opportunity for you both to unwind and spend some time together in mutual, tacit admiration of the natural world. Whether we like it or not, the lifestyles that we choose (to a certain extent, anyway) to put ourselves through – a general dearth of time, moderate to high stress levels, job anxiety, shifting personal commitments – affect our dogs as well as ourselves. Sensitive pooches can become so negatively impacted by the less-than-positive frame of mind held by their owners that they themselves become depressed and anxious. Other, more well-adjusted dogs suffer through isolation: when obligations are pressing, the twice-daily dog walk can be the easiest thing to relegate to the back of the line (your dog can hardly raise his voice in outrage, can he?).