A woman shared how she managed to train her dog out of separation anxiety after making one simple change to their routine – but she says you have to stick with it
A woman claims to have successfully trained her dog out of separation anxiety after making one major change to their daily routine. While acknowledging she’s not a dog trainer, she urged people to carry out their own research before implementing her techniques.
On TikTok, Isabel Klee, who is known as @simonsits on the platform, said: “Simon (her dog) went from having terrible separation anxiety to none at all.” She added: “When I first got Simon as a puppy, I had a few instances where I would leave him alone and he would just go absolutely ballistic. I think I made the mistake when I first got him that I would only leave him alone when I was actually going out for a few hours.”
But after witnessing his reaction every time she departed the house, she realised something needed to change to ease her puppy’s distress.
She added: “For a month straight, I had no social obligations and my full attention was on training this dog not to have separation anxiety.
“I would leave my apartment 100 times a day. Every five minutes, I would go, walk out the door, close the door and stand outside for 15 seconds and come back in.”
She explained she would gradually extend the time she spent outside the house to get him accustomed to her being away for longer periods.
When she’d return inside, she wouldn’t greet him straight away.
Instead she would calmly walk past him and interact with him a short time after this. She added: “I trained him to believe me coming home isn’t a big deal. I also train him to believe that I was always going to come back.
“The more that I came and left, he got more desensitised to be doing it and now when I leave the apartment, he barely lifts up his head.”
Commenting on her post, one user said: “Do you put your dog in the crate though? I have two or my dog destroys my house.”
Another user added: “I’ve started crawling out the window so he wouldn’t see me leave out the front door.”
A third user said: “Thank you so much. My dad wants to get rid of my dog because she has separation anxiety and when my mum leaves she destroys a lot of things.”