American dogs these days

Last Thursday, I attended a free lunch sponsored by one of the drug companies that makes a behavior modification drug (actually it's basically Prozac) for dogs.

(That's right, I got to go to a free lunch this semester! I even convinced my PBL group to take a week off [in my defense, we are way ahead of all the other groups] so that we [I] could go to the lunch.)

The main topic of the lunch was canine separation anxiety, with just a little token reference to the doggie Prozac at the end.

Here's a quick synopsis of separation anxiety, for those of you who are not crazy dog people:

Some dogs are really super attached to their owners. Like, they will follow them around the house constantly, always have to be in the same room as the owner, or in some severe cases they always want to be in physical contact with the owner. They are VERY attuned to their owners' actions and routines. Sometimes we call them "velcro dogs."

You can probably imagine that such dogs get a bit bummed out when their owners leave the house. Okay, "a bit bummed out" is a gross understatement. They can freak out so badly that they tear themselves out of plastic or metal crates, eat couches, pee and poop everywhere, bark and howl, scratch halfway through door frames or eat large quantities of dry wall, and occasionally launch themselves through windows in their desperation to get back to their owners.

You can also probably imagine that such behavior is rather frustrating to the owner, to say the least.

And it's not very easy to fix. The dogs are so closely focused on their owners that they know every step of the owner's morning routine prior to leaving for work. For example, the owner gets up, takes a shower, gets dressed, makes some oatmeal, reads the newspaper, checks their email, packs up their briefcase and laptop, puts away the breakfast dishes, turns off all the lights, grabs their car keys, and heads out the door.

So as soon as the dog figures out that the owner is starting step 1 of maybe a 30-60 minute "getting ready to leave" routine, the dog starts getting wound up. Anxious. Even panicked.

As the morning routine progresses, the dog has half an hour or a full hour of getting itself worked up. By the time the owner is actually ready to leave, the dog can be in a full-blown panic.

There are a bunch of behavior modification and training things you can do to try to basically teach your dog to be independent and enjoy "alone time." The speaker at the lunch, though, offered one suggestion that I hadn't heard before:

She suggested that the owners go through their entire morning routine, letting the dog get itself all worked up. Then right at the moment when they would head out the door, they should go sit down in the living room and watch TV for 10 minutes.

As the speaker put it, "American dogs have learned that when their owners sit down to watch TV, the dog can be pretty confident that the owner won't be going anywhere for awhile."

So the dog figures out the owner is apparently staying around for awhile, and immediately calms down (or at least gets markedly calmer within 10 minutes). At the end of the 10 minutes, the owner stands up and immediately leaves the house, with no fanfare or delay. Yes, the dog is still going to be upset about the owner leaving, but the dog goes straight from "calm" to "owner gone" within a matter of seconds, without an hour of panicking wind-up.

Wonder what other great habits we have taught our pets....