Nobody teaches a dog how to be alone

We teach dogs to sit. We teach them to come back, to walk on a leash, to wait at the door. Then we leave them alone for eight hours a day — the single thing they spend the most time doing — having never once taught them how.

I did this. Bettle came home during a stretch when I was working from the kitchen table, and for four months he was never alone for more than ten minutes. Then I went back to the office and was genuinely baffled that this was a problem.

First: film it

Before anything else, find out what actually happens. Prop a phone on a shelf, hit record, and go and stand outside for fifteen minutes.

Almost nobody has done this, and it's the only thing that tells you which problem you have. It also, quite often, delivers the good news that your dog sighs, turns round twice and sleeps — and that the neighbor's complaint was about a different dog.

Boredom or panic?

These look superficially similar and need completely opposite responses, so it's worth being sure.

Refusing food is the one I'd weight most heavily. A dog who won't touch a filled toy the moment you're gone isn't bored.

If it's boredom

This is the easy one, and it's mostly logistics.

• Walk before you leave, not after. A dog who has just done twenty minutes of sniffing is a dog who wants to sleep. The slow kind of walk works better here than the fast kind.
• Leave them something to do that takes real time — a portion of breakfast in a puzzle feeder or scattered in a cardboard box rather than served in a bowl.
• Give them a spot. Somewhere they choose, that doesn't get disturbed, ideally where they can see the door without being at it.

If it's panic

Then it isn't naughtiness and it isn't spite, and it won't be fixed by any amount of tiring them out. It's an anxiety disorder, and it responds to the things anxiety disorders respond to.

Do not let them cry it out. This is the instinct — they'll get used to it — and it is the one approach that reliably makes things worse. Every long absence spent in panic teaches the dog that being left is exactly as bad as they thought.

The method is dull and it works:

1. Find the number. How long can you be gone before distress starts? Ten seconds is a perfectly normal starting point. That's your baseline, not your failure.
2. Work below it. Leave for less than that. Come back before anything goes wrong. Repeat, a lot. You're building a track record of departures that ended fine.
3. Break the cues. Pick up your keys and sit down. Put your shoes on and make coffee. Open the door and close it. Do this dozens of times until the keys stop meaning anything.
4. Keep leaving and coming home boring. No long goodbyes, no enormous reunions. You want the door to be unremarkable.
5. Add time in small pieces and expect to go backwards on some days. That's normal.

This is the one place a gadget genuinely earns its keep. Steps 1, 2 and 5 all depend on knowing, to the second, when distress starts — and on getting back through the door before it does. A phone propped on a shelf tells you afterwards. A pet camera with a live feed you can watch from the car — a Petcube Cam is the one I'd look at first, but any camera you can watch live from outside the house does the job — tells you while you're still on the porch, which is the whole difference between a departure that ended fine and one that taught your dog the opposite. Skip the two-way talk feature for this: a disembodied voice from the ceiling tends to wind an anxious dog up rather than settle them.

Disclosure: that's an affiliate link. If you buy through it I earn a small commission at no extra cost to you. The camera is here because the method needs a live view, not because it pays — a phone and a patient friend on the porch work too. How affiliate links work on this site.

Progress here isn't measured in hours. It's measured in the longest absence you can do without your dog being frightened — and that number only goes up if you stop overshooting it.

Two more things. Get your vet involved: for genuine separation anxiety, medication alongside the training is a legitimate, evidence-supported option, not an admission of defeat — you're trying to lower the panic enough for the dog to be able to learn. And if you're stuck, a qualified behaviorist working on referral will get you further in a month than a year of internet advice, mine very much included.

The exception worth knowing

If an adult dog who has always been fine alone suddenly isn't, treat that as a medical question first. New clinginess and new night-time distress can come from pain, from failing hearing or sight, or from the early stages of cognitive decline. Training a symptom is a waste of everyone's time.

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The thing I'd tell myself four months in: alone time is a skill, it needs practicing while everything is calm, and ten boring minutes a day of leaving and coming back is worth more than any gadget you can buy.

Film them first, though. You may find there's nothing to fix.