Hello and welcome to another special episode of your new puppies podcast so this one I am doing

because I have been getting a lot of questions about separation anxiety during COVID-19.

You know, why we're all staying at home.

It's pretty fantastic that we get to spend all this extra time

with our dogs, but I've had listeners and

students and clients reach out who are concerned about their dogs developing

separation anxiety for when things do start to open up and we do start leaving our

homes again and maybe we even have to go back to work.

And it's a valid concern, especially if you have a younger puppy who is just starting to learn how to be separate from you when we all of a sudden all had to be staying at home or maybe you've adopted your puppy or your dog during this time and they've never been alone so you're really not sure how they're going to handle it.

This is not the first time.

I've talked about separation anxiety.

It is very closely linked to crate training.

In fact, I have an entire episode dedicated to how to prevent and treat minor separation

anxiety, and that's episode 22.

So I'm not going to go into a lot of detail that I go into there, I'm just going to talk about the specific things

that you can be doing now to help ease them into you leaving the house and going back to work.

Because I think what's happening, the reason why this is coming up now,

because this has always been an issue for dog owners, especially puppy owners because dogs don't come to us knowing how to be alone.

Every single dog has some form of discomfort with being alone. And because they live in our human world,

we have to teach them how to be alone. And a lot of times, it happens naturally for us, like when we're crate training, when they're

first puppies and we're home with them and we're potty training them, it's really obvious because

a lot of times we can't even leave the room without them like barking and crying and whining.

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