Natalie

Hi everyone, thank you so much for your lovely replies! Things have been going really well for us the last couple of days, I know that Clomicalm can take 8 weeks to build up within the system but we’ve almost instantly seen amazing results, probably also down to the amount of desensitisation we have done over the last 2 months. Thursday it took Phoebe around 13 minutes to stop walking around crying and then she went in to her crate and snoozed for a few hours. Friday it took 5 minutes. Today it took 1 minute. Once she is in there, she lays down and is awake for a little bit but after a short while she is on her side sleeping. Usually I can’t go upstairs for more than a couple of minutes before she will start to cry, pace and sometimes urinate. Today I went up for 30 minutes and she came to have a look what I was doing and then went and lay down in the living room! we are now trying to work on leaving through the front door as that is her main trigger so building that up in really short doses but we couldn’t do longer than seconds beforehand whereas I’ve just managed to do 3 minutes and she was still fine but didn’t want to push it too much and rush the process (as I think I have in the past). She really is so much better being in the dining room with her crate and we leave through the back door. I think it helps that we naturally have that door open more and potter in and out where as the front door is mainly open when we are just leaving. we are just feeling so elated that we can have a bit of normality whilst we continue the training with her as it’s been impossible to manage the last 2 months of not leaving her at all as it’s naturally caused myself and my husband to live almost separate lives to provide nearly 24/7 company for her! your messages have been so reassuring so thank you very much

Thank you so much for your reply! We didn’t crate her when we first brought her home which I feel like was a massive mistake. She had free reign of the downstairs so I bet she just had no idea what/where she was expected to go and do. She did have a bed in the living room and the dining room so would go between the two depending where we were. The bed in the dining room is now inside the crate. we got the crate just before we started with our first behaviourist and I asked her about crate training but she said it wasn’t necessary to treat separation anxiety and can make it worse as she’s seen some bad injuries from crated dogs with SA, particularly because she tried to chew through the door to get to us. We never close the door on Phoebe’s crate but she chooses to sleep in there (assuming because I’m in there) whilst I’m working for 3 days a week. We didn’t have a door between the living room and dining room when she first came so then we put the door on so that when we do leave, she only has the dining room with crate and kitchen now rather than the whole run of the downstairs. This has seemed to help at least with not urinating by the door that we leave through. Perhaps some crate training whilst moving room to room would be beneficial with the internal SA. we did think very seriously about a second greyhound but this has been such a culture shock and I’ve read mixed experiences about it working, not working and then the dreaded having two hounds with SA. She’s also quite scared of other dogs (seems to have extended to some greyhounds that we see out and about sometimes) so I’m just not sure how it would play out for her. Thank you again so much for your response!

Here goes… For background I am from the UK and work full time. I work 3 days from home and 2 days in the office. I have grown up with dogs and as an adult, my last dog was a rescue German Spitz that developed diabetes in her later years so we gave her insulin twice a day so the idea of medication etc isn’t too shocking or scary to me. 6 months ago me and my husband decided 3 years after losing our furbaby that we were ready for another dog. We kept borrowing our friends dog and then felt like they had died when we gave them back so we knew we were ready. We’re not particular active, like going for a mooch etc so we volunteered at our local greyhound rescue to get to know the breed and as soon as we saw their little faces we knew we were adopting one. We were matched with Twirl (now named Phoebe). Phoebe is 4 years old, has raced a lot and was retired in November 2021. We walked her with the pack and she seemed ok with dogs so we thought brilliant! As soon as we got her home on her trial it was clear that she was definitely not ok with dogs, she was absolutely petrified. I took her to outdoor socialisation classes 3x per week and she has done amazing. She’s had some lovely, calm, brief interactions with dogs (even if the next day she is crying and spinning again like that didn’t happen?) but we’ve trained her to cope with dogs passing by either watch me or Phoebe come and as long as we have Ham with us she’s much more interested in that! the adoption group told us that she will be quite reserved and not to expect too much from her but within about 10 hours it was like she had been there for 10 weeks, she settled in straight away. We’ve decided from the start that we don’t want her to come upstairs. We’ve got really narrow windy stairs. She wouldn’t sleep at night properly for a good 3 months as she would cry, pace, pull the baby gate off the wall but now we’ve got her a snuggly crate, she’s dying for us to go to bed now so that she can have her chew in her crate and settle down. When we first adopted her, my husband had to work away for a night on the second day and from that moment on I became the one that she latched on to. I think it would have happened anyway as I work from home. I took a few days off work and instantly left for seconds, minutes, hours and when I came back she would be settled on her bed so I felt like it was ok. Over the coming months we went from scratched door, pulled up carpet, urinating on the carpet next to the door we left through. One day I captured on the camera where she was crying, panting, chewed most of internal door off. That evening I reached out to a dog behaviourist and begged her to take us on and we started the next day with her. She taught us how to provide enough enrichment and came up with an 8 week SA plan. In those 8 weeks, we’ve achieved leaving her for 2 minutes and 15 seconds. The sessions incremented by around 5 seconds per day but we just couldn’t make any progress. We were told not to leave her other than the sessions so we’ve used holidays/Lieu days/worked Saturdays to get a rest day during this time. Phoebe will even urinate if im upstairs. We can’t leave her and I can’t go upstairs. I made an appointment with the vet and got in with a vet behaviourist and he said it’s clear that she is going to need medication to be able to cope with being left alone. He wasn’t happy about the 5 second increments and said SA anxiety should look more like day 1 10 mins, day 2 20 mins. He was also concerned that this had gone on for 2 months and medication wasn’t brought up by the behaviourist sooner when in the early days we could only leave her for 10-15 seconds. He also didn’t agree with not leaving her at all for 2 months and said we have probably made matters worse being around so much. We have started 80mg per day (40mg twice a day) Phoebe weighs 28kg. We’ve used all the leave we can and tomorrow we both have to go in to the office and I can come home at dinner time to walk her etc. she seems to settle better in the dining room if where her crate is if we leave through the back door. She can’t cope even more with us leaving through the front door. I know that Clomicalm can take a while to get in to the system. My vet advised that it takes around 8 weeks to see full effects but hopefully within around 2 we might see some mild improvements that mean we can make a small dent in the start of some SA training (hopefully). My question is - what should my SA training look like now? Is it still a mixture of door is a bore, watching her on the camera and seeing how long she can cope and building on this? Are my days leaving her going to undo it all? I keep reading that “medication only works in conjunction with behaviour modification” so is this the things that I have listed? I feel like I’ve been researching/doing all of this for so long that I’m just feeling lost and having a behaviourist and a vet behaviourist with two completely different view points hasn’t helped! thank you so much to anyone that has taken the time to read my huge post! Absolutely any insight or help will be so appreciated and if anyone comes across this post because they’re also looking for help then I hope you’re doing ok because it can be so hard!