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!