Anxiety/Fear Issues

What fear actually looks like

The obvious signs are the ones that damage furniture: barking, howling, scratching at doors, toileting indoors, refusing food. By the time a dog is doing those things they have usually been uncomfortable for a while.

The quieter signals come first. Pacing. Panting when it is not warm. Following you from room to room. Whining, restlessness, an inability to settle. Lea writes about this in Do Dogs Feel Guilt?, where the behaviours owners read as guilt or spite turn out to be stress: hiding, crouching, tucked tails, ears back, the whites of the eyes showing.

Reading those early signals changes what you can do about them. A dog who is pacing before you pick up your keys is telling you the difficulty starts well before the door closes.

Separation anxiety, or something else

Not every dog who wrecks the kitchen has separation anxiety. Some are bored, under-exercised or under-stimulated. Some are young and have never been taught to settle. Some are in pain. The behaviour looks similar and the treatment is completely different, which is why the first session is mostly questions.

A genuinely anxious dog usually shows distress the moment the routine of leaving begins, stays distressed rather than settling after ten minutes, and does not improve with more exercise or a better chew. A bored dog gets on with destroying something and then sleeps.

Why punishment makes fear worse

Correcting a frightened dog adds something unpleasant to a moment they already cannot cope with. It can suppress the outward behaviour while leaving the fear untouched, and it damages the one relationship the dog most needs to feel safe in.

The American Veterinary Society of Animal Behavior reviewed the evidence in 2021 and recommends reward-based methods for all training, including behaviour problems. It advises against aversive tools, naming electronic collars, prong collars, choke chains and leash corrections. Reward-based methods were also found to be better for the relationship between dog and owner, which matters a great deal when the problem is that your dog does not feel safe.

How the work goes

Two things run in parallel. The first is management, meaning we stop the dog rehearsing the panic while we work. That might be a different room, a change to the leaving routine, a neighbour or daycare covering the longest absences, or simply not leaving the dog alone longer than they can currently handle.

The second is gradual exposure at a level the dog can cope with, paired with something good. For separation that often starts absurdly small, with you picking up your keys and putting them down again. For noise or stranger fear it starts at a distance or a volume that barely registers. The point is to stay under the threshold where your dog can still think.

We also build coping skills and safe spaces, so the dog has somewhere they choose to go when the world gets loud. And we teach you to read your dog's early signals, so you can act on them before the panic arrives.

What to expect

Anxiety work is slower than obedience work and the progress is less linear. Some weeks go backwards for reasons nobody can identify. Dogs who have been through trauma may always need some management, and a dog who copes well with support is a genuine outcome rather than a partial one.

As Lea puts it in Stop Comparing Your Dog to Others, asking a fearful dog to hurry up is like telling someone mid-panic-attack to get over it. Our dogs can suffer from the same mental health problems we can, and the thing they are reacting to is a real threat to them even when it makes no sense to us.

Where we work

Anxious dogs do best starting somewhere they already feel safe, so sessions usually begin at home. Separation work in particular has to happen where the dog actually lives. Training covers North Vancouver, West Vancouver, Vancouver, Burnaby, Coquitlam, Richmond and New Westminster, and online sessions work well here, since much of the practice happens while you are out of the house anyway.