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Dog Separation Anxiety Symptoms and Solutions

If your dog shows separation anxiety, fear of storms, or aggression, there are solutions. WebMD explores the topic with expert Victoria Stilwell.

By Sandy Eckstein
WebMD Pet Health Feature

Reviewed by Amy Flowers, DVM

We’ve all heard the stories: a dog is so terrified during a thunderstorm that he jumps through a picture window to escape. Or maybe your dog is the one that ate the living room couch while you were out.

Why do our dogs do these things? That’s what we asked Victoria Stilwell, the internationally known dog trainer, star of Animal Planet’s “It’s Me Or The Dog” show, and author of several books on dog training.

Q: What are the most common fears or anxieties you’ve seen in the dogs you’ve worked with over the years?

A: The biggest one is separation anxiety -- that’s pretty major. It’s when the dog is hyper-attached to the owners and cannot cope when the owners aren’t there.

Another big one is aggression, which is deeply based in anxiety and insecurities. Many dogs that show aggressive response to other dogs or humans have incorrectly been labeled for so long as a dog that’s trying to be dominant. Aggression starts as a purely defensive gesture, but can become offensive when the dog realizes that he has been successful.

Q: What causes these fears?

A: It can literally be through lack of exposure when young; lack of socialization. When you have a puppy, you have to introduce it to 100 new experiences and all different kinds of people and all different kinds of dogs in a lot of different environment situations. You cannot overwhelm your puppy, and you have to make sure all the experiences it has are pleasurable. There’s no doubt that genetic predisposition has a great effect, too.

Q: Are some dog breeds more prone to fears or anxieties?

A: Border collies, the herding dogs, because I think they’re bred to be so sound sensitive, and to be just environmentally sensitive. You’ll find that collies and shelties and even German shepherds can be predisposed to suffering very much from fears and anxieties. It’s almost like they’re wired in a different way...they are hyper-aware.

That’s not to say if you get a border collie your dog’s going to suffer from anxieties. And I’ve had golden retrievers that have had severe separation anxiety or storm phobia. Any dog, really, has the capacity to suffer from it, depending on their upbringing and their predisposition.

Q: What should I do when I see that my dog is afraid of something? Should I comfort him? Ignore him?

A: Obviously, it’s different for every fear. It used to be thought that you should ignore your dog when it was fearful because if you were giving comfort or attention, you were reinforcing the fear.

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