What is a leaving cue?
Leaving cues are the cues, or triggers, or events, that your dog associates with you leaving them alone. These are learned by your dog because they happen before you leave. This means your dog starts to predict that when they happen, you are going out without them.
Some common ones would be:
- You pick up your keys
- You put on your coat
- Windows get shut and the back door is locked
- You pack your bag
- Certain shoes get put on
- You put your dog in a certain room
When you start to do these things, your dog gets the idea of what’s going on. This might trigger signs of anxiety starting before you even leave. Perhaps they start following you. Some stop eating breakfast because that’s a leaving cue. Plenty of times I’ve seen dogs not want to come in from outside, or run away when their owners go to put them in the kitchen. They know what’s coming and they aren’t going to help it to happen! I’ve also seen dogs become so panicky that they become aggressive with their owners to try and get them to stay.
How do these impact your training?
One of the important parts of training is that we build it up to be realistic so that your training transitions successfully to real life.
Dogs are very switched on to different contexts. If they weren’t they wouldn’t get anxious at the leaving cues in the first place. They know the difference between your snuggly jumper you wear in the house for warmth and the coat you put on before you leave the house.
The bulk of the training is about building the actual duration of you being out of the house. However, this is useless if it all falls apart as soon as you put your outside shoes on. This is why I always make sure that on the checklist of training before we start are “going out clothes”.
If you do all your training in your pyjamas and slippers then that is what you might end up needing to wear out for dinner!
When to train leaving cues
In years gone by we would have you write a list of all possible leaving cues and work through them all individually. Then you’d start putting them all together. All before building duration.
It could take weeks or more to work through them all and only once you could get ready from start to finish would the absence training begin. What a drag right?!
Nowadays we start with the essentials like outdoor clothes and shoes to make sure it’s realistic, and comfortable for you! Then we might start introducing processes to get your dog used to other leaving cues. But we do this alongside training absences to get you out of the house! The aim is to get you out of the house as soon as possible.
The individual leaving cues are then sprinkled in throughout the warm up steps and gradually integrated more and more into absences over time. We morph this together into a realistic training session where you have everything you need and your dog feels safe.
If you’d like some help getting it right
There are lots of things to think about when doing separation anxiety training, and getting it wrong can be frustrating and set you back. If you think having a professional on side to check over what you’re doing and provide your next steps to take the thinking and uncertainty out of the training then that’s where I can help.
– Call on 07834604549
– Email on hello@weteachpets.com
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