Adventures With Makai: An Update on Our Alone Time Training
It’s been almost three months now since my husband and I adopted our rescue puppy, Makai, from the Connecticut Humane Society. Time is flying! Our boy is almost 6 months old already! Since the trials and tribulations of our first month, we’ve really settled into a nice routine and Makai’s making great progress with the positive reinforcement puppy training that we’ve been doing. Last month, we focused a lot of training time on puppy socialization and other puppy foundational skills and it’s paid off. Makai is becoming more and more confident with each passing day. He’s becoming more curious and interested in exploring his surroundings rather than fleeing in fear, and I’m so proud of our little guy! Building confidence in a puppy leads to a well-rounded, friendly adult dog, so I’m very pleased with the progress Makai is making in that area.
Overall, things have been going well. Potty training has been successful, though we’ve had the occasional accident here and there, which is to be expected at his age. He’s earned himself the nickname “Mako Shark” due to those sharp puppy teeth. Puppy chews, bones, frozen carrots and teething rings are helping though, and the biting has subsided tremendously from the first month. Oh, and Makai randomly woke up from a nap one day limping so we ended up at Old Lyme Vet Hospital for an emergency appointment. After being unable to find an injury, we all jokingly agreed that he just missed his friends and wanted some extra attention and treats (the limping has since gone away). All in all, Makai has been learning, growing, and developing beautifully…
… Except for alone time. Like I mentioned last month, alone time training has certainly been our biggest hurdle. Makai made it clear early on that he was not comfortable being alone. We adopted Makai at about 11 weeks and given his age, I wasn’t surprised that he struggled with being separated from us at first. It’s normal for a young puppy to want to be close to their family members and many puppies grow more independent as they get older and become acclimated to their new home. So, at first, I wasn’t overly concerned. We tried some simple things to help him acclimate such as putting his crate in various locations of our house, using a pen instead of a crate, sitting next to him as he fell asleep, and we even tried a snuggle puppy. While Makai did make progress and quickly began sleeping through the night in his crate next to our bed, leaving him home alone or trying to put him down for a nap during the day was a different story. It was clear that Makai needed extra help, so I created a desensitization training plan for Makai, very similar to the training I do with my separation anxiety training clients.
Desensitizing Makai to Alone Time
I was confident that Makai did not have separation anxiety, based on the behaviors and body language I observed from him. However, the nice thing about desensitization is that it can be used for many behavioral challenges, not just separation anxiety. Desensitization is all about gradual acclimation, so whether the learner is a young puppy who’s not accustomed to alone time (like in Makai’s case), a dog who’s suffering from an anxiety disorder, or a dog who’s afraid to wear a harness, desensitization is one of the most effective training methods available.
For our alone time desensitization training, I chose to utilize a crate. Many dogs who struggle with alone time do better when left in a bigger area like a playpen, gated room or when given free reign of the house, rather than confined to a crate. However, I decided on crate training for several reasons. The first was for safety. Makai’s a young puppy, and puppies get into and chew just about anything! I know I’m not going to feel comfortable giving Makai unsupervised free reign of our home for at least a year or two, so getting him accustomed to being in confinement was important to me. I also wanted to keep safety in mind when it comes to Makai and Roxi’s interactions. They’re getting along really well now, however, puppies (and adolescent dogs) can be a lot for an adult dog to handle and sometimes fights can break out if an adult dog has had enough but the younger dog isn’t respecting their boundaries. Lastly, I didn’t see a difference in Makai’s behavior when we tried putting him in a playpen or gated area. The larger space didn’t improve his ability to relax at all. In fact, he quickly learned how to jump over any gate or fence we used. So, for all of these reasons, we opted to utilize a crate.
To help Makai make a positive association with his crate, we fed him meals and provided enrichment activities inside the crate, first leaving the door open so he could choose whether or not to be inside. Once Makai’s body language showed that he was comfortable eating in his crate, we began shutting the door during meal/enrichment time but made sure to open it back up as soon as (or before) he was done, long before he began to get distressed.
We also made sure to be very strategic about when we crated Makai, whether it was for a meal, enrichment, or training. Like most puppies, Makai was much calmer and more relaxed in his crate when he was tired and ready to rest, so we made sure that we never asked Makai to go into his crate unless all of his other needs were met (exercise, social time, play time, water and a potty break) and was ready to settle down and take a nap. This took some pre-planning and working around our work schedules a bit, but it was worth it as it helped to expedite the training process.
Our training sessions started off very easy to help make a positive association with the process and teach Makai that alone time is safe. One of the keys to success with desensitization training is to go at your dog’s pace and stay under their threshold, or in other words, never leave them long enough that they begin to show excessive stress or anxiety signs. Makai’s starting threshold was just 3 seconds. This meant that any absence over 3 seconds would result in him becoming very distressed. So, at first, our training steps consisted of (in no particular order) taking a few steps away from the crate and returning, walking in and out of view, walking to the front door, opening and shutting the front door, and stepping outside but returning immediately. These steps may seem trivial, but starting with such easy, manageable steps helped Makai learn that he could relax instead of worry about whether we were going to come back or not.
Enjoying our date night while Makai sleeps soundly alone at home!
After the first week, Makai went from a 3 second threshold to a 3 minute and 26 second threshold. A huge jump after just a handful of training sessions! I kept gradually making the sessions harder, but always making sure they were manageable for Makai. I was constantly observing Makai’s body language (through a camera) to make sure he was never pushed to the point of distress. Those three minutes quickly grew to twenty minutes and last month, after about five weeks of training, my husband and I were able to go out and enjoy a date night together while Makai relaxed at home, alone!
Fast Forward to Today
We’re continuing to practice with Makai to help him feel more and more comfortable being alone. We certainly have our good days and our bad ones but all in all, Makai has improved so much over the past couple of months. One of the challenges that we’ve faced on this journey is the fact that I do a lot of work from home, and when I’m not home, my husband usually is. This makes life easier, because one of us is almost always available to be on “puppy duty” but it makes finding time to practice alone time training much harder. We’ve had to sit in our cars, and walk around stores when we had nothing to buy just so Makai had practice time being alone. A small price to pay to help Makai feel better and to get our freedom back.
Through our desensitization training, Makai has also become much more comfortable with napping on his own throughout the day. When we first brought Makai home, I had to bring my work downstairs and work from the living room so that I could be close to Makai but now, our boy is sleeping peacefully in his crate while I work from my office upstairs. I’ve been able to get back into a workout routine, shower without a puppy in the bathroom with me, and enjoy some much needed “me-time.”
Makai has come such a long way and my husband and I have both enjoyed the freedom of leaving the house without worry (and more date nights!). With the holidays fast approaching though, I know we’ll need to make some accommodations for Makai. He’s not ready to be home alone for more than two to three hours, both due to his alone time challenges and his age. Luckily, we have a friend who can dog sit for us on Thanksgiving but for Christmas, we’ll have to adjust our plans a bit. That’s ok though, because raising a puppy is a long-term commitment, and I know that we’re on the right track to all of this being behind us very soon. By the next holiday season, this will all be a distant memory!
With wags and aloha,
Cori Tufano- CSAT, CPDT-KA, FDM
