Pre-Departure Cues/Triggers

Pre-departure cues are things that tip off your dog that you are about to leave him alone. These cues are signals or predictors of alone time, and dogs notice these associations and can begin to panic as soon as they observe them.

Common pre-departure cues include a person getting dressed, putting on shoes, picking up things to take with them (keys, purse, backpack, etc.), and sometimes things that occur outside the home as well can be triggers (like opening a garage or gate to drive through).

Common erroneous advice includes trying to desensitize a dog to all of the possible pre-departure cues. For example, picking up keys and putting them down repetitively. Putting on shoes, walking towards the door, then not leaving - trying to make them predict not leaving. But this does not work, because eventually people will have to put shoes on, pick up keys, and the other stuff they need, and then actually leave the house. This will undo all the work trying to make these things predict the person not leaving.

So the strategy to solve this is to simply include the triggers/pre-departure cues as part of the whole desensitization plan. We won’t waste time trying to make them not predict leaving the dog alone, but instead include them in the leaving process while only leaving the dog alone for an amount of time he’s comfortable.

In other words, we will make pre-departure cues/triggers predict safe absences, rather than trying to make them predict no absence.

At first, don’t worry about pre-departure cues. For most dogs we’ll try to add them into the process once your dog can be left alone for 30 seconds.

When we start to add in these triggers (it’s raising criteria - the difficulty level for the dog), so following good training practice, we will lower the difficulty of other criteria. This means even though your dog can now handle 30 seconds of alone time, when we start to add the pre-departure cues like picking up keys and leaving the home, we will require only leaving for a few seconds until the dog starts to get used to this change in the plan.

We’ll also work on each pre-departure cue separately before adding them together.