We adopted pup at 4 months and he is now 9 months. He has finally stopped being super clingy and sleeping comfortably in his crate at night and this is now out of our room. It’s been a long process but we wanted to go slow and not make things worse. We work from home but have always made a point of leaving older dog for errands/if there was gap between one leaving/coming home and odd longer evenings out (3 hrs) so she can be left without any issue when needed.
I think we can now start on pup and her alone together (but separate) which we would have done sooner but it’s all been a bit chaotic and our focus was on other training/socialisation. He would get super upset if we went to the loo for example but he’s now well settled.
Our plan is for him to have kitchen/dining room and older dog have upstairs and hall. Older dog was trusted with run of the house and would sleep on our bed so is used to that. There would be a room between them.
Younger pup is currently a teenage pest and play can get a bit silly so I’m not comfortable leaving them together but also I don’t want to crate whilst out if it gives him some room to move about and play with any toys we leave.
We’ve started just giving lickimats/kongs/their meals for them in their areas and we go to another room and close the door so we can listen. Any suggestion of upset and we go back into pup with no fuss and only acknowledge once he settles. We plan to do that and then work up to going outside the house and will again just listen etc so he isn’t becoming distressed. To build on this and to desensitise him to going out signals we will practise going in/out of his area, in/of the house etc and anything else that is potentially a trigger for him being signalled that we are leaving. We will just keep building up the time slowly and not push it too far.
Is there anything else we can be doing? Once older dog got to 30mins we stuck at that for a bit and then it was no bother adding on time but I recall it took some time to get her there (rescue dog previously left by former owners).
It all feels very elaborate but the safest option while he’s still very boisterous. Older dog is very tolerant but I wouldn’t want a situation where he was being bratty and we couldn’t intervene.