Hi Everyone,
Just wanted to thank everyone for helpful advice on my previous thread https://www.mumsnet.com/talk/the_doghouse/5235540-need-a-handholdadvice (hopefully that link works!)
To summarise, we adopted a rescue puppy now 8 months and unfortunately she has really been struggling, assessed as having super high levels of anxiety and frustration.
We’ve been putting in place different things, including quite a few of the suggestions you made. We’ve made really good progress on a few things, and she is now sleeping much more in the day than she was (although still much less than the recommended amount.)
She’s still very anxious in lots of ways and barking for hours a day. As best we can tell, she suffers from bad separation anxiety when either myself or my partner are away, although if she’s surrounded by lots of people she does much better. She is very sound sensitive and where we live there’s quite a lot of noises it’s hard to control (e.g. other dogs barking, noise from neighbours, urban foxes.) We noticed she seems much less anxious when she goes to her doggy daycarers (multiple people there) and when we were home for Christmas with lots of people but a quieter area she was much happier and more relaxed.
We’re working with a behaviourist from the charity we adopted her from and they had suggested medication to bring her anxiety levels down as they are very high. But now seeing she is much better in certain environments, feeling very torn whether it’s fair to medicate her and whether a vet would do this? Unfortunately we can’t do much to change that we aren’t both home all the time as my partner needs to go out to work and we can’t move house any time soon.
So torn as we’re really bonded to her and want her to stay with us, but don’t know if we can offer what she needs without medication as her anxiety/barking is making day to day life very hard. Even if we did think of rehoming, not sure how many people would have multiple people around daily, live in a quiet area and have hours a day to spend on walking and training (she’s on the go still and craves interaction at least 8 hours a day.)
Sorry for the waffle. Any thoughts, anyone with experience on this would be really appreciated.