Leaving Your Dog Home Alone

Once upon a time, in the perhaps somewhat legendary past, dogs spent their days outdoors, working at their humans’ sides. Cue the theme from “Lassie.”

Tips for Leaving Your Dog Home Alone

These days, if someone has to leave the house for a reason beside a walk, they have to leave their dogs home alone. Often they’re bored and lonely. Fortunately, we can help that time pass easily — without spending a lot of money.

Here's a preview of the different solutions we'll discuss below. 

1. Tire your pup out
2. Keep your pup busy
3. Hire a professional
4. Never leave your pup alone outside
5. Watch out for separation anxiety!

Make ’Em Tired

The best thing you can do for your home-alone dog is supply some good, hard, first-thing-in-the-morning exercise. You saw that coming, right? How much exercise — and what kind — depends on your dog’s age, fitness, body type, and state of health, and also on the weather. Is your dog old, arthritic, and short-nosed, or is she an adolescent Border Collie mix? Is it 90 degrees out, 15, or 55? Check with your vet if you have questions about your dog’s exercise tolerance. The result you’re looking for is that your dog gets home and flops down on his bed to snooze.

For most dogs, running, trotting, and sniffing are ideal, because they supply not only varied physical exercise, but mental stimulation as well.

Keep ’Em Busy

Next, put away your dog’s food bowl and use food-dispensing toys instead. Some toys — such as the Kong — can be stuffed. I often suggest a mixture of half canned and half dry food. For champion chewers, freeze the stuffed toy until it’s hard, so as to make a long-lasting excavation project. Other toys release dry food piece by piece when the dog knocks or pushes them around. Some of these toys offer variable difficulty levels, so you can frustrate your dog just enough to keep her active and engaged. Did you forget to wash out the food toys from the day before? Then take your dog’s entire breakfast ration of dry food and scatter it on the floor as you leave the house. Successful foraging is most dogs’ idea of a good time.

Do test-drive chew toys when you’re home and can supervise. Many food-dispensing toys will stand up to all but a minority of jaws, but others aren’t suited to hardcore...

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