Hello! This forum has been so helpful! I have a 14-week-old ALD. He is such a great puppy. The one problem we are having is with a bit of separation anxiety/crate barking. Areas where he excels in his crate: sleeping through the night, napping in my office while I work from home, and also if we leave the house. Where he struggles in his crate is if I am physically in the house, but NOT sitting next to him/within view.
So to be clear, if I put him in his crate and leave the house, he settles within 2 minutes (we have a camera on him) and then sleeps for several hours. If I put him in his crate and sit at my desk, he goes right to sleep and will rest until I get him up. However, if I put him in the crate, and I leave the room to fold laundry, or if I put him in his crate in the same room as me, but I'm up and about making dinner or helping my kids with their homework or tidying up, etc, he will bark loudly and constantly. It's like he either wants me to sit quietly where he can see me and know that I'm not doing anything without him, OR he wants me to leave the house completely. Haha.
Do you have any suggestions for how to work on this with him? We do some crate training every day with him in the crate, dropping a treat, walking to the other side of the room, rewarding calm/quiet, and doing it again. He isn't easily distractible with toys or chews. I am definitely the thing/person he is most interested in. It's slow going, which I totally understand is normal. But I also need to be able to fold laundry and help kids with homework and maybe shower more than once a week! I'm afraid of making the situation worse by stressing him out a ton.
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