Separation Anxiety

Earlier I said that most WAGS dogs don't have serious behavioral issues. This is true: by and large, rescuers do their best to screen out dogs who present with severe fearfulness, resource guarding, and/or aggression. There are so many sweet, easy dogs crowding Southern shelters that even they get euthanized for space; accordingly, rescuers tend to take the ones who can be adopted out easily, quickly, and safely, so that they can go back and save more.

But there's one exception, and that is separation anxiety. There are tests to screen out fearful and obviously aggressive dogs, and resource guarders are pretty easy to spot, but there is no way to know whether a shelter dog will show separation anxiety until you bring her home.

Nationwide, shelter dogs have a statistically higher incidence of separation anxiety than the overall dog population does. Some of them may have been abandoned by their previous owners because of that behavior. Others may have developed it as a result of the instability in their lives. Every one of my foster dogs has shown some degree of (very mild) separation anxiety. It's not hard to see why a foster pup would feel frightened and anxious about your departures: you represent the primary source of security that this dog has known in her life. She has lost every home she had before coming to yours. Some of the people in her life had good reasons for sending her away (such as the transporters who brought her North and the caretakers who saw her through her pre-transport quarantine period), but the dog doesn't know that; she only knows that these people were kind to her and now they are gone. So she really, really does not want you to go away too.

(Incidentally, this is one of the reasons it's so important to make a good match between dogs and adopters. Every time an adoption fails and the dog bounces back to the rescue group -- or, worse, gets dumped at a shelter -- she suffers another bout of homelessness, and the upheaval makes things worse. A temperamentally sound dog may develop separation anxiety. A dog who's already anxious may get much, much worse. If your foster pup has any tendencies toward separation anxiety, be doubly careful in trying to place her with the right home.)