eight month old standard poodle who had constant human presence for her first six months because we were both fully remote and we started a hybrid return to office four weeks ago and the separation anxiety regression is more severe than the published material prepared us for, looking for families and trainers who have walked a pandemic raised young dog back from a comparable starting position and what the resolution protocol actually looked like inside it

Inola is an eight month old standard poodle we got at ten weeks from a breeder who does early neurological stimulation and structured socialization through the litter period. Both my partner and i were fully remote at the time we brought her home and we made the deliberate choice to add a puppy because we had the bandwidth to do the foundational work properly. From week one of bringing her home through the end of month six she had essentially uninterrupted human presence in the home, with one of us always within ten feet of her and the other usually somewhere in the house. We knew at the time that we were setting up a particular dynamic that would need to be addressed before any return to office happened, and we did puppy alone time training the right way through the early months, ten minute departures building to thirty minutes building to two hours over the first four months, all of which she handled without distress because she had built the foundation through the structured short departures. We thought we had threaded the needle on the pandemic puppy problem and built a young dog who could do alone time properly, which i now recognize was a misreading of what alone time actually means when measured against the dogs full life rather than against the structured training context we had built.

The transition started four weeks ago when my partner went back to a hybrid schedule of three days a week in office and i went back to a hybrid schedule of two days a week in office. We tried to stagger the in office days so that one of us was usually home and Inola would have a maximum of two days per week with neither of us present. The first week she handled the longer absences without obvious distress, we had set up the cameras and she settled within fifteen minutes and slept through most of the day, and we felt cautiously that the foundation was holding. Week two something shifted and the first signs appeared, she started following us around the house more closely on the days we were home, she would not settle in her bed during the workday even when both of us were present, she developed a pattern of checking on our location every few minutes that had not been there before. We wrote this off as her adjusting to the new rhythm and expected it to resolve. Week three the alone time itself started degrading, the camera footage showed her not settling for the first hour, then not settling for the first two hours, then panting and pacing through extended stretches of the day. By the end of week three she was destructive for the first time in her life, chewed through a baseboard and ingested a fragment that thankfully passed without intervention but which scared us badly. Week four she has been unwilling to enter the room where her crate is even when we are home, has developed a low whine that starts when we put on our shoes in the morning, and the camera footage from yesterday showed her vocalizing for the full eight hours we were both gone with no settled rest at all.

What we have already tried in the last four weeks and why none of it has worked. We added a midday dog walker who comes for forty five minutes and the camera footage shows she is briefly settled after the walk and back into the same pattern within an hour. We tried interactive feeders and frozen kongs and licking mats which she engages with for the first twenty to thirty minutes and then ignores. We tried the radio on with classical music and she had no measurable response. We tried adaptil diffusers and she had no measurable response. We tried a thirty day trial of trazodone at the dose our vet prescribed for the in office days and the camera footage showed her sedated but still distressed underneath the sedation, which felt worse rather than better and we discontinued after eight days with the vets agreement. The pattern is that everything we have tried has either had no effect or has masked the symptoms without addressing what is driving them, and we are now in a position where we are losing the dog we had built day by day and we do not have a protocol that is producing measurable improvement.

The specific questions i am bringing to this thread. one, the structural question, is the puppy alone time training we did in the first four months actually the foundation we thought it was, because if the foundation was real then this should not be happening, and if it was not real then the pandemic puppy population may need a different alone time framework than the historical training material assumes. two, the desensitization protocol question, where do we even start when she has already escalated this far, every separation anxiety protocol i have read assumes you can find a duration of absence that the dog handles without distress and then build from there, but our dog at this point appears to be at threshold the moment we put on our shoes, and we do not have a sub threshold starting point to build from. three, the medication question, is there a different medication or combination that actually addresses the underlying distress rather than sedating around it, the trazodone experience felt clearly like the wrong tool and we want to make better informed choices on the next attempt rather than cycling through medications based on what our general practice vet has on hand. four, the household structure question, would relocating to a smaller home where she could not roam through empty rooms reduce the distress, or would a daycare arrangement four days a week be better than the current attempted alone time, are we trying to make a structure work that simply cannot work for this particular dog. five, the long timeline question, what does a realistic resolution arc actually look like, our trainer is talking about six to ten weeks but the slope of the deterioration in the last four weeks does not give me confidence we have six weeks to work with before the destructive behavior or the self harm escalates to a crisis. six, the breed question, is there anything specific about how standard poodles experience this, the breed material i can find talks about velcro tendencies and intelligence but does not address what that means for separation work specifically.

Inola is otherwise a healthy structurally sound young standard poodle, fully house trained, recall is excellent off leash in low distraction environments, she has good dog social skills and we have a regular small playgroup she attends weekly, she sleeps through the night in her crate in our bedroom without any issue. The separation work is the one area where everything has fallen apart and where we feel we are losing ground faster than we can make it up. We have the resources to invest properly in a specialist trainer and to make household changes if that is what the situation requires, but we want to invest in interventions that have a track record of working for this specific pattern rather than defaulting to the first prescription we encounter. Looking for input from families who have walked a pandemic raised young dog back from comparable distress, from separation anxiety specialists who can speak to the structural differences between the pandemic puppy cohort and historical cases, from standard poodle families specifically because we suspect the breed factor matters, and from anyone who can describe what the resolution timeline realistically looks like and how to know when the protocol is working versus when it is not