Shams been dealing with some really rough separation anxiety following Jack being gone for an entire month, kicked up about two weeks in to her absence and now peaks with her having to leave every day for work
We’re making progress and helping him realize she’s not disappearing for egregious amounts of time anymore and he’s slowly but surely getting there
One adorable note to this is that typically when sham is expressing a lot of stress Yoshi will make herself scarce - if we have to do nails or something that makes him slightly uncomfortable she will leave the room until it’s done. She’s always hated being near stressed out dogs.
But in this case she’s been avidly trying to help him 😭 I’ll be sitting on the floor near him trying to help him progress towards self soothing and she’ll just walk over, sniff from a respectful distance, then plop down in to a relaxed settled down with her head down or flopped on her side.
And he watches her and follows her lead 😭
He’ll go from full stress panting and shaking, to watching her, to then slowing his breath, displacement sniffing, then laying down and resting his head while glancing over at her periodically like he’s making sure she still thinks everything’s chill and fine
She’ll glance over at him every now and then like she’s making sure he’s got the memo and chilling out. The tiny 10lb nugget providing confidence and security for the rugged 50lb street dog 🤦♀️
He’s starting to settle quicker with each day now and I’m hoping that returning to our standard routine will bring everything back to level for him. Already seeing some good hints of progress in the right direction from how severe his anxiety got but definitely a ton of work left to go to help out the lad
