DON'T GET TOO CLOSE, I NEED MY SPACE!

Maintaining clear and consistent boundaries on our personal space is one of the most basic and important ways to teach our dogs about respectful interactions, their personal independence from us, confidence, and polite manners and impulse control! A very touchy feely dog who likes to nudge, cuddle, lean on, lick, and get clingy with people uninvited needs to be taught boundaries. We don’t want to allow that dog to indulge these impulsive clingy behaviours because they feed into and reinforce his separation anxiety (the addiction to ‘togetherness’) instead of teaching him to be calm, confident and stable independently. Because this is a concept that separation anxiety dogs struggle with, we’ve been very consistent about setting firm boundaries about not enter anyone’s personal space uninvited and about behaving respectfully when he is in close contact with others like during our grooming/handling and nail trimming. The ‘Out’ command is another very useful bit of training that will allow his handler to help the dog to disengage and create space from the people and items that he wants to cling to or guard.