My Mistress has been reading a book about separation anxiety in dogs and I have to admit as a breed we don’t come out well. I suppose it’s not that surprising that Entlebuchers commonly suffer separation anxiety when it is out nature to stick to our main human like glue. The book made my Mistress laugh in places ‘Does your dog sit outside the bathroom while you are in there?’ She was able to answer quite honestly ‘no’. That however is not because we stayed wherever we were before she went to the bathroom, it’s because we are in the bathroom with her! ‘Does your dog lie in the hallway?’ Again ‘no’, but not because we are balances individuals off doing our own thing and not keeping tabs on our human. It’s because we will be sitting where we can actually touch our human and so know exactly where they are. Our attachment to our main human has, rather unkindly in my opinion, been described by some as ‘pathological’. I prefer to think of us as ‘superglue dogs’. We will stick to our human in all eventualities. Oh, you can train us to be ok without you for short periods of time, but you need to know what makes us feel safe when we can’t hold your hand with our paw. For me, it’s being in my crate, which is my favourite place in all the world if I can’t be sitting with our Mistress. For Shadow it’s the snug and for Alfie it’s our Mistress’s bed, where he can smell her and know she’s not so very far away. Of course, we quite like going into kennels as she got us used to that slowly and we love the people there too, but we’re always happier if there are two of us, rather than one, and you should see the bruises we give our Mistress when she comes to collect us!
Here’s a photo of our Mistress with my Mum from the other day.
Alfie’s Diary – the Book as well as our other books are available HERE
You can find short stories to read at www.alfiedog.com