Summary of the findings of: Santos de Assis et al, 2019: “Developing diagnostic frameworks in veterinary behavioural medicine: disambiguating separation related problems in dogs“
The ‘separation anxiety’ diagnosis gets thrown around quite a lot, but is that justified – or even helpful? There seem to be different forms of separation problems, and anxiety is not necessarily always central.
7 forms of problem behaviour could be extracted from the dataset:
- “exit frustration”
- “social panic”
- “elimination”
- “redirected frustration”
- “reactive communication”
- “immediate frustration”
And these could be clustered into 4 categories:
- “exit frustration”
- “redirected reactive”
- “reactive inhibited”
- “boredom”
Depending on the cluster, you can draw different conclusions about the reason behind the behaviour, and which interventions will likely be effective.
It is announced that Santo di Assis’ preliminary article will be published in full form shortly.
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