There is not a lot to say about this video except that, for me, it is sad. I think what we see is what is happening, namely that the owner of this dog has gone into the supermarket and left their dog behind. But the dog is not tied up. Do people normally tie up their dogs outside a supermarket? I’m told that this took place in Switzerland. It would seem careless, though, to leave your dog behind at the sliding front door without tying them up but perhaps I am incorrect in that assessment.
But what I see is separation anxiety. I may be overly sensitive but when I see this dog with anxiety written all over his demeanour, I see a paradigm example of dog separation anxiety in all its myriad of forms. I read somewhere that a dog owner should not leave their dog alone for more than four hours. That comes from a dog expert. How many dogs are left at home while the owner goes to work during the day? And if so, how extreme is the feeling of separation anxiety experienced by these dogs.
Note: This is an embedded video from another website. Sometimes they are deleted at source or the video is turned into a link which would stop it working here. I have no control over this.
I have a feeling that dog owners do not give enough attention to separation anxiety in their companion animals. There are millions of examples. Perhaps one of the problems is that the owner does not know what their dog is doing while they are away. Unless they have a camera set up inside their home. My neighbour, a couple of houses down, has a dog and he or she howls during the afternoon sometimes.
The owner has only popped out for a few hours but the dog is howling. A clear signal of separation anxiety. I think companion animals in general suffer anxiety far more than the experts and their owners believe.
We don’t know what happened to this dog. We presume i.e. the viewers of the video presume, that the owner comes out of the supermarket and picks up their dog. But that raises questions. Where is the lead? It just doesn’t make sense to leave a dog like this outside a supermarket without a lead. So, we do not have the full story and we don’t know what happened.
One person who commented on the video expressed my feelings entirely accurately. She said: “My anxiety goes brrrrr when the video is about to end but the owner hasn’t come back”. I like the way that she expressed her anxiety with that chilly “brrrrr”.
Below are some more pages on dog emotions.
