Last week I promised to tell you how to teach your dog to stay alone. I wrote “your dog”. I did not write “your puppy”, because you never leave a puppy alone.

Firstly, whatever problem you tackle, you will need to change your behaviour with your dog. If you go on showing him several times a day that you are respecting him as the leader, you will not be able to find a solution to any problem you have. If you succeed in starting to think like a dog, you might begin to grasp what it means to be the leader of the pack.
And bear in mind that if you have just strated up a business and are working 12-hours a day it may be better not to have a dog at all. Please look at the situation from a dog’s point of view.
If you already have a dog and you want to teach him to stay alone at home the treatment may take some time, certainly in severe cases. Take care to avoid relapses for everything you are teaching the dog. Whenever you make an exception and you allow your dog to be disobedient just once, you will need an additional couple of months of training.

Using a pen
Avoiding relapses can be achieved by taking the dog everywhere in your car, by leaving him with a sitter, in a kennel or in his own indoor pen.
A pen is not a prison.
There are a lot of misconceptions about the use of a pen. One of my clients uses a pen in his car. When he leaves his dog alone at home, the dog is chewing the expensive chairs and tables and destroying the settees. I told my client to use the pen also at home. He refuses to do it, because he thinks it is cruel. This is not true. In fact a dog will easily consider the pen to be his own bedroom.
For him it resembles a safe hole you dug for him in the ground. If you accustom him slowly to his pen he will learn to go inside if he wants to lie down and rest. Now and then you will close the gate and open it a few minutes later while you stay close. The dog will get used to lying in it with a closed gate. He will understand that the closed gate does not necessarily mean that you are leaving him alone. Then you might start leaving the room, closing the door after you. A few minutes later, on condition that the dog is quiet, you will enter the room and open the gate of his pen. Slowly you will increase the time you will leave the room and you will start adding other significant signals for the dog. You might open and close the front door and go back to the dog. You might take your keys, your handbag, leave the house, walk to the gate and come back. Each time you will make it more difficult for your dog and each time you will go back to him. If you have arrived that far you might open the gate, start the car, drive it outside, close the gate, drive around the block and come back. Until finally you will be able to leave your home for a couple of hours. You will have put a bowl filled with water and your dog’s favourite chewing toy in his pen before leaving. Sometimes this treatment is all your dog needs to be able to relax while you are away.  .
When I adopted my Labrador last March, I made him sleep in a pen for the first night he stayed with us. As I did not want any trouble, I placed the pen in the kitchen, threw in a towel from his former owner, invited my Labwith a biscuit to go inside and closed the gate. He slept in the pen for four days. From the 5th day onwards he slept in his basket. He still does.