“So many owners have heard the old advice to ignore your dog when you leave and when you come home, but there’s really not any evidence for it,” says Zazie Todd, PhD, author of the website Companion Animal Psychology and the Psychology Today blog Fellow Creatures.
“I think it’s counterintuitive to what people want to do, especially when they come home and a happy, wiggly dog is waiting for them–it feels wrong,” she says. And they don’t ignore dogs when they leave any more than they’d go out without saying goodbye to a spouse or child: “We think of dogs like family members, so it’s just a bit weird to do that.”
Despite how often it’s repeated, Todd says I’m not the only one who disregards this advice.
Personally, I don’t ignore the dog; I ignore this advice. I’ve always given my dogs a treat when I leave the house, and it seems to make them happy to see me go. In fact, they’re so happy that it’s almost insulting. But that’s better than them being upset about it, so I am willing to endure this minor blow to my self-esteem.
When Todd wrote a blog post about this study, she got a lot of comments from people describing their routines for saying goodbye to their dogs–and like me with my “goodbye cookie,” not a single one said they ignored them. “I think it’s really common that people have these rituals,” she says. “They have a routine, so the dog knows you’re going to go out but you’re going to come back as well.”