Home Alone: The Battle of the Basenji

Like many basenji owners, I seem to constantly struggle with the question of what to do with the dogs when I leave them home alone. Since I got Reef and adopted Biko from BRAT, we’ve tried many different approaches to this, some of which I’ve written about on this blog and on BRAT-chat. First we crated both dogs all day with me coming home at lunch to walk them, then last summer my husband encouraged me to gradually leave them alone in the house for increasing periods of time. First we tried leaving them uncrated for mornings only (they mostly just sleep in the mornings anyway), and then we tried afternoons too. We found that if we simply closed the bedroom doors and removed a few items that they were likely to get into, they were actually pretty well-behaved. Yay! This was my ideal situation, and I was thrilled that after years of struggle, we’d finally got the dogs calm enough and settled into a routine enough to make being uncrated a reality. When my dogs are happy during the day, I am too.

Then, we bought a new house, and we started packing up our belongings to move. It started slowly at first, just a nibbled item here or there, but gradually the dogs seemed to grow increasingly unsettled when left home alone. And of course in basenji world, unsettled = destructive. After a string of days coming home to find my couch eaten (not just the throw cushions - the actual couch), I had had enough and decided to take a step backwards and begin crating them in the afternoons again.

Fast-forward through a month of moving trucks, snowstorms, rainstorms, and getting settled in to the new house. We’re finally back to a regular routine, and although my new house is 20 minutes away from my office, I’m still coming home at lunchtime to let the dogs out and play with them for a few minutes. Now that things are settled down I tried moving the dogs back to being uncrated in the afternoons as well as the morning, but they’ve been destructive on more than one occasion and I’m sincerely tired of spending hours each evening sewing the foam stuffing back into my couch cushions and my papasan chair. They seem to deal even worse with being gated into one room than being crated, so when they’re left uncrated for the mornings I try and gate them OUT of the living room and just leave them the office couches to sleep on. I just wish that they would stop trying to eat the office chairs in the afternoons! So, for now my poor doggies have to deal with being crated for about 4 hours each afternoon until I come home from work. I really don’t want to crate them, but I’m not quite sure how to get back to that wonderful and ideal state of non-destructiveness that we had last summer. I guess you could say that we’re fighting the battle of home alone one day at a time.