Published summaries put many dogs at meaningful improvement inside two to four months of steady daily sessions. Nobody credible promises a date, and the pace depends on whether real absences can be suspended while the training runs.
The variable that moves the timeline most is not the dog. It is whether the dog is still being left over threshold between sessions. Training four-second absences in the evening while leaving for eight hours every workday runs desensitisation and flooding on the same animal, and the eight hours wins.
Owners who can arrange coverage — a sitter, a neighbour, a changed schedule — for the early weeks move considerably faster than owners who cannot. That is the single biggest fork in the road, and it is a logistics problem rather than a training one.
Not a straight line. Plateaus are normal, and a bad week after a good month is not a failure of the method — it is the reason the protocol is run against a recorded number rather than against a feeling. The number tells you whether the trend is real.
Recovery is also not "the dog no longer minds". It is a dog whose threshold is longer than the absences your life actually requires.
Why Your Dog Panics When You Leave is a 53-page guide in nine lessons, with every claim sourced in the margin of the page it sits on: finding your dog's threshold and protecting it, the training absence from one second upward, what crates and second dogs and bark collars actually do, and where medication fits. It comes with the Absence Ladder spreadsheet you log each departure in, and the owners' community.
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