Help with a newly adopted dog with possible separation anxiety?

So, we brought home a 19 month old bitch staffie Friday. Now we've had experience with the breed as well as adopting a dog, but this is an issue we've not had to deal with.
So a little history on the dog. She had one previous owner who's had her since a pup and grew up with another doggy, due to a relationship breakdown she was forced to give her up. She went to a foster home for a few weeks where she was surrounded by a lot of other dogs. We picked her up Friday and she has been fine, quite trained with the basic commands and lovely with my children.

The issue occurs when we leave the house. She howls constantly! Both neighbours on either sides have already complained about it so I'm now getting myself into a tizzy and worked up about the whole situation. I have to leave her for about half an hour in both the morning and afternoon to get my children from school, and obviously I need to get out in the day shopping and such. I'm currently on maternity leave but I will have to go back to work in the new year. Im just at a loss of how to deal with it. I don't want to give up on her at all, my children are already in love with her. I just need some sort of strategy to deal with it and I'm completely in the dark. If anyone can help that would be fab.

To add, our house is relatively small so no room for a crate at all, but I lock her in the kitchen with a filled Kong (which she doesn't touch) lots of toys and she has a brisk half an hour walk before we leave
Thank you in advance
Please someone help me

Someone please help I'm desperate!

So, we brought home a 19 month old bitch staffie Friday. Now we've had experience with the breed as well as adopting a dog, but this is an issue we've not had to deal with.
So a little history on the dog. She had one previous owner who's had her since a pup and grew up with another doggy, due to a relationship breakdown she was forced to give her up. She went to a foster home for a few weeks where she was surrounded by a lot of other dogs. We picked her up Friday and she has been fine, quite trained with the basic commands and lovely with my children.

The issue occurs when we leave the house. She howls constantly! Both neighbours on either sides have already complained about it so I'm now getting myself into a tizzy and worked up about the whole situation. I have to leave her for about half an hour in both the morning and afternoon to get my children from school, and obviously I need to get out in the day shopping and such. I'm currently on maternity leave but I will have to go back to work in the new year. Im just at a loss of how to deal with it. I don't want to give up on her at all, my children are already in love with her. I just need some sort of strategy to deal with it and I'm completely in the dark. If anyone can help that would be fab.

To add, our house is relatively small so no room for a crate at all, but I lock her in the kitchen with a filled Kong (which she doesn't touch) lots of toys and she has a brisk half an hour walk before we leave
Thank you in advance
Please someone help me

I was reluctant to reply to your post because what I will say may 1) not be very helpful and 2) not what you want to hear.

For the past nearly 20 years, we have had dogs who cannot be left home alone. The first one, Hal, was a 4th generation wolf cross and therefore we knew what we were taking on. The second and third dogs - our latest one is actually son of Hal - are much less wolfy in their genetic make up and their wolfiness, but nonetheless equally cannot be left. With all 3 dogs, on the very, very rare occasion when they had to be left home alone, we would enclose our current and previous dog in the porch, but Hal had the run of the house. All 3 dogs would neither eat nor drink whilst we were out, and more worryingly not even touch their water. Every 15 minutes or so they would burst into a cacaphony of howling - the second dog we had, Tai, has gouged deep half centimetre scratches in both our internal and external mahogany front doors, and Ben's half brother Woody who we had for the first 2 years of his life ate right through our mahogany garage doors!

With such extreme cases, I firmly believe that there is nothing much that can be done, no cure. In the case of Tai and Ben, they did at least have each other for company which did help, but now Ben is on his own, he is shut in the porch when we are forced to leave him and he howls the place down apparently, and scratches at the outer front door.

However, your dog is a staffie, not a wolf cross, so there is some hope here. However, the down side is she is a rescue, which may mean she is more clingy. You do have a window of opportunity whilst you are on maternity leave. I understand that you cannot have a crate, this is a great shame because crates really do help in this sort of situation because the crate feels like an underground den and therefore safe sanctuary. I would really work on this every day before you have to go back to work by leaving her in as small an enclosed area as possible - do you have a porch or a separate loo? - and leave her there home alone every day, starting with very short periods of 5 minutes, then building up up to longer and longer time periods. Always make sure of course that she has access to food and water, although she most likely will touch neither. A raw meaty bone is a treat for any dog, and this just may help if she is very food orientated - it made no difference to my 3, but is worth trying.

Never hover, just briskly put her where you want her to stay, tell her she is a good girl and to stay, then quickly leave the house. Never hang around like a bad smell, if you have a car, get in the car and drive right away from the house, wait a few minutes, then return. Make sure you drive far enough away so that she can no longer hear the engine, it is amazing how dogs can hear their owner's cars from a long distance!

When you come back in, obviously give her huge praise, maybe a titbit if you allow such things, and generally make an enormous fuss of her.

I would repeat this every couple of hours for the first day, then lengthen to 10 minutes the next day, and so on. Your life may be that busy that you cannot do this, what with having kids and everything - not to mention a baby - but do what you can. You could mix it up with just walking away from the house, perhaps taking the baby for a walk in the pram or whatever?

Obviously make her "den" wherever it may be as comfortable as possible for her - warm in winter, cool in summer, etc. etc.

I hope this is helpful and not too off-putting! As I say, I have an extreme "breed" of dog, and northern breeds in general suffer far more from SA than any other breed it would seem, so you may find that you have a much simpler case on your hands than my pessimistic thoughts convey!

Best of luck - don't give up on the little girl, everyone on here will give you lots of help and support, people who are far more expert than me - all I can do is offer my advice based on the experience I have had with extreme cases! x gnasher x

I think her separation anxiety is probably down to being in rescue and never previously being left on her own. I've never had a dog with separation anxiety even though I have multiple dogs they do have to get used to coping alone because you never know what the future holds.
I hear what you say about lack of space for a crate but I think you need to look again, maybe understairs cupboard or any storage cupboard could house it. It should help as long as it's covered and cosy, give her a kong with some of her food in it to occupy her while your out.

I don't think there are any easy answers to this problem. Teaching her to wait quietly for you to return, would have to begin with very brief absences - initially just closing a room door on her, and returning before she has the chance to call you back. Do not fuss over the leaving or the return, the object is to avoid any excitement. Once you can do this, progress to exiting from your external door, but again, monitor and return before she has the chance to become distressed. You will need to extend these small steps very gradually, and it is going to take more than a few weeks. There are some very good articles about treating SA using positive methods on the net.
I have a girl who lived as a kennelled pack member for 6 years. She has been here for 18 months, and I can still not leave her for more than about 30 minutes without her starting to bark - unless she is in the car, where she does settle quietly with a decent chew. Would doggy daycare, where she will have company, be a possibility when you have to return to work?

Good advice from both Trouble and Carole. Let us hope that this IS just temporary SA, due to her being a rescue and therefore very unsettled. The picture I have painted is SA at its very worst, which is why I was loathe to respond to the OP before.

With a dog with true SA, they are simply not interested in food or even water - so a stuffed kong whilst a good idea and will certainly do no harm, may not be of any help at all - certainly wasn't with my 3 wolves, but then most dogs are not so difficult as Hal, Tai and Ben!

Interestingly, since Tai was put down, Ben's SA is 10 times worse. He has completely ruined both porch doors and several of our softwood internal doors as well where he has accidentally got shut in, or out. He is now 11 so we are stuck with WYSIWYG!

Thank you all for your replies, I really appreciate it! We invested in a crate and will have to put up with it until she's settled. She's in there now, waiting for her to settle before we go to bed. So far so good! She has been really glum, but today she seems to have perked up. She actually wanted to play! So I'm hoping she is feeling a little more settled which in turn I'm hoping will help her anxiety. We have banned the sofa for her for now, trying to encourage her to relax on her own bed! So it's work in progress for now, fingers and toes crossed.
Wouldn't it be perfect to be able to speak dog, if only for a day. It would make life so much easier

Well done re the crate! They really are very good for helping dogs settle - it sounds cruel to confine a dog in a cage, but they feel safe and secure in them, and can be very helpful with dogs suffering from SA in particular.

I agree with some of the points already mentioned.

If a dog associates the closing of the door as the owner leaves the house to always mean being left alone all day - then the anxiety kicks in straight away.

By practicing leaving the house and returning after 30 seconds, 10 mins, half an hour, 5 mins, 2 hours etc then the dog will eventually learn that the owner 'could' return any minute now.

I know one of the previous owners left her from 9 till 5 in her crate Monday to Friday, poor thing! So a little update (again not counting my chickens!)
We've had lots of crate time over the weekend, we decided to not leave her just get her used to it again. She was fine, so the test. School runs!
I've been using an audio recorder, which records everytime it picks up noise.
Just to put it into context, Friday before we introduced the crate we had 78 recordings in total. Today, using the crate we had a total of 2!! Early days, and like I say I'm not getting too excited yet that she's anyway near 'fixed' but we are definitely on the way