Does your chihuahua follow you everywhere? If you pop to the loo does she wait
outside? Have you wondered why your chihuahua feels the need to follow you
around the house? Is it bad for her and should you try and curb the habit?

Does your chihuahua follow you everywhere? If you pop to the loo does she wait outside? Have you wondered why your chihuahua feels the need to follow you around the house? Is it bad for her and should you try and curb the habit?

Chihuahuas seem to have a special talent for this behaviour, especially if you are their ‘designated favourite.’ Picking a ‘favourite’ is a chihuahua idiosyncrasy. Once you have been chosen you are the one they want to be with all the time. 

Should your chihuahua follow you about?

A lot of people think it’s kinda cute, you pop to the toilet and you have your own little parade of chihuahuas following you. Tails wagging like flags. But there are a few issues with encouraging your chihuahua to follow you everywhere.

Separation related behaviours

It entirely possible that your chihuahua becomes anxious when your not there, the more this is encouraged and rehearsed the bigger the dangers of SRB. (Separation related behaviours). A dog that struggles to cope when your not there is a dog under stress. You may start to get unwanted behaviours like crying and whining when left to chewing and creating nasty hot spots. SRB is time consuming to unpick and it really is better not to let it develop.

It can pay into barking behaviours.

It might seem strange but excited barking behaviour can be an unintended consequence of following you about. To see why this is you need to understand some about your chihuahua’s emotional bucket. So if you haven’t read the post on this I would check it out. Basically, how full your chihuahua’s emotional bucket is will have an impact on behaviour. Some of the things that fill your chihuahua’s bucket are, excitement, tiredness and stress. All dogs need to have an appropriate amount of rest in the day. Chihuahua do a lot of ‘chi-miles’, just charging around the house on little legs. When they get up and follow you this disturbs rest. They are always on the go watching for you to move. Tiredness and an overfull bucket creates barking at noises and reactivity. When they are barking, this creates excitement, which fills the bucket and creates more barking. They then start to rehearse this behaviour and then in comes trigger stacking. It becomes a cyclic hot mess that is hard to unpick.



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