Why does my dog follow me everywhere?

You are being followed. To the kitchen, to the bathroom, to the front door and back, and if you stop walking suddenly you get a nose in the back of the knee. Owners describe this to me either with total delight or mild despair, and the question underneath is usually the same one: is this normal, or is my dog too attached to me?

Both answers are true, depending on the dog. Following is one of the most ordinary things a dog does. It is also one of the few behaviours where the ordinary version and the version that needs help look almost identical from the sofa.

The plain reason, and it is not complicated

Dogs are social animals that were built to move around with their group, and you are the group.

There is no mystery in a species that spent thousands of years travelling with humans deciding to travel with a human. Puppies follow their mother, then they follow you, and most never see a reason to stop. Add the fact that you are the source of every good thing in the house, and following you is not devotion so much as excellent strategy. Food happens where you are. Doors open where you are. The lead lives where you are.

Some of it is breed. Working dogs bred to stay glued to a handler, the collies and the spaniels and most gundogs, tend to shadow harder than breeds that were left to make their own decisions. If you have a dog that was designed to check in with you every twenty seconds, the house is just a very small field.

You probably trained it without noticing

The second layer is the one owners are always slightly annoyed to hear about.

Following pays. Your dog gets up, walks to the kitchen behind you, and something happens: a word, a hand on the head, a dropped crumb, a “what are you doing, silly”. None of that feels like training. All of it is. It is the same machinery behind licking and jumping up, where the behaviour continues because the human keeps paying for it, usually without meaning to.

Boredom sharpens it too. A dog with nothing to do in its day has one hobby left, and that hobby is you. The shadowing often eases noticeably once a dog gets more to think about, which is why I nearly always ask about the walks and the enrichment before I discuss the following at all.

When following is worth a proper look

Most shadowing needs nothing. A smaller slice is a symptom.

The line is drawn at distress, not proximity. If your dog cannot cope with a closed door, cannot be left at all, paces or drools or barks when you are out of reach, or begins the anxiety before you have even picked up your keys, you are looking at separation anxiety rather than a companionable dog. That has a real training path and it is worth walking it properly.

Medical causes deserve the same respect. Dogs that feel rough seek company, and so do dogs whose senses are fading. A previously independent older dog that suddenly cannot let you out of its sight may be losing its hearing or eyesight, or slipping into canine cognitive decline, and that pattern shows up alongside the other signs of pain or unwellness more often than owners expect. Sudden is the key word. A dog that has followed you for nine years is being itself. A dog that started last month is telling you something.

Building an off switch without pushing your dog away

The goal is not a dog that leaves you alone. It is a dog that can.

Teach a settle properly. Give your dog a bed it likes, reward it generously for lying on it while you potter about, and gradually increase the distance and the boring-ness of what you are doing. You are paying for the choice to relax at a distance, which is the exact opposite of what most of us accidentally pay for. Keep it easy at first, because a dog that fails a settle is just practising getting up.

Then stop feeding the shadow. Not coldly, just neutrally: when your dog arrives at your heel in the kitchen for the ninth time, do nothing at all. No word, no glance, no hand. Save the attention for the moment it wanders off and lies down, which feels backwards and works anyway. Give the brain a job somewhere else too, with a food puzzle or a stuffed toy from our best toys for a bored dog roundup, so there is something in the day that is not you.

Most dogs land somewhere sensible within a fortnight, still following you about because they like you, but perfectly able to hear a door close and go back to sleep.