Traveling with an anxious pup

If you're new here you might not know my dog has some pretty bad anxiety. Generalized/social not separation.  He's cool with being alone. He does seem to also suffer from FOMO a little too and throws a fit when we leave though. But if you read about Tuckers anxiety it goes into depth about him, but he is medicated for it. He takes prozac daily and when something particularly stressful we have gabapentin.  

Every year for Christmas we travel 6 hours north to my sister's house, she's a dog person so Tucker comes with me. It's a long car ride, and some of the basic things like people shadows lights windshield wipers all set him off really bad.   I am 99.99% confident that Tucker will not go up and bite someone, he's safe to be around. Just not to pet. But traveling with him is mildly unpleasant. So here are some tips and tricks that made our adventure a bit more enjoyable.

Medication

So tucker was prescribed prozac for daily use and gabapentin for really bad days like vet appointments. So what we do is take the prozac as normal, but then the night before I give him a gabapentin and again the half hour before we take off, Definitely check with your vet before "double dosing" my vet suggested this when one before the appointment wasn't quite enough. Again both of these medications were prescribed and are taken as per vet recommendation. I also used Zippy Paws calming chews. Collectively they made the trip not too unbearable 

Kennel

I tried crate training tucker, it lasted almost a year. Currently he's gated in the kitchen at night and when we're gone. my kitchen is essentially dog proof, there's nothing he can reach to get into, and he respects the safety gate. But he does still find security in the kennel away from home. my sister's house doesn't have smallish space to gate my gremlin in which is why we started bringing the kennel. He goes into it happily at night and when we leave, or just when my sister's dog is tryna play too much.  But in the car it's so comforting. Putting him in the kennel when we run in for potty breaks keeps him out of trouble.  I also found that I can cover 3/4 sides and that also helps keep him at ease and my legs don't get scratched and bruised from him standing unsettled on my lap.  He did not stay the whole trip in the kennel, but he did spend most of the drive in it.

Food

I use food/hand feeding as a reward for almost everything. I'd never used treats for training not a majority of training, just the hard things. So whenever something that made tucker particularly anxious I would just toss a couple pieces of food. or I would use the food to lure him into a "down". Unfortunately that will only work until he is full which happened for the first time on our trip.  

Comfort

In the end I had decided that he would be best pulled out and kept in my lap which is a place where he feels safe at. I don't try to hold or cuddle him because he doesn't like it. But allowing him to be in my lap not petting below his collar does help and so I make sure to stick to scratching his ears. His ideal safe space is on top of my shoulders over my head and if it were practical I would have let him but that's not really possible in a car.  

I did continue giving him his prozac and the calming treats the three days we were there and kept the gabapentin for the car ride home. which we survived that as well even though we had to use the windshield wipers. Luckily I wasn't the one driving otherwise that would have been so much more difficult. He did have a really good weekend and was very calm despite the chaos. He decided my pillow was his spot and would only lay on it on her couch, but that made it easy he stayed in his preferred spot close to me but not so close we were touching. 

If you have any tips on how to travel with an anxious dog, please leave it in the comments.  Or if you try any of these let me know how they worked out for you and your anxious bff.