My dog won't let me take her on walks after my wife and I switched schedules.
I have a 4 year old German shepherd/lab that my wife and I have had since she was 4 months old. She has always been a bit anxious, loud noises easily spook her. We hired a private trainer after we first got her to help us go over the basics of training her and for the most part she is pretty good but she does sometimes have some reactivity towards other dogs and resource guarding. We just hired another private trainer to help with these issues, we just had our second session with them and we've gone over clicker training and identify and deal with her targeting things.
We've always taken her on 2 walks a day, once in the morning and then again in the evening. For the past few years my wife and I have both worked from home, my wife would take her out in the morning, and I would take her out in the evening. On weekends I would take her out in the morning on my own or we both would together.
But in January I started a new job and now work in office. We continued with the same schedule of me walking her when I got home from work and all was well.
Then about a month ago my wife got a new job where she has to start work at 8am, she is still at home mostly (she might go into the office once or twice a month), so we switched it up so that I take the dog out in the morning and my wife takes her out in the evening since I can show up at work whenever I want.
The problem is that my dog won't leave the yard when I try to take her out, including in the evenings now. When I take her out and only goes as far as smelling across the street, otherwise we just walk around the house several times and we end up in the backyard where she plays a bit. During this time I do some training with her but she ends up easily distracted and looks inside the house for my wife.
The other day I drove up the road to the park just to get her away from the house and it worked out fine. But today when I tried, as soon as we got out of the car we heard a loud noise like a car backfiring and she was done and beelined for the car. I drove up the road to another park but she wasn't having it there either. I barely got her out of the car and when I did she didn't want to go anywhere and wanted back inside the car. When we got back home and went under the bed, which is where she usually spends her time during the day, we have a crate for her but she prefers under the bed.
She definitely has some kind of separation issues with my wife. She will happily go on walks if my wife is with her. I feel bad because this puts a lot of pressure on my wife and I feel bad for my dog because if she's not out with my wife she's usually under the bed. Although she will go outside in the yard a couple times throughout the day
I'm assuming the issue is deeper than her just not wanting to go on walks with me but we aren't sure what to do about it and what the underlying cause is.
Anything we should address with our trainer or that we can try on our own?
Thanks for your help!