The content of the two papers Reviewer 1 mentions here focussed on the impact of the pandemic on management changes in dogs and on dog owner experiences at a single time point during the most restrictive ‘lockdown’. The current paper is different to either of these, and indeed any other published paper, in that it focusses on changes in separation related behaviour over time, across two different surveys in a longitudinal cohort. The paper is about separation-related behaviour, not about the pandemic. The changes in leaving routine that occurred during the pandemic afforded the opportunity to study what impact this had on a large population of pet dogs over time, that would otherwise have been impossible to capture at such scale. The topic is unique and important in that it adds evidence for an association that has previously been supposed or observed by individual practitioners, but not demonstrated in the published literature, and certainly not on this scale.
A catchy topic, but its content is unoriginal, bringing nothing new to the pre-pandemic science. It seems that the authors of this study have already tackled this topic exhaustively in their previous articles