Help a dog deal with stress?

[Erica]

I was wondering if anyone had tips for helping a dog deal with stress. Amadeus does really badly with stress - it seems to build up quickly and stay for a long time. Is there a way to relieve stress? To prevent it building up? It makes it hard going, doing counter conditioning if he can only handle one dog encounter a week, and that only if the rest of the week is extremely low-stress (hint: most weeks aren't).

Also, any tips/brochures/short, easy to understand articles for his parents on stress in dogs? I'm going to try to find some of the good posts about stress (the water-in-a-glass metaphor, for example), but multiple sources are good, to show that it's not just me saying this.

[gwd]

I was wondering if anyone had tips for helping a dog deal with stress. Amadeus does really badly with stress - it seems to build up quickly and stay for a long time. Is there a way to relieve stress? To prevent it building up? It makes it hard going, doing counter conditioning if he can only handle one dog encounter a week, and that only if the rest of the week is extremely low-stress (hint: most weeks aren't).

Also, any tips/brochures/short, easy to understand articles for his parents on stress in dogs? I'm going to try to find some of the good posts about stress (the water-in-a-glass metaphor, for example), but multiple sources are good, to show that it's not just me saying this.

you're absolutely correct, the effects of stress are longer lasting than just the 'event' that caused the stress. adrenaline is the first culprit, but the cortisol effects can remain for days.

have amadeus's parents tried massage? that can be as relaxing for dogs as it is for people! also chewing is a stress reliever. i know some people swear by bach flower extract (rescue remedy) but i've not found it to be effective and i don't know of any study with a good experimental design that has shown efficacy.

[Erica]

Hmm, I don't think they have, but Ami doesn't like people near him when he's very stressed (he lets me near him because I will back off at the first tiny body language hint that he's uncomfortable). He gives a nice little "please keep away" growl that is hard to miss. he does like chewing on the dog toys they have. Would chewing on something destructible - bully sticks/Himalayan chews - be more satisfying, do you think?

I can try a massage after our walks and see if that reduces his overall stress levels. If he doesn't want them when he's very stressed, that's fine, but they might help! I will try!

[ladybug1802]

Have you tried a Thundershirt? There is no scientific reasoning behind them as to why they should work...but people swear by them. Mine does seem to help Dylan when he gets extr stressed at fireworks or thunder or something.

[Horace's Mum]

It depends a lot on the dog, but Horus can't survive without his oat tincture (avena sativa) and stressless, which is a magnesium supplement. He also needs regular stuff to really chew on, which is great now I have him on raw - he gets a massive bone twice a week which last for 2-3 days each time and allows him to chew as much as he wants. Before raw he had his dry food, biscuits and dried fish skins stuffed into a rubbery toy such as the orbee which meant he had to chew hard to break it up to get the food out which helped. But in the beginning with him, if we had a day out it would take a month to get him back to normal again, it gradually improved but time is sometimes just what needs to pass.

[bambiandbells]

it would really depend on why the dog was stressed- im not a professional so don't want to say too much, but i would have thought distraction would be the best method, such as providing a toy/removing the stress source (if possible obviously )
i study animal behaviour at uni, and our tutor once told us it takes 3 seconds for a dogs heart rate to reach maximum pulse during an excitable/stressful situation, but it takes up to 3 days for it to return to normal!

[jacksdad]

additional to the already given advice. what method are you using when you encounter/see another dog? It might not hurt to reevaluate how your handling his counter conditioning.

[Erica]

We don't see dogs on our daily walks - maaaybe once every three months - though we walk past a yard with dogs nearly every other day; it's either that fenced in yard or several invisible fence dogs that don't mind crossing their invisible line. Ami is okay going past the fence dogs, and we're on the other side of the street, which helps too. Overall we are about 30-40 feet from the yard, which is his average threshold. He's never lunge/bark/growl reacted to the yard dogs; the fact that there's a lot of space and a few trees between him and them, and that they've never gotten too close to him, seems to make him feel a bit better around them than other dogs. When we do see another dog on a leas, it's usually George starting his walk. George's owners and I will make a half-second decision on who goes back inside depending on which of us is closer to our respective house - Ami and George have a mutual hatred for each other, so it's avoid-at-all-costs. 

His owners do the same thing, though they used to let him approach (drag them to) other dogs. After he growled at one of them, they stopped. They don't understand the reasonings in-depth, but the kids sometimes go with their parents on walks and from what I've gleaned from the kids, the parents are honest when they say they have started avoiding other dogs. They leave the training/counter conditioning mostly to me, though if BAT seems a good fit for Ami I'll teach them about it and how to do it, etc. Counter-conditioning didn't do much for Ami so they decided that instead of risking a reaction because they overestimated Ami's threshold, they would avoid dogs until I figured out a way to work with Ami around them. 

We are going to start BAT with Ami later today or tomorrow, depending on schedules (with the 12 year old walking a fake dog and me handling Ami). Ami rarely takes treats outside at all - even high value meat or cheese which he goes nuts for inside is not worth it, whether we're in the backyard or on a walk. I do make sure Ami's training sessions happen when he has had a low-stress week and nothing strange is happening, to my knowledge, in the coming week. I'm hoping that he realizes his behavior has a direct effect on the environment around him, and that realization might make the training less stressful for him. 

I started this post a couple days ago and didn't finish it for some reason but Ami and I just did our first BAT session and he is currently refusing to get out of the car now that we're home...no idea what that's about but I'll take advantage of the break He refused to get out at home earlier, when I needed to go lock the door, but jumped right out at the park, so I don't think it's related to all that went on over there.

BAT so far seems pretty good for Ami! The main decoy dog today was a pretty husky girl at the dog park (we went to the same place I took Opal - until I can find some decoy dogs other than the fake one I have, that'll probably be our main setting...but once he's got the hang of it with Dummy the fake dog and the dog park we can do stealth BAT in more populous places, if we can't find decoys. Anyways, he didn't notice the dog park at first - the frisbee field was full of nice smells apparently - but first time he did notice them was probably about 100 feet away. He did a look away eventually and we ran away together, which he liked. Getting to run and pull me (on cue) is a pretty awesome reward in his opinion. After that, within a few trials we made it to less than 20 feet away, with the husky looking at us head-on. Ami took a bit longer but eventually sniffed and got his pull-me-around reward (I have to say that even on cue he doesn't want to do much more than lightly tug on the leash). By then there were groundskeepers coming to mow the field so I figured that was a good stopping point and we left. The groundskeepers complimented Ami and didn't say anything about our charging around like idiots.

From what I can tell at the moment Ami is no more stressed by BAT trials than other methods we've tried. He may just be more high-strung than Zeus or Opal, for example.

Does this seem like a good plan of action, or is there another way to deal with things that might work better?

Thanks for sharing the experiences and suggestions all! I'll go over them with his owners and see which are a best fit for him and them.

Sorry this post is so disjointed - it was written on my phone over a period of several days.

Edit: Just did a stress test with Ami - seeing how he asks me to stop grooming him and how much I can groom him before that happens - and he seems remarkably calm for having been to a relatively unfamiliar place, near several other dogs and strange people on loud machines. He asked me to stop by gently "kicking" me with his back leg, without otherwise moving. When he's really stressed (like the day after he goes to the vets or something similar) he'll do a breathy growl before I even sit down next to him, but he let me groom an entire leg and a bit of his stomach, which is about as much as he ever lets me do.

[jacksdad]

I am glad your trying something else. I was going to suggest BAT as one possible solution depending on what you had been doing and how the dog was acting when encountering it's trigger.

sometimes you have to mix it up so to speak. I started with the auto watch that Patricia McConnell advocates. It got us only so far, mostly I realize now due to my lack of proofing the watch me part. But there were other issues. I then went to any dog, any distance, almost any reaction by jack = treat. that really helped get us past that plateau in progress with auto watch. LAT has been very good for Jack, but ironically I am considering going back to rebuilding the autowatch/watch me on command to try and address some impulse control issues now that dog = good thing he does about 50% of the time seem to get over excited in a good way verse the old must drive away evil dogs way. BAT isn't something I have played with too much with Jack as his threshold distance is all over the map depending on the other dog and he has a tendency to "lock in" visually on the other dog.

Basically, I don't believe in having just one method. I have found 4 so far, autowatch, LAT, BAT and strait up classical conditioning that are all great tools. Not all dogs will need to use all of them. and you certainly don't want to just bounce around between them. you do (as I am sure you would) want to give each tool a really good go or notice a plateau in progress before changing things up. Also, all these methods share some very common ground but apply the concepts a little different and which you start with or use more than the others does really depend on how the dog reacts to it's trigger.

Anyway...all that too say this...I think you made a good choice to try BAT, I think your on the right track.

[Erica]

Ami's reaction to other dogs is to lock in on them visually, watch them carefully, then if they get closer he'll start bouncing (front-end jumps, sort of, not pulling towards the dog at first), then do low woo-woo barks with a little less bouncing, then the bouncing will turn into pulling - sort of lunging I guess, but he doesn't go back-and-forth, just forward - and he'll stop barking. Keep in mind that this is all from memory as he hasn't reacted in a while (good thing, I guess ), but is as accurate as I can recall. This is his reaction to his arch-enemy, and may vary from most dogs, but the locking-in part is definitely the case.

I tried to start him with "watch me" to progress to auto-watch, because of the locking-in part. However, even though he is GREAT at offering eye contact (when we're doing sit-stays, for example, he will crane his head around as I walk around him to keep eye contact, and offers it several times a minute on walks, and occasionally will keep up eye contact with me for 30+ seconds on boring parts of walks), he has trouble doing it on cue. It's one of the things we work on most every session (the others being auto stays and leave it) but it's slow going compared to his normal learning. Which is odd, but that's just how it is with him. I think it will be a valuable tool if we can get it working.

I do a version of "look at that," too, I guess, even if it's not the way LAT is used for reducing reactivity: I say "I see people" and point when I see something out of the ordinary (people, big trucks, deer, guinea hens). I use it to prevent him getting startled when he's distracted by a smell and a thing is approaching us; if he sees a person, for example, from a decent distance, he's fine with them passing us, but if they "suddenly appear" (ie he doesn't notice them until they're close) he locks in, starts bouncing a bit, though he rarely progresses to woodling and lunging. We'll work in some "sudden environmental change" work into his BAT eventually (or whatever we're doing at the time), but I think we'll keep it to dogs only for a bit...unless it's better to work that in now?

We used to do "stuff the puppy" when we saw other people/dogs, so counter-conditioning, back when he did get excited about treats outside. We sometimes try to do counter-conditioning but have yet to find a good thing to use. He has a few toys he really likes but he gets kind of weird and guardy with them on walks - I can't say 100% that he would be happy to get the toy outside; maybe 60% happy, 40% "something might try to steal this from me" guarding. He doesn't guard it from me - he doesn't see me as a threat, I guess, since I don't try to take things from him - but like I said, I'd be worried that it would build stress and not be a positive association.

I definitely agree that switching it up when we hit a wall is a good idea and I will keep it in mind for the future.

Thinking back on it, I feel that giving Ami a way to control his environment helps him deal with it. We will eventually have to get him used to not being in control, but that will be way in the future. For now, it gives him confidence.

Thanks for the encouragement and for sharing your experiences too!

[jacksdad]

I am starting to think that progress brings it's own challenges sometimes.