Stress can come in many different forms – it can be good or bad – it can save your life or it can cause illness, disease and eventually death.
Stress is meant to be short term, that is how all mammals have survived. A bunch of hormones that run through our brain and central nervous system turns off some parts of the brain and body, and turns on other parts (shooting in adrenaline and other hormones) to get us out of potentially dangerous situations. This is the good part of stress.
The bad part of stress is when it occurs for a long time – for days, weeks, months or years. This is almost like a malfunction of all those hormones that are running through our body, and your dogs body. If we look at the hormone adrenaline for instance, this naturally produce drug takes 48 hours to leave the body completely. Adrenaline is produced each time your dog becomes alert – dog barking down the street, person walking by the house, mailman on their postie bike, car slaming across the road. Adrenaline builds up with every little event, to the point where the dog finds in difficult or is unable to “bounce back” from stressful events.
This results is behaviour problems – excessive barking, escaping, digging, plus LOTS more. It also can result in illnesses and disease as a result of Stress.
It is best to think of these problem behaviours as an attempt (although unconsiously) to get rid of some of that stress build up. For people, we might come home an yell at our partner or the kids, we might go for a run, or smoke a cigarette to feel better, or eat a packet of Tim Tams all to ourselves. We do what ever we can to feel better – and guess what so does your dog!
So what does that mean to a dog owner – who dog does not “chill out” – well we have to teach them! It isn’t rocket science, but it is science. A systematic plan of counter condiditoning (changing your dogs mind) and desensitisation (making bad things seem ok) we are able to change your dogs life. It doesn’t matter the breed or the age of the dog – just like us learning is an individual experience – so the time frame may change for each dog – but the “chill out factor” is the same.
