In the News

Summer in Minnesota means time at cabins and lakes enjoying outdoor activities. For our pets, the summer is the most exciting time of the year, but unfortunately, it can also be the most stressful time of year. Many dogs can get very anxious and even fearful of things like thunderstorms, fireworks, and travel.

There are many things we can do for our pets to help make some of these stressful events a little easier for them to handle. The most important part of any strategy starts with you. Remember that our pets feed off our energy and stress. As owners, if we get worked up, our pets will respond in kind. If we try to console and comfort them too much, we are affirming their feelings that something is wrong and they have reason to be stressed.

The best approach to your pet is to stay calm and act as though nothing is wrong or different. It is by no means a way to resolve their stress, but it can make a big difference. Whenever possible, it is important to try and desensitize your pet to stressful experiences. Car rides are a good example of an experience that our pets can be conditioned to respond to more positively. Starting with very slow and short rides in the car around the neighbor-hood that end in a handful of treats or food is a great way to desensitize them to the experience before you take a long trip to northern Minnesota.

There are several other tools that are very safe and effective in helping to relieve some of your pet’s anxiety. The Thunder-shirt® and similar products are tight-fitting garments that apply constant gentle pressure to create a calming/swaddling effect by releasing endorphins. Thundershirts®, specifically, have been found to also repel static electricity, reducing thunderstorm anxiety. These products don’t work in every situation, but a large majority of dogs show at least some improvement in their anxiety while wearing them. Another safe and simple tool is pheromone products like Adaptil (dogs) and Feliway (cats). These synthetic pheromones are designed to mimic the calming pheromones a mother dog or cat would emit around its puppies or kittens. We use these products to help reduce the stress our patients experi-ence at our hospital, and they can be very helpful during stressful times like thunderstorms, fireworks, and traveling. There is also a variety of over-the-counter supplements that are sold as daily treats to provide to your pet daily, and most of these products contain natural calming ingredients such as tryptophan and green tea extract.

In some cases, the anxiety and fear are too great to overcome using these approaches alone, and we look toward medications for relief. The goal of medications is to reduce the stress to a tolerable level for our pets. Remember not to use sedatives or other anxiety-relieving medications in your pets without first consult-ing with your veterinarian. They can be used as a tool to help treat the anxiety, but the best results come when we use medications in combination with desensitizing our pets to stressful events, taking a calm and relaxing approach in response to their stress, and using products like Thundershirts®, pheromones, and calming treats to help relieve their stress.