00:00:02 Speaker 1: Hey, everyone, welcome to The Houndation's podcast. I'm your host, Tony Peterson, and today's episode is about stress in dogs, anxiety and dogs, and you know how to recognize that, how to deal with the behaviors that come from that. It's sometimes impossible to believe that some dogs are capable of ever being even like a little bit remotely stressed out, but they can be. All of them can be, And even the most mild mannered, lovable goofball Golden Retriever is capable of becoming a ball of anxiety in the right situation. And when that happens, weird behaviors often follow. But it's sometimes difficult to link to stressful event to current behavior, which is what this episode is really all about. My wife and I have an ongoing fight. Well, we have a couple of them, but this one in particular involves our twin twelve year old daughters and the idea that if they aren't in it these twenty seven activities at one time, we are failing miserably as parents. Now. I don't know what it is, but us gen xers and those older millennials out there, we just decided that even though the odds of our children going pro and any sport are about I don't know, the same as the odds that one day cow will wake up and suddenly shave his mustache off. We decided it's best if they play some sports all year long, even when they are in middle school. Plus we tack on a lot of extra activities and clubs and you name it. This is in addition, of course, to a full school schedule. So not only are we asking our kids to sort of work almost a full time job, we also tell them they need to put in a lot of overtime and they will be damn happy to do it. The old blonde buzzkill who married me thinks this is an amazing way to raise kids. I, on the other hand, think it's kind of dumb and unfair to them. I think when you live vicariously through your kids' activities, you rob them of afternoons to just go catch some frogs, or play with the neighborhood kids, or just do kids stuff that simply isn't organized, you know, at least partially for the parents' benefit. I'm not against kids playing sports, mind you. I think it's great. I think they should try a lot of different sports and activities to see what suits them best, if that's at all possible. I also think we should look at the rosters of high school varsity teams across the country and pay attention to the reality that a lot of them are full of younger kids that needed to be pulled up to fill the gap from the older kids who mostly belong on those teams but have bailed. No. Sure, there are some I don't know, superstar eighth graders who should play varsity to hone their skills and allow them to really develop. Most aren't there, though, and never will be. And a lot of those kids who are pushed to play year round basketball or hockey or volleyball, they drop off the team when they hit high school, which means we got to bring up younger kids to fill those spots. Now. I know this isn't a guarantee, but it seems to be happening a lot lately, and I doubt it's a coincidence. I work out at the local YMCA a lot, and from some of the stations in the weight room you can see the hockey rink where a lot of the local teams practice. When you see eight year olds lugging hockey bags, in there in June or July. You have to wonder how many of them are already feeling the pressure of having to perform. You know, the answer probably isn't zero. Now, some kids stick to it because they love the game and the camaraderie and the competition and the self improvement and all that stuff. But a lot of kids, especially lately, are checking out when they get old enough to finally have some autonomy over their lives and say no, there's too much pressure, too much stress for too long, and something gives the worst part about this is that we as parents often cause this, and we have no idea it's even happening until it manifests itself in bad behavior or behavior we view as bad anyway. You know what other situation this very closely mirrors that can result in unacts, affected and often negative behaviors out of something we love dearly. Yeah, you guessed it. Are dogs? I know you think, Well, not my dog. My little fluffy butt is spoiled, rotten and doesn't want for a thing. I'm the best dog paring out there. Well, it doesn't work that way. To understand this, it's best to think about what is probably the most universal type of stress on our dogs, which is separation anxiety. Now, there are two ways to kind of look at separation anxiety. You might have one of the roughly fifteen percent of dogs out there that can claim separation anxiety is just sort of a fundamental condition of their existence. These are the dogs that can't handle it when you go to work or when you leave them home for a few hours to go to Target to get some groceries. Now, these are extreme cases, but not always belonged to dogs that had a rough go of it as puppies, but not always the case. I owned a Golden Retriever once who was like this, and she was treated pretty well as a puppy. Then you have the less obvious separation anxiety, which is kind of entirely situational and maybe tied more to fear than anything, which is something I'll get to in a second. But either way, both of my dogs, for example, particularly to my older dog, can get separation anxiety in a horrible way. But she doesn't get freaked out if I leave the house for a couple hours. It happens when she sees me stuffing clothes into a duffel bag or some sort of carry on luggage. You see, dogs are pack animals, and when the leader goes missing, it seems to send bad vibes into their world. With my older dog, Luna, she views me packing up as an activity that will separate us. She'll lay at the top of the stairs with her paws crossed and her head down on them and just mope adorably. If I'm headed out on a trip where she doesn't get to go along, it's almost a guarantee that she'll get physically sick. Sometimes that's a situation where she'll urgently let my wife her daughters know she needs to get to the yard fast, and sometimes she has no way to get to the yard, and breakfast will come out one under the other, often in the corner of a basement. I think there are a couple of reasons why Luna acts this way. For starters, we got her as a pup when we had two babies. She didn't get a quarter of the love and attention our current pup gets because there just wasn't enough to go round. When she did get love and training and just attention, it was almost always from me. And when she got to go hunting, which is her favorite thing in the world, to do. It was always from me. Now I have been the conduit to everything she needs in life, her whole life, and so when she sees the familiar activities of me packing up for another trip, she spirals because she knows that I might not take her and we will be separated. This is the kind of stuff you don't see coming when you're working with a one year old dog, but it happens, and it sucks. It's gotten to the point where sometimes my wife will take Lunau to the park or something so I can pack my truck up and she doesn't have to see it. She still gets pissed at me when I leave, but she doesn't have hours and hours to stress over it. And that's an important distinction, because stress has a way of compounding in dogs and to be fair, people too. What might not be one single huge event that would send your dog spiraling might just be a single layer of stress. The impact a few days later might be as minimal as them just not training as well as usual, just not being so crisp, or maybe not listening as well, you know, when you take them on their evening walk. But if that stressful event happens and then something else happens that's stressful. Those behaviors, you know, they can come out a few days later and they might be a lot worse. This can be hard to recognize, but you know when it happens, you know it's easier to spot. So let's say you have a lovable dog that isn't a fighter, but you go to the park or to some outside event you bring and she meets another female dog that makes a lunge for her neck, or maybe they just get into a scrap for a few seconds before you break them up. You might not connect that to your dog having an accident in the house or chewing on a chair leg when it hasn't exhibited that behavior in three years, but that might be the result of a one off stressful event earlier in the week, or the stressful event that layers on top of some other low grade stress and finally manifests itself with bad behavior. Now, you can't avoid every situation that might stress your dog out, nor should you try. It is important to understand how stress affects dogs and how to mitigate some of it. Take fear related anxiety and stress. For example, our next door neighbor, who I say this with only love in my heart. Probably shouldn't be allowed to own a goldfish given her life situation, but she went out and got a Cane corso puppy. Now, if you don't know what that is, it's an Italian breed of mastiff. In the not two distant past, this dog breed, you know, which tends to be pretty good size and pretty much jacked, was used to herd cattle or big game hunting and for protection. It's a dog that's used to having a job, or sometimes several, so when it's put inside a house or a fence backyard for all of its existence, it will exhibit some undesirable behaviors that aren't just related to not getting trained enough. You know. For example, that dog is terrified of my daughter's and eye, and it lets us know that by barking at us non stop. When we approach the fence and introduce ourselves for the ten thousandth time, that dog will growl, bark and charge us and fits and starts. It's scared of my daughter's but absolutely terrified to me, which the owner says isn't uncommon. The dog doesn't like men, which happens, but it's also scared of its own shadow. So to win this dog over, we started carrying a handful of treats with us when we head to the backyard to shoot our bows. If the dog is out, she'll eventually take a few treats from us and settle down for a bit. My hope is that over time I can treat train my neighbor's dog to just shut up when we are outside if nothing else. And while there are quite a few reasons why that dog might not have the best behavior, I think it's pretty safe to assume that it's living a stressful lifestyle. Some folks might think lying around all day and having your food and basic needs met by someone else is the closest thing to dying and going to heaven. But a dog with the genetic ingredients to work and hunt and be active all of its life is going to be stressed out by that lifestyle by not having a job. So often we think we are giving dogs what they need because it's something we want to give them. That's not how it works. We have to give them the things they actually need to take the physical and mental edge off. We have to look at their fear beast behaviors and ask ourselves not only why, but what now? The why part of that equation is good to try to figure out because it helps with the what now part. Take a conversation I had with a buddy of mine recently who has a three year old lab. It's his first dog, and he's done a great job of training it, he really has. But his dog is quirky in ways that I've never seen. And during that recent conversation, he told me that when he went to take his dog for a walk in the woods, the dog sat down and wouldn't go. Now, keep in mind, this is a hunting dog. He's been in the woods and in the fields and in the water his whole life, and it has without doubt been his happy place. But suddenly he was scared to go where he has gone so many times before. My buddy was at a loss, and so was I. I think maybe his dog got stung by a few bees or something on their last trip, and there's sort of a negative associate with that spot, But that's just a guess. It was a new fear, and they worked through it by going to easy environments like wooded parks and other spots that are kind of like the woods. He's afraid of but kind of not like soft immersion therapy. It's like he had to recondition his dog to being an outdoor loving hunting dog in any environment where the fear comes from matters, but not as much as addressing how to get dogs past it. This can be frustrating because it seems so irrational, which it is. But I've talked about phobia's on here before and how it's not all that rational for us to be deathly afraid of spiders or mice, or in my wife's case, fish that are swimming in the same water as her. If we don't hold ourselves to the standard of rational fear, we probably shouldn't hold our dogs to it. We have to help them work through it, which will destress their lives and make the whole thing better. Dog training guru Tom doc And has a way to frame this up for us, using an example that just dumbs down the whole thing. He often says that if you were wildly afraid of skateboards, but he needed you to get on one for some reason, or at least not be wildly afraid of them, I guess he'd put one hundred dollars bill on one and roll it in your direction. Since one hundred dollars is about what it takes to take the wife and kids to mcdonald'sy's days, you might rethink your aversion to skateboards. If that happened three times a week, you might start looking forward to that skateboard rolling in your direction. Over time, with dogs, something super positive around something that is super stressful can accomplish the same thing. Now, I don't want to have to bring treats in my pockets every time I'm in my backyard shooting my bows or catching frogs with the girls, But I know eventually that dog will view me as a supplier of something she loves and not a representation of something that she fears and that stresses her out. Not everything can be remedied with a caloric reward, however, and not all dogs are super food driven. But since I own labs, I'm not really familiar with any of them. But if you look at separation anxiety, for example, especially the kind of daily, low grade separation anxiety that happens I like when you go to work, there are ways to mitigate that. Think about what happens if you take your dog for a walk before you go to work, or you know if you have a sporting dog, what happens if you head out to toss the dummy for them for twenty minutes and run through some retrieving drills before you head to the office. That might be all it takes to take the edge off, you know, dull the energy level a little bit, and keep the stress to an absolute minimum. A lot of what causes stress related behaviors in dogs can be tied awful closely to pent up energy. In severe cases, where you know, anxious just seems to be the natural state of certain dogs. You know, there are medications and natural therapies. The effectiveness of these seems to vary quite a bit. And while this is a conversation for you to have with your vet and not something you should take as gospel from some dude who writes squirrel hunting articles for a living, I'll say this. Look at this like it's not a magic elixir, but a complementary option in addition to managing their anxiety with other methods. Putting a dog on some SSRIs or antidepressants or using CBD oil or whatever can be a valuable piece of the puzzle, but it probably won't solve the whole thing. Exposure training, desensitization training, and a willingness to examine what your dog really needs in physical and mental stimuli and then delivering on that is often the best route. Now, this is different than treating a dog for a likely stressful event like I don't know, Fourth of July fireworks, which might be something you have to work with for just one day a year. If you notice your dog has certain bad behaviors like barking or pacing, or obsessing over going outside or blowing muddle over your basement, but it's not really consistent that might be what you're dealing with, try to find the source of the stress. Think about what might be causing the dog to revert to those behaviors and how you'll address them. Sure, some things are unavoidable, like unfortunately, you might just have to go to work five days a week, and as much as that sucks for your dog and probably for you, it's just the case you're going to have to work around that. But what if it's just I don't know, you not getting the dog enough exercise or setting up a few fun drills so your dog can problem solve and use its brain. Then a little self reflection and a change in your behavior can make all the difference or a lot of the difference in the stress and anxiety level in your dog. This is also I should say before I wrap this episode up a moving target. You might have a dog develop severe anxiety later in life, which sometimes happens with older dogs, like really older dogs, and it's heartbreaking to sea. Or there might just be some encounter with something somewhere that unlocks a new fear and your dog the bad behaviors will let you know that something entered its life which is having a negative effect, especially if they are even remotely consistent bad behaviors. Because any dog can have an accident in the house, and it might be as simple as eating a dead mouse they find in the yard or something else that doesn't agree with their stomach, or it might not be so linear, and that accident in the house that happens once a week or a couple times a month could very well be related to stress and anxiety. This is stuff to think about and be aware of as a dog owner. So do that and come back in two weeks because I'm going to drop an episode on how dogs have shaped the deer hunting culture in this country. For a long time, and honestly the big game hunting culture all over the world in a story that's pretty cool. That's it for this week. I'm Tony Peterson and this has been The Houndation's podcast. I want to thank you so much for listening and for all your support here for not only this podcast, but everything we got going on on Cal's network and in the broader meat eater sphere here. We really appreciate you checking out the website for articles, you know, how to articles, recipes. There's a ton of podcasts on there in case you need to kill some time when you're taking a road trip out to bird hunt somewhere, and a heck of a lot of videos to check out if you're bored at work and your boss isn't going to walk into your office, so you can head on over to the mediater dot com and check those out. But again, thank you so much for your support.