How to deal with anxiety in your dog

Anxiety in dogs can be caused by a number of things: illness, travel, thunderstorms, death in the family, separation, or they may develop unexplained phobic or neurotic behavior, or barking or other antisocial behavior.

If you can identify the cause of the anxiety, then the best solution to the problem is to remove the cause.

However, this is not always possible. If your dog experiences separation anxiety every time you leave the house and you work outside the home full time, you have a problem! I guess you could quit work and stay home with your dog, but sometimes we have to get a little real!

For this particular problem, there are a number of things you can do to ease your dog’s anxiety when you’re gone; many people have found that playing relaxing music while they are away works wonders.

Mozart? – that certainly used to calm my hyperactive son down a bit, so Mozart would be my personal first choice, but there are plenty of relaxing and new age classics, or even some light rock or jazz music could work – try what you have in your CD Collection to get started.

Another wonderful idea I read about recently is to make a tape recording of your own voice and play it in a continuous loop while you’re gone.

And there are certain homeopathic and herbal remedies that really do soothe your dog. So they may well help with your dog’s separation anxiety.

But what about dogs that are afraid of loud noises? My dog ​​Kara has an irrational fear of thunderstorms and a fear of fireworks and, well, actually, she is afraid of almost any loud noise. Many dogs are like this.

One New Year’s Eve when I was away, Kara forced her way under the house and escaped (due to being terrified of the exploding fireworks). My neighbors had to pick her up from the pound the next morning. Apparently the dog catchers are out in force on New Year’s Eve because they round up a lot of dogs and impound them! A nice little revenue booster for local authorities. From memory, it cost about $100 to get her back.

Anyway, I found that peppermint oil applied to their paw pads has a calming effect. And a natural stress remedy works great too.

A few years ago, before I got interested in natural remedies for dogs – it was actually after the fireworks incident – Kara was pretty determined to keep running away, for some reason. Once she realized that she could get out, she kept trying. She even she was destroying part of my house in her determination to try to get through the thick wooden boards she had placed to prevent further escape. So I took her to the vet as I didn’t know what to do with her. They prescribed an anti-anxiety medication. This made Kara quite ditzy and she seemed to take some of the personality out of her somehow. In other words, I guess she seemed drugged. I dindt like it at all

I now know that there are much more pleasant and natural anxiety treatments for dogs that do not have unpleasant side effects. And they really work just as well.

For more information on stress remedies for dogs, click here: http://www.StressRemedies.BrigitteRecommends.com

(c) 2005, Brigitte Smith, Happy Healthy Dogs