Stress and Dogs

Stress and Dogs

What is stress? ‘Stress is a lack of fit between the perceived demands of the environment and the perceived ability to cope with those demands.’ According to “The Primary Headship” Apr 2007.  It occurs in dogs as well as humans.

Di-stress

There are two types of stress. When they hear the word ‘stress’, most people think of the negative kind of stress, called ‘DIstress’. And example would be if a dog is fearful about a situation, a dog in a panic or in pain. Most dogs that have been subjected to punishment-based training exhibit signs of distress in their daily lives. You don’t have to look far for examples of those behaviors. Here’s a link that lists behaviors related to pain and distress. 

http://www.epettalk.com/forums/showthread.php?59883-Signs-of-pain-and-distress-in-dogs

Eu-stress

There is also good stress called ‘EUstress’. It can be healthy, pleasureable or curative. Eustress has a perceived positive outcome. An example of this would be excitement of meeting a person or pleasure of figuring out a puzzle during training.

Here’s a video showing a dog who is greeting her person after an extended absence. What signs of Eustress can you observe? http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ysKAVyXi0J4

Interestingly, a search for eustress on dogs on the web resulted in no pages containing behaviors to watch for. Here’s an article for humans: http://eishasarkar.blogspot.com/2010/08/eustress-good-stress.html

Hormones

 When a dog is stressed, she produces adrenaline and cortisteroids that act to give the dog extra energy or strength in the event of a physical emergency (increasing heart rate, breathing rate, increasing blood pressure, rate of conversion of glycogen to glucose etc) and to cope with emotional changes they experience in such events. If the dog produces these chemicals too often, it can wear down the adrenal glands and affect the dog’s immune system.

I propose that eustress can also build to the point that it is not healthy for a dog both acute and chronic situations. A common example of this is when a dog is playing with another dog. Play gets so exciting and rambunctious that it turns into a fight due to the excitement level. (In humans, an analogy might be laughing so hard you can’t breathe and end up choking.) Or if the dog is being hyped up all the time, so the dog doesn’t get a chance to fully recover from the excitement such as in a dog that gets too much exercise or training.

ACTIVITY

What types of situations trigger distress in your dog?

What situations trigger eustress?

Have you ever observed a eustress situation change into a distress situation? How about the reverse?

My example:

We had Jessie’s blood levels tested about 18 months ago for thyroid and adrenal function. She had been under stress for about 2 years after our senior dogs died and she became an only dog.  Some people would have called her a ‘fraidy cat’ in some common situations. The blood levels showed while her thyroid was on the low normal side (untreatable by conventional standards), her adrenal glands were being overtaxed. Interestingly, shortly after we got Lucy (our second dog), we noticed Jessie relaxed significantly in some of those situations. After a year of having the two dogs together, we took Jessie back in and had her blood re-tested. Adrenal glands were now functioning normally. So getting her a dog buddy was quite likely what helped Jessie be less stressed. (We have always had at least two dogs at any one time with that exception and little else changed in that time other than changing her diet from kibble to raw and decreasing the amount of training she got).