Does your dog struggle with the loud bangs that come with fireworks? Prior to the 4th of July for those in the USA and the 5th of November in the UK I get a flurry of enquiries from people needing help to calm their dogs for fireworks night or there are other pets but unfortunately in that small period sometimes only a few days in advance it's really too late to do anything meaningful with helping sound sensitivity with your pets.
The time to start is months before and what's so frustrating for me is these are two occasions where we have prior warning of this occurring and in order to be proactive with supporting your dog you do need to start early. Now there's a variety of different ways to help your dogs from diffusing calming oils to food and the best approach is actually a multi-layered one where you utilize lots of different factors in order to get the the calm dog that you want to get but these all take time to do. A lot of people get in touch with me because they want some essential oils and they feel that that is enough but they do not work like fairy dust you just don't just sprinkle them along around the floor and then suddenly your dog's going to be calm and in actual fact if you do do that when fireworks are going off or whenever there is a negative trigger occurring you actually risk making that odour become a negative association for your dog instead of the calming one you want. Despite that oil having therapeutic benefits for calming, so the next time you spray it they actually have a negative reaction because it builds an odour memory with the thing that they're scared of like the bangs, the traffic, the dog next door, the person coming to the house and so on.
The key thing with building a calm dog is giving yourself time to do it, it's all about the compound effect, small changes make a massive difference so you literally start small now.
One of the best ways to do this is with sound desensitization you can access many different things on YouTube or buy certain CDs and things like that that have firework noise. Now people will often say to me “but they don't work” they do work if you have used them correctly and allowed enough time to do so. The key thing is you need to start off at a very very low volume, if that's too triggering you need to do it in another room all the time working with your dog to help keep them calm. Literally five minutes a day and if five minutes is too much you drop it down to two and a half minutes for example.
Separately you're going to work on calming using maybe essential oils so you're going to start using them when things are calm you are going to choose a couple of oils that are very therapeutic for calming and you will start off wiith your chilled and relaxed. You might diffuse those as well so your dog associates that aroma with that calming sensation and that's in addition to the therapeutic effects that that calming essential oil actually offers as well. So you are really making a very strong association with that aroma and being chilled.
Other things to look at are calming activities don't just introduce some calming games when your dogs are already stressed because that's actually not going to work so start playing these games teaching your dog how to play these games in the months leading up to fireworks night. I love doing scent work and getting my dog to search and you can get little scent walls I'll probably do a much bigger post on this because it's going to be too much to go into but you can actually choose teach your dog to to search a really easy thing to do is have a treat or a stuffed Kong start making easy finds around the house slowly building up to where they have to search more. Or getting a couple of cardboard boxes and hiding a treat in them box and then they search for the treats. These are really easy ways to to build that activity and get them using their nose and building up to hunting round the house to find the rewards.
The next thing to look at is calming massage and things like that and again you want to be getting your dog used to that kind of touch before fireworks night so you can have a cuddle on the sofa and you're actually reinforcing that calmness, acupressure points working from the just above where the eyes are working back along the forehead down around to the back of the neck and going towards the back of the ear is a really nice way to calm your dog and apply some oils there that they already like see my video to learn about this more but any sort of gentle massage using effleurage movements are going to be very very soothing.
Also look increasing their fun while they're eating now I'm I have a mixed view about slow feeders I think sometimes it can increase frustration things I do like are Kongs you can freeze kongs there's lots of different things you can put in them, I would put in some peanut butter at the bottom to plug the hole and some yogurts and banana you might want to do another little swirl of peanut butter I might add in some other things like apple and top with some cheese and maybe some jellied bone broth then put maybe a fish skin at the end and then freeze it. When you give it while the main body is defrosting they're chewing on the fish and this is going to keep them sort of nicely occupied. Other things are platters so I like bamboo platters where again you can spread some yogurt on it or some peanut butter and add in some other little foods. It may be some scraps of chicken, maybe a few blueberries, some cooked mushroom, chicken, bits of cheese, maybe a few olives. Lots of different things try lots of different textures and find out what your dogs likes, get them used to these things before the night in question.
Now the other thing that people often make the mistake of as well is exercise now when we exercise we are pumped up and cortisol is running around our body because we have exercised now cortisol is also a neurotransmitter that is elevated when we are stressed so taking your dog out for a two hour hike before the fireworks goes off is actually going to be counterproductive because they are already going to have lots of cortisol going through their body and that is going to be elevated more when they are scared. Think about that emotions bucket so do the walk in the morning to make sure they've got time to get rid of that cortisol- diffuse your essential oils to assist so that before the fireworks start to go off your dog is nicely prepped.
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