Signs indicate that your dog may suffer from anxiety – 7/8/2023 – Science

We tend to think that joy, fear, and sadness are emotions that are unique to human beings. But science is discovering, little by little, that this statement is totally incorrect.

On July 7, 2012, an international group of neuroscientists met in the city of Cambridge, UK, and drafted the well-known Cambridge Declaration on Consciousness.

In short, experts have determined that our species is not unique in possessing the neurological underpinnings that generate consciousness. In other words, non-human animals have the capacity to have feelings and, therefore, can manifest intentional behavior.

This also applies to the ability to experience the feeling, which is the subject of this article: anxiety.

In both dogs and people, anxiety is simply a form of reaction to certain problematic situations. But when it exceeds a certain intensity or exceeds the adaptive capacity, anxiety becomes pathological.

warning signs

How can we identify if our dog is in this state?

Different forms of behavior indicate your willingness to escape the feeling of restlessness, nervousness, insecurity and malaise.

Anxiety arises when the dog has the expectation that something bad is about to happen. This expectation triggers the sympathetic nervous system, responsible for the body’s reactions to dangerous or stressful situations, causing the animal to manifest an intense behavior.

When anxiety is pathological, the symptoms that we can find are: continuous alertness, hyperactivity, excessive licking, hair loss, digestive problems, howling, tremors, moaning, excessive barking, exaggerated fear, aggressiveness and destructive behaviors, which can increase when dogs are left alone.

The situations capable of provoking this pathological anxiety are also diverse: fear of being alone, noises like fireworks, storms or traffic… any incident that exceeds your adaptability or that is frequently repeated can trigger anxiety.

These are often problems generated by human misunderstanding of their needs, as a species and as an individual.

Diagnosis and treatment

If prolonged, pathological anxiety can cause diseases over time, such as disorders of the gastrointestinal system, increased incidence of tumors or changes in the immune system, not to mention the damage to coexistence between species.

Added to this is our sadness and frustration at seeing a pet suffering, not knowing how to help it.

The first step in treating anxiety, after being diagnosed by the veterinarian, is behavioral therapy, conducted by an ethologist, or specialist in animal behavior.

Medicines can be administered if the specific case requires it, also under the control of the veterinarian.

This intervention can be compared to that of the psychologist and the psychiatrist in human beings. The psychologist specializes in understanding behavior, while the psychiatrist is dedicated to mental disorders and their pharmacological treatment.

Although each case has its own particularities, behavioral therapy should include the following objectives:

• Reduce the dog’s stress levels;
• Teach him to manage problematic situations;
• Offer resources for him to calm down;
• Reduce your sensitivity to the precursor signs of anxiety. The animal can interpret our actions of picking up the keys, putting on the coat or putting on the shoes, for example, as the previous step to being alone. We must clarify to him that this does not necessarily mean that we will leave;
• Assign the dog a clear role in the family. We need to do activities with him to make him feel integrated, like playing or going out for a walk, so that the dog and the owner have fun;
• Make the dog socially independent. That is, we cannot be with him all the time, nor solve all his problems.

If the learning process is difficult because the anxiety levels are too high or because of the animal’s specific circumstances, the process needs to be supplemented with medication.

It may be convenient to resort to medication, for example, when the dog feels anxiety when left alone and, as its guardians work, it needs to spend at least eight hours without company. The dog cannot be in a continuous state of distress.

It is also necessary to understand that, in the same way as in our species, there are circumstances that generate prolonged stress — which lead to the “state of anxiety” — and profiles that are more anxious by nature, the so-called “anxiety trait”.

The search for the causes of pathological anxiety and its control should not be restricted to controlling the consequences of using medication, but should also improve the attention we offer them as sensitive, social beings who need appropriate activities for each individual.

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*Nuria Máximo Bocanegra is an occupational therapist, professor in the Department of Physiotherapy, Occupational Therapy, Rehabilitation and Physical Medicine, as well as director of the Animal Research and Society chair at the King Juan Carlos University, in Spain.

Mónica Kern, a canine educator who specializes in guide dog training and is a volunteer at the animal-assisted intervention organization “Perruneando Madrid”, in Spain, collaborated with this article.

This article originally appeared on The Conversation academic news site and is republished here under a Creative Commons license.