We all deal with stress from time to time, whether it’s related to work, our personal lives, our finances, our health – and a small amount of stress can actually be beneficial.
If you’ve ever felt stressed about making sure you’re buying the best dog food or training your dog in the best way, you’ll know that being a pet parent can cause stress at times, too!
And while it’s no secret that too much stress can have negative effects on our physical and mental health, did you know that our stress levels can also affect our dogs? That’s according to new research from Queen’s University Belfast.
Our dogs lead much less stressful lives than their ancestors did years ago, but they still have experiences that could be stressful, like vet visits and long journeys. And researchers in France found a few years ago that how a dog parent behaves at the vet will affect their dog’s stress levels.
However, until Aoife Byrne and Dr Gareth Arnott’s research at Queen’s University, nobody had looked at the effect of dog parent stress on their pups in a controlled environment. Their study looks at the effect of dog parent stress, measured through changes in heart rate, on the stress experienced by the dog while at the vet.
The research
Twenty-eight owners and their dogs took part in the experiment, with both humans and canines wearing heart-rate monitors throughout the experiment. The researchers then exposed the parents to either stressful or stress-relieving interventions, monitoring the effect it had on them as well as their dogs. The former involved a digital stress test and a verbal presentation task, while the latter was a five-minute guided breathing meditation video.
“We found that dogs’ heart rates decreased as they got used to the veterinary clinic environment,” Byrne and Dr Arnott wrote in The Conversation. “This suggests that vets should give dogs time to get used to the clinic before examining them. Not only will this reduce their stress, it may also improve the validity of any examinations or tests performed, as measures such as heart and respiratory rates can be elevated as a result of heightened stress.”
They also explained that changes in the parent’s heart rate from before to during the experiment could predict the dog’s heart rate changes, too, with the dog’s heart rate increasing or decreasing accordingly.
This suggests that dogs might be able to recognize stress in their parents, influencing their own stress levels – in something referred to as “emotional contagion”. This refers to when people or other animals can mimic the emotions and behaviors of others around them, whether they realize it or not.
It also suggests that dogs look to their parents to inform their response to a new environment. As the humans were asked not to respond to their dogs while the experiment was taking place, any assessment of their parents’ stress made by the dogs was done so without direct communication between the two.
It looks as though our stress can influence our dogs, so it’s important for us to keep this in mind when visiting the vet. If we stay calm during vet visits, and our vets encourage us to feel calm, we can help our dogs to stay calm, too.
As the researchers put it, “What is clear from our latest research is that dogs are perceptive animals that are influenced by the world and the people around them. People caring for or working with dogs should bear in mind that their own stress may affect that of their dogs.”
Worried about your dog’s stress levels? Why not try these 32 ways to destress your dog? Meanwhile, here’s how to calm a reactive dog.
