Signs of Stress

Signs of Stress

Are you able to confidently spot signs of stress that your dog or others might be giving off in everyday situations?

Some people answer this and say, “Yeah! It’s all in their tail…”

Well have I got news for you. There are so many signals our dog can be giving us at any one time. A lot of this goes unnoticed and sometimes without meaning to can end up in dangerous situations. How many times have you heard people say “Oh he has never done that before….” Or a “play session” that suddenly turns ugly?

Usually there were plenty of warning signs a dog would be giving out before it even gets to this. We as the other half of this bond can spot these and be there for our dogs. Again re-enforcing that ‘Safe place’ as mentioned last time. There are obvious ones like trying to walk away that are a very clear warnings but there are far more subtle ones before this. As humans we can all demonstrate signs of stress, biting nails, etc. and don't get me wrong, I wouldn't want you to think: “Oh my god my dog is so stressed!”. We all have moments of stress in our everyday lives, but making sure they don't get too much and trying our best to reduce these as much as possible is what we do.

As we were working on another project I noticed whilst editing that we had managed to capture on video lots of little signs of stress that our dogs were making during filming. None of these were anything particularly stressful as all the dogs were in familiar environments and know each other well. I just think as dog owners it’s useful to see these and be aware of seeing them in other dogs equipping us to know when to remove our dogs from certain situations if you can see they are overly stressed or not happy.