By veterinary nurse Isabelle Newhouse
Fireworks can be extremely distressing for our dogs and their owners and can have longer lasting effects on welfare than just a couple of hours of fear.
I have yearly customers that come to our self-catering accommodation with their dogs and cats to escape the city fireworks. The easiest way to help your dog to cope with fireworks night is to plan ahead.
Here are some steps I would recommend taking.
Plan your walks and toilet breaks for when it is light outside. If there are local firework displays plan toilet breaks around these planned events.
Create a safe space for your dog. Use a covered crate to make a den, close all windows and close doors in the house to muffle noise. Play soft calming music. Use pheromone sprays and your dog’s favourite form of enrichment, like a snuffle mat or chew.
Thunder shirts are useful for anxious dogs in lots of situations but especially useful for noise sensitive dogs. They work by applying gentle, constant pressure around a dog’s body. This pressure is believed to activate the nervous system’s calming response, reducing heart rate, stress hormones, and anxiety behaviours.
The concept is known as deep pressure stimulation. Always comfort your dog never punish them for nervous behaviour. If we look at it from a human perspective if you were having a panic attack and someone shouted at you it would only fuel your anxiety further.
Ask your vet for advice. If your dog is displaying several of these extreme distress indicators, contact your vet: Excessive panting and drooling, trying to escape, trembling or shaking, pacing, dilated pupils, loss of appetite.
Your vet can discuss the use of a short-term drug to help your pet cope. The choice of drug is at the discretion of the prescribing vet, but there are currently two drugs on the market licenced for noise sensitivity in dogs. These can be pre-emptively prescribed to be given before the stressful event to lessen the emotional response.
In the long term we need to think about some form of counter conditioning to lessen the emotional response to firework noise. The issue with not tackling your dog’s noise sensitivity to fire works is they can very quickly generalise to other loud noises, like gun shot, car door slamming or loud machinery, which can result in other issues like them becoming nervous out on walks and risks dogs running away from their owner out of fear.
I would always recommend working with a trainer or behaviourist to tackle issues like this.