Dog Behaviour Explained – Stress

Today we discuss the phenomenon of Stress in relation to dogs and dog behaviour on the blog. Read on!

Simply put, stress is a change in chemical and physiological balance. This change can be caused by physical or emotional factors. Simple, but not very clear! So let’s take a closer look at it.

If something happens to an animal or in its environment, and it is noticed by the animal, we call this a stimulus. The stimulus is observed, followed by an emotional or physical response. This then causes the stress response, and then behavior that is observable to us follows.

I often read in comments on videos that unsuspecting proud owners put in Facebook groups: ‘Oh, but that’s because of stress, your dog is stressed!’. After this, the owners in question usually feel either sad or angry. The load of the word ‘stress’ has become rather negative, because we all mainly look at the negative sides of stress.

Positive stress

But as a loving brand new dog owner, it is good to realize that not all stress is caused by negative factors. Stress can be both positive and negative! A dog that is completely over the moon when the teenage owner comes home from school (“Because he always plays with me, yay!”) does experience stress, but this is of course not negative stress. Other things that can cause positive stress include play, training, and the promise of food.

Negative stress

Of course, stress also occurs when the dog experiences things that he finds aversive or even scary. Think of a visit to the vet, being alone, unknown people or dogs, and busy crowds.

But going through life without stress is also not possible. We need a certain amount of especially the positive stress in our lives, and so do dogs. It pushes us to action, it ensures that we survive, but it also helps us enjoy our lives!

We can of course do everything we can to deal with it as best as possible. And to keep the consequences of stress as minimal as possible. More about that in a later blog.

We will first take a closer look at what exactly happens when an animal experiences stress. As I said, something has to happen first, the stimulus. This is registered by the brain, which then triggers an emotional and physical response and releases hormones.

Stress hormones

The hormones released during stress are:

• (Nor)adrenaline
• Testosterone
• Cortisol

These substances stimulate the body to action.

Cortisol in particular remains in the body for a long time, it takes 5 to 8 hours before the cortisol produced during one stress response has disappeared from the body. If something happens again within that time that causes a stress response in the body, cortisol is released again.

This way, the amount of these substances accumulates during a stressful day, until a limit is reached, and ‘the bucket overflows’. That proverbial stress bucket is different for every dog. This depends on various factors such as breed and bloodlines (many working lines are more sensitive to stress than non-working lines of the same breed), but everyone’s bucket can overflow. When that happens, we naturally see a reaction in the behaviour of the dog.

An example of the stress bucket

An example: early in the morning we walk the dog, and he finds other dogs quite scary. On the corner of the street we meet another dog (1). We cross the street and continue on the other side of the street. After returning home, the dog gets food (2), and half an hour later visitors come to the house (3). Both getting food and the arrival of visitors provide positive stress, but the stress bucket fills up with it of course. After the visitors have left, we walk the dog again, where we meet three other dogs (4). Then we go to training, and during training the dog starts running around like crazy with an arched back (5). The stress bucket has overflowed, the dog has a fiddle about (more on this later).

On another, less busy day, the dog could train well, if less has happened prior to the training and the bucket is therefore less full.

What exactly can we do with this, you might think. We will go into this in more detail in a later blog, but for starters: give your dog plenty of rest! Sleep allows the body to process the released cortisol. You could also regularly take a sniff walk as we discussed in a previous blog. The endorphins that are released with such a walk also help to reduce stress.