Adventures & trails w/my dogs as we navigate through life...🐾
25/02/2025
💯 👏👏🫶
Do you know what happens from a physiological point of view when we fail to positively introduce the grooming process to dogs? 🤔
Be warned this is a LONG post 😅
If you have a dog in your books who seems to always struggle with even the most basic grooming tasks, then you'll probably identify most, if not all of what this lovely diagram/flow chart illustrates.
But if you're new to the function of the Autonomic Nervous
System, let's take a look at what it is telling us...
If we assume that EVERYTHING that a dog can sense (see, hear, feel, touch and taste) will cause them some degree of stress, fear and/or pain, then we can also assume that everything in our environment is an environmental stressor that will be perceived as something threatening unless we help to show a dog otherwise.
Failing to desensitise the process will cause an array of consequences that are not only reflexive in nature but completely normal.
We must consider the state of a dog:
👉Mentally/Emotionally - how the dog feels
👉Physically - how the dog looks
👉Physiologically - how the dog's systems respond
👉Behaviourally - how the dog reacts
Since together, these are ALL simultaneously communicating with and responding to the environment based on a dog's perception ⭕️
What we, as groomers, tend to concentrate on is what we see from a behavioural perspective.
But often, what we think we are seeing is not a true reflection of what is actually going on...
For example, if we see a dog air snapping at the dryer we may label the dog as behaving in an "undesirable" way because he/she is being:
👉"aggressive"
👉"reactive"
👉"naughty"
👉"spiteful"
👉"dramatic"
We may even consider this behaviour entertaining and take time out of the groom just to capture an air snap in action to share with our peers... sound familiar? 😔
BUT HERE'S THE ISSUE:
When we only focus on the superficial behaviours a dog is displaying, we fail to identify the cause of why a dog is behaving in such ways.
I'm sure we have all heard of the survival responses (flee, freeze, fight, fool around and faint).
By getting to know how to identify but also, understand a survival response, we can shift our own perception of canine behaviour from
👉"this dog is behaving (very) badly" 🙄 to
👉"this dog is expressing fear, stress and/or pain and is really struggling to feel safe".
THIS SIGNIFICANT SHIFT IN MINDSET CAN BE TRULY LIFE-CHANGING TO A DOG WHO IS FINDING THE GROOMING PROCESS INCREDIBLY CHALLENGING.
From a more holistic point of view, it can even transform how a dog copes in their day-to-day lives.
Whether we are groomers, trainers, dog walkers, veterinary professionals or something else, acknowledging that how we are working with dogs, is undoubtedly contributing to how good a quality of life a dog has overall -
Finally recognising that one grooming session repeated every 4-8 weeks of a dog's life is significant will not only give us the push to do better, but also force the wider community to take our roles a lot more seriously too!
With all this in mind, I would like to end this post with one last self-reflection exercise:
Don't you think that taking photos of dogs "misbehaving" solely to seek the empathy of other groomers and/or increase social media engagement now seems like such an awful waste of an opportunity to instead stop unnecessary suffering?
Let me know your thoughts below 👇
