15/06/2023
It’s always so important to assess and ensure your four paw companions feel safe with you and in their surroundings.
Does Your Dog Feel Safe?
When we think about all the things that we need to do to take care of our dogs every day, it is easy to focus on basic needs such as food, shelter, exercise and health care. I am sure that everyone who follows this page also thinks about providing things like enrichment, mental stimulation and opportunities for natural behaviours. But how often do we think about core emotional needs – specifically the most basic emotional need: the need to feel safe.
All animals have a biological imperative to survive. While finding food and passing on genes to the next generation is important, if you can’t stay alive none of that will happen anyway, so avoiding danger and feeling safe is something that needs to happen first, before all other needs are attended to. While absolute safety is unattainable, the more unsafe an animal feels, the more energy and emotional resources will be employed trying to deal with this and the more the animal’s body and ability to engage optimally in other activities will suffer.
This is quite a simplistic way of looking at things and I do believe that it is more complex than this, if one accepts that animals have a wide range of emotional experiences. If we think about what safety means to us, it is not just physical safety that is important, but emotional and “social” safety. We don’t only want to avoid being knocked down by a car when crossing a road, we also want to know that when we come home we will be welcomed by those we share our lives with, loved, cared for, understood and respected. I am sure that we all know what it is like to have experienced conflict with those we love or to feel misunderstood and isolated around friends at some point in our lives. To feel safe, we need to be able to trust the people that we live with and know that they won’t suddenly lash out at us verbally or physically. We need our loved ones to be predictably “safe” for us to be able to relax in our homes and thrive.
In the same way, we need to start thinking about whether we are providing a safe haven for our dogs. Are we dependable and safe to be around or are we likely to explode at them and lash out in anger? Can our dogs trust us to give them reassurance and comfort when they ask for it or do we ignore or reject them when they seek us out? Do we evaluate how changes to the home environment (human guests, visiting dogs, renovations etc.) may decrease feelings of safety and find ways of mitigating them or do we just expect our dogs to get over whatever may be going on? Do we consider the situations we put our dogs in and how they impact on their emotional wellbeing and sense of safety or are we unthinkingly exposing them to stressors that we could easily avoid if we were more careful?
With many of my dogs I have probably taken it for granted that they felt safe most of the time. If I think of Cruz specifically, he was born into our home, was never separated from his mom or taken from his early environment. He had no siblings to squabble with for resources and a very safe puppyhood and adolesence with no significant bad experiences or trauma, socially or otherwise. Cruz is definitely the most easy going, emotionally stable dog I could ever imagine. I am sure that his care free and secure home and early life experiences have had a huge amount to do with that – in addition to good genetics.
However, with Primrose, while she has an incredibly sweet nature and is the most affectionate dog we have ever had, I realise that I have to consciously consider whether she feels safe in a variety of situations. Primrose was the smallest of 9 puppies and was taken from her canine family at around 8 weeks. While we take it for granted that this is how most puppies start life, we do need to consider that this early separation from mom and siblings is a traumatic event and that some puppies may be more affected by this than others. Primrose thrived on human contact and connection, so we did everything possible to meet that need so that she felt secure and safe in our home. She settled in well and was off to a great start, but unfortuantely at the age of about 14 weeks she ingested a 12cm piece of bamboo in a freak accident and while we knew something was very wrong, more than one vet unfortunately missed what the problem was and as a result, Priimrose suffered for weeks with bouts of vomiting and huge discomfort, which made her highly sensitive to all sorts of things: handling, helping her into the car, putting on a harness and so many things which none of our puppies have ever been concerned about became associated with pain and were things that she started avoiding. On one hand her appetite suffered and on the other, she was inclined to resource guard food and chews. The poor things must have felt so conflicted over anything related to her very uncomfortable digestive system.
When the stick finally passed through intact and we realised what had been going on, 90% of Primrose’s emotional sensitivity spontaneously resolved, because she was no longer in pain. However, there were of course associations with a lot of things that we still had to work through. Unfortunately, this was not the end of Primrose’s physically related trauma and at around 6 months she started limping and after a long process, was finally diagnosed with “growing pains” where the ulna grows faster than the radius, placing undue pressure on the ulna bone, resulting in multiple tiny fractures that are terribly painful. She then underwent surgery to correct this problem. While the surgery has been completely successful, the whole episode involved months of a restricted lifestyle, discomfort (obviously we did our best with pain management) and increased frustration of not being able to just be a normal, active teenage dog.
Because Primrose handled the surgery and multiple vet visits so well (we were told she was their favourite, sweetest patient who they could x-ray without sedation, just by rubbing her tummy) it would have been easy to assume that she was “fine”. However, there is no doubt that she has been through an enormous amount of trauma in her young life, which has made her emotionally sensitive and less trusting than Cruz and his mom. Primrose is “quirky” and she will suddenly seem worried about something that I would never have thought twice about with our other dogs. I am learning to consider more carefully how apparently “harmless” situations may actually be perceived by her in light of this and remembering to exercise patience and empathy, rather than assume she is just being “silly” or “awkward”.
The reality is that Primrose has experienced too many feelings of being “unsafe” in her short life, so my number one priority is to ensure that from now on, as much as it is within my power, she will feel as safe as possible going forward. This will require extra thought, extra effort and extra care, but her wellbeing and happiness is the highest priority, so I will keep working on it and hopefully our experiences can be used to help others in the future.
It is always worth spending some time considering carefully whether our dogs feel safe and what we can do to help them in this regard. Don’t take it for granted.