Watching our beloved pets suffer with anxiety is painful. When dealing with fear, anxiety, stress syndrome (FAS), some pets can experience intense emotions that are not appropriate for the situation.
In any case or form of anxiety, training is central to your pet’s healthy recovery. We recommend finding a great trainer that is a fit between the owner and dog triangle that can help your pet learn to trust the commands and cues that you confidently give. Here is a link to find a Board Certified Behaviorist near you: https://www.dacvb.org/search/custom.asp?id=4709
Your behaviorist can help with training as well as supplements and medications to help control your pet anxiety.
The purpose of this article is to provide some information on the holistic supplements that you may encounter and find useful while training your dog. The purpose of medications and supplements are to help control the physical and chemical overreaction of your dog to common, everyday stimuli.
Here is a link that describes the process of counter-conditioning and desensitization, or getting your pet used to normal, everyday stimulus that is causing them anxiety: https://www.animalhumanesociety.org/resource/counter-conditioning-and-desensitization.
While we can and do use pharmaceutical medications to help control your pet’s anxiety, we commonly get questions at Aliso Beach Animal Clinic about alternative calming agents that are holistic, and we’ve provided a list below to help you on your pet training journey.
The benefit of holistic supplements is SAFETY. We don’t have to worry about long-term side effects or lasting deleterious effects at the same level as we do with the more potent pharmaceutical medications. Used correctly, side effects occur very infrequently with the below over-the-counter products.
The downside of these nutraceutical products is that they’re not instantly 100% effective for every dog, so with a little patience and a realistic set of expectations, you can try different combinations of these products to help your dog.
In our experience, the combination of all the below products concurrently can provide the best control of anxiety to begin your pet training.
1. CBD – CBD products do have utility as an anxiolytic and doses can be safely increased higher and higher until the pet is seen to be calmer. Use caution when increasing doses and do so slowly and over several days.
2. Zylkene – Zylkene is a natural protein derived from milk that has a calming effect.
3. Valerian Root – Nature’s valium is useful for your dog and many pet safe formulas are available over-the-counter online.
4. Adaptil – Adaptil makes a number of products making use of pheromones (or hormones that are transmitted through smell) to calm your dog. A nice product is a collar that slowly releases these non-pharmaceutical calming agents.
There you have it! Give these a try in a variety of situations. While this is not an exhaustive list, these are the products with which we have had the most success. Please schedule a consultation if you would like to discuss these or your pet’s anxiety further.