Stress and Your Service Dog
You may think any type of stress is bad, but stress can be good for you!
Stress helps you meet your daily challenges and motivates you to reach your goals, ultimately making you a smarter, happier, and healthier person. Good stress is vital for a healthy life.
Stress helps you meet your daily challenges and motivates you to reach your goals, ultimately making you a smarter, happier, and healthier person. Good stress is vital for a healthy life.
Stress, if defined and used correctly in the biological sense, refers to being pushed out of a state physiological homeostasis, either by something negative or positive. Being excited about seeing a rock concert is as stressful as being afraid of going to the dentist.
Animals benefit from certain kinds of stress. In appropriate quantities, stress is necessary for normal growth and for survival. However, excessive stress, negative stress, or “bad” stress can cause damage, such as illness or behavioral problems.
- Normal stress, or good stress, is called eustress.
- Bad stress is called distress. This is often related to fear or anxiety.
Service dogs are chosen for their emotional stability.
They should show few stress signs and recover quickly.
They should show few stress signs and recover quickly.
When experiencing eustress, there is an ideal peak performance level where the dog can perform a behavior quickly and with a sharp focus. Service dogs may show some “good” stress signs as they process a task. They may lip-lick, yawn, or shake off as they think through what they need to do to accomplish a task. However, higher levels of eustress can also cause the dog’s behavior performance to worsen, leading to a state of frustration and ultimately distress. Once the dog is experiencing high levels of distress, they may go into a “fight, flight, freeze, or fool around” stress response, at which point they have limited capacity to perform the behavior.
If your service dog is experiencing distress,
they will be unavailable to support you or perform service tasks.
When a dog is not performing a behavior in a certain environment or situation, rather than labeling the dog as being “stubborn,” “dominant,” or “disobedient,” we can consider how eustress, distress, and frustration levels may be affecting their ability to respond. We can then modify the environment to decrease the dog’s stress in order to improve the dog’s ability to process information and perform the behavior.