On Wednesday I told you the horror story about Gus chasing the pheasant.
We watched Gus lie staring at the bush where the pheasant (minus a few tail feathers) had hidden. He lay there for a time, then sometimes ran round the bush only to lie down facing it again. We left him to it.
I wasn’t going to try and crawl in to get him – it would’ve been too unedifying a prospect and anyway I’m not sure my new hip is quite up to that just yet.
Around half an hour later he finally turned up at the patio door. We let him in. Gus had blood on his leg.
I grabbed a cloth to clean it off and followed him to the patio window where he stood, staring at the bush. He was so hyped up he struggled to tolerate my administrations and had a brief snarl, very unlike him, but understandable given how aroused he was.
He had no injury I could find, so I doubt there was a happy ending for the pheasant.
Gus spent the rest of the morning running back and forth from the patio window to my study, very excited and aroused. He didn’t even lie down once until after lunch – and even then he struggled to settle. (Himself didn’t help. He decided to water his plants, so was walking to and fro past the windows, with Gus following him round from inside the house.)
That’s the effect those stress hormones have and why it’s SO important to give your dog time to completely recover after any such incident.
Perhaps your dog has had a barking, lunging fit at another passing dog.
Perhaps she’s been chasing her ball hard for half an hour on the beach.
Perhaps he’s had a fright from a car or van coming too close.
The half life of cortisol with large stress hormones loads is over 5 hours. That means that the levels halve on average around every 5-6 hours, which is why it takes up to a couple of days for them to go right down back to normal.
But if anything else exciting or stressful happens in the meantime, those levels will just keep zooming back up.
Stress is bad for your dog’s health as well as yours. So make sure your dog is allowed to calm down thoroughly after any excitement or stress.
Book our help if you’re struggling with your excitable dog. We’ll help you plan how to get, then keep, them calm through our Perfect Pet course as well as giving you the skills to train them to be a great pet – walking nicely on lead, coming back when called and not jumping up at all your visitors.
If you’re happy with your dog’s behaviour but you want to delve deeper into the behaviour of dogs and want to build your knowledge of why dogs do what they do, think about becoming a Down Dog Devotee.
Keep training,
Carol