Hey Reader,

When a dog hears a loud bang, the stress system kicks in within seconds. Adrenaline and noradrenaline prepare the body to act, and a little later cortisol follows.

But that system doesn’t keep a separate account for every stressor. The dog who barks at every dog on the morning walk, gets startled by the delivery van, sleeps badly because the toddler wakes up three times a night, or has stiff hips nobody has noticed yet is using the same system all day long.

In the short term, that’s no problem at all. That’s exactly what the stress system is for. But when the load stays high for weeks or months, the body starts to adapt to it. We call this allostatic load: the wear and tear that builds up when the stress system rarely gets the chance to recover (Korte et al., 2007).

The range in which the dog can still respond flexibly gets smaller and smaller. In the beginning, it took a real firework to push the dog over the edge. Now a car door, the toaster or a dropped pan can be enough.

And a sound recording at the lowest volume as well.

Which is exactly why some dogs start panting at volume 1 in their very first exposure session. You turn it down even further, and further, until you’re basically playing silence and feeding sausage 🙂.

So should we stop working on the sound altogether? No, of course not. But if the dog’s overall stress load is too high, there’s very little room left for the dog to learn anything from those sessions, however carefully you set them up.

There are three things I see quite often in cases that get stuck here:

✅ The intake is only about the noise. Walks, visitors, being alone, other dogs, sleep and health barely come up, so the biggest stressors in the dog’s week can stay invisible.

✅ “Management” only happens on fireworks nights. The safe place and the music are ready on New Year’s Eve. The other 364 days, the daily load stays exactly the same.

✅ The training plan starts in week one. And when the dog can’t cope, the conclusion is that the dog is “just very sensitive”, or that the method doesn’t work for this one.

Each of these can keep a case stuck before the exposure work has even had a chance.

The dog’s overall stress load is one of the four places where I see noise cases get stuck most often. And when you’re fully immersed in a case, it can be difficult to know whether this is the one.

That’s why I made the Stuck Case Check. It’s a short quiz that takes a few minutes. It will help you figure out where your case may be stuck at this moment, and give you a first step forward.

<<< Take the Stuck Case Check >>>

Cheers, Dr. Else

P.S. My course Noise Phobias in Dogs opens on 16 November. In the course, you’ll learn how the environment, emotions and stress influence how noise fear develops and why it continues, how to support dogs in the short term with management and nutraceuticals, and how to set up exposure therapy for the long term, so you can improve the welfare of the dogs you work with. People on the waitlist get early access from 9 to 13 November, and a special early bird price + an extra bonus. If you’d like that, you can join the waitlist here.

Best,

Dr. Else

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