Hi Reader,

Fireworks night.

You’ve prepared the owner really well. The safe place is ready, the curtains are closed, the music is on, and perhaps there’s medication from the vet in the cupboard.

And the next morning you get a message: “It was a bit hard around midnight, but she’s okay now.”

Phew. Case closed until the next round of fireworks, right?

And that’s quite logical. We put so much energy into getting the dog through the night that the night is all we tend to look at. How much did she tremble? Did she hide? Did she bark at every bang?

But how a dog reacts to the bang is only half of what’s going on. The other half is what happens after it.

A bang sets the whole stress system in motion, and that system needs time to come back down. For some dogs that’s half an hour. For others it takes days, and after a really intense episode, some dogs seem to need a week or longer to recover (Riemer, 2019).

During that time, the dog can look perfectly okay. She’s out from under the bed and she ate her breakfast. But she may also startle at the toaster, skip her evening walk, or sleep badly for days. And if the next bang comes before she’s fully back to her normal self, she starts from a higher stress level than the time before. Bang by bang, the fear can then slowly get bigger.

So should we wrap the dog in cotton wool for a week after every noisy night? No, of course not. How quickly a dog bounces back is also something we can actually work on. But that part is so easily overlooked.

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

✅ We judge the night by the reaction, and don’t measure the recovery. And recovery is often the very first thing that changes, long before the reaction itself does. So we can miss real progress, or miss that things are slowly getting worse.

✅ We go straight back to the plan the next day. As if nothing happened. But a dog who is still recovering has very little room to learn anything from an exposure session.

✅ We see a slow recovery as “just how she is”. A sensitive dog, a nervous breed, a bad start in life. That may all be true, and yet it doesn’t mean her recovery can’t improve.

All three are very easy to fall into, especially in the busiest weeks of the year. But each of them can keep a case stuck, even when the exposure work itself is set up really well.

“Stuck after the bang” 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: https://quiz.amazinganimalminds.com/stuck-case​
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Cheers, Dr. Else
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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.

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Source: Riemer, S. (2019). Not a one-way road: Severity, progression and prevention of firework fears in dogs. PLoS ONE, 14(9), e0218150.

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