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Preparing your puppy for Halloween

 🎃 Halloween 🎃


With a week to go to Halloween, I’ve been getting lots of requests for how to prepare young dogs especially for this week.


👻If you have an adult dog already terrified there’s not a lot of time to change how they feel but I would speak to your Vet to see if your dog could be prescribed any medications that may help. 


💀With midterm starting now, It might be an idea to walk dogs very early in the morning before anyone might be messing around with bangers and fireworks to avoid any one trial learning that may have life long affects on how your dog feels about fireworks. 


👻 If your dog is already sound sensitive this week is probably going to be hard so prepare as best as you can.  It might be an idea to chat to your vet as there are strong links between pain and sound sensitivity in dogs.  If your older dog is more fearful this year, pain might be one thing you want to rule out with your vet. 


💀 If your dog or puppy wants comfort because they are really scared, please comfort them.  It’s okay, You won’t make them worse. 


👻 If they want to hide away let them do that too.  Prepare a ‘den’ in the quietest part of the house (for example I use my downstairs bathroom as it’s not attached to outside of the house so the quietest room) or a covered crate under the kitchen table or under the duvet or bed etc 


💀 Close all blinds and curtains too.  Play music like reggae and classical to try muffle the noise


👻 If you have children, try have one person stay home to watch your puppy or dog and one person go out with the kids.  I disconnect the door bell and/or stand at the door so the door bell ringing 100 plus times is not an extra trigger for the dogs.  It goes without saying not to take them trick or treating 😀


💀 Speak to the vet about herbal remedies like Bach Rescue Remedy, Yucalam and Nutricalm. 


👻 Try to feed them and get last wee early as they may not want to eat or toilet when the fireworks start because they are out of ‘rest & digest’ mode and in ‘fight or flight’ and forcing or pushing them could add stress 


💀 You want to try keep adrenaline & cortisol low this week so go easy on high intensity games like ball chasing, playing in the dog park, or if they are reactive to people/dogs etc that would increase the adrenaline and cortisol and make staying calm harder when scared by fireworks harder.  Instead opt for calming, sniffy walks in quiet wooded areas, play sniffing enrichment games like the Sausage tree game https://youtube.com/shorts/46cs9IKOcyk?feature=share this helps prevent your dog being over loaded or trigger stacked. 


👻 If you live in a quieter area could speak to your neighbours and ask if any are doing fireworks and what time so you can be prepared.  I live in Dublin so I know they’ll be going off all around us, all night long 😞 


💀 Prepare in advance a selection of things like Lickimats, frozen kongs, Pizzle sticks with lovely, super yummy, high value food and give early in the evening and throughout the night if possible.


#halloweenanddogs #puppiesandhalloween #dogtraining #puppytrainingtips 

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