Year: 2014

Alleviating Stress in Shelter Dogs: A Case Study

For most dogs, being relinquished to an animal shelter is a drastic change and a stressful experience. Even though a shelter may make every effort possible to make a dog’s new shelter home welcoming, it is still a place where dogs will be confined, separated from their previous families, and exposed to more noise due to the close proximity of other dogs. These environmental changes are very stressful for most dogs. Because of the influence of individual dog personality on behavior, signs of stress can vary. Some dogs will hide in the back of the kennel, be less active or stop eating. Some may be more active. Some dogs may behave aggressively in response to stress, while other dogs will begin to perform repetitive behaviors, increase their frequency of barking/vocalization, become destructive, and start to urinate and defecate in their kennel. The presence of abnormal behavior and the absence of normal behavior are equally important to note. A dog not eating and not playing may be just as stressed as a dog who is circling, barking, and lunging at the kennel door.
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Is it Time to Rethink Food Aggression in Shelter Dogs?

What’s the most common problem behavior we see in shelter dogs? Do you want to take a guess? I’ll bet the answer isn’t what you’re thinking. According to the data we have collected through the online version of the Match-Up II Shelter Dog Rehoming Program, it’s highly excitable, exuberant behavior we call “jumpy/mouthy” behavior. As I wrote previously, Match-Up II Online identified about 37% of dogs as displaying “jumpy/mouthy” behavior, the number one problem behavior in the Match-Up II database. But this blog post isn’t about jumpy/mouthy behavior. It’s about food aggression, a topic that has received a lot of attention lately from the Center for Shelter Dogs, among others.
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New CSD Study Finds Activity Levels May Be Key to Identifying Stress in Shelter Dogs

Although it seems obvious when you see it, it can sometimes be difficult to identify harmful stress in shelter dogs. Shelters are stressful places for dogs, even when we provide an enriched, stimulating, supportive environment. There has been a lot of research in the last few years working on ways to identify stress because once we can accurately identify it, we can actively intercede and do something to minimize the causes of stress and reduce the harmful effects of chronic stress on shelter dogs.
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The Real Factors in Dog Bite Related Fatalities

In the 1970s and 1980s, my colleagues and I were lecturing and writing about the “dog bite epidemic”. Although I knew that dogs sometimes bit, I preferred to emphasize that most of the time they do not. And what’s more, there are things that can be done to prevent these incidents. Recently, the “epidemic” seems to be lessening. There are fewer reported dogs bites in many cities across the United States than there used to be. For instance, New York City reported about 37,000 dog bites in 1971 and fewer than 5,000 in 2011. Chicago reported about 12,000 in 1978 and about 2000 in 2011.This is good news but dog bites still happen and unfortunately often become big news.


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Ah, Those Exuberant Dogs!

You know the dog – he’s the one who will leap excitedly at people, jumping to their waist, their chest, their face, as high as he can get.  With springs for legs, he’s jumping, jumping, jumping!  Sometimes licking, sometimes drooling, sometimes knocking people down.

Sometimes even mouthing them, making contact with their teeth and leaving marks or bruises.  We call this behavior “jumpy/mouthy” and it can be a real problem – frustrating staff, scaring off adopters, even inflicting injury.  Yet, these dogs often have a devoted following amongst the shelter staff, because of their seemingly boundless energy, good spirits, and apparent friendliness.  At the Center for Shelter Dogs, we offer resources for working with jumpy/mouthy dogs which we hope will provide shelter staff tools to manage and reduce this annoying behavior and find the right home for these big personalities.  We chose to develop these resources early on because we knew ourselves how hard it could be to work with and rehome these dogs and we often heard from other shelter personnel the same thing.
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