Since it's almost July 4th, I was wondering of you could talk about medication options for noise anxiety/noise phobia in dogs and what has worked well in your practice. My dog reacts to pretty much all loud noises (but especially storms) and I am not making much headway. I made another appointment with my vet, but it would be great to have some options to bring up.
I know you sent this in before the 4th, but there’s a significant wait time for questions to be answered. There are just so many questions, and this blog should not be relied upon for time sensitive advice.
But in my experience the best time to start preparing a noise-phobic dog for an anticipated scary day, with or without medication, is about twelve months in advance. So here we go.
The basis of desensitizing dogs to their particular problem noises (storms, gun shots, fireworks, motorbikes, etc) is to switch off their response to that sound and built up a tolerance. You don’t always get perfect behavior, the dog may not be thrilled with then noise, but if we can just stop them from panicking then that’s often good enough for most dogs.
So we designate that dog a ‘safe space’. It might be a crate, a room, a kennel, under the bed, or any other well defined ‘area’ in which nothing bad ever happens and the dog is left alone. It might have familiar scents or toys, and may also have Adaptil diffusers, a pheromone spray for dogs.
We also start a training routine. It doesn’t have to be complex, a series of sit/stay/shake/drop with a high-value treat will do, something that lasts 5 to 10 minutes.
Then once that routine is established, we find the lowest volume of the Scary Sounds that the dog will tolerate, and play it through the TV, an iPad or something suitable. There used to be CDs sold for this purpose, but you can probably find something suitable for free on youtube.
Then you go through the training routine on that low volume, with a good reward at the end, and you do this ever day for 5-10 minutes (or twice a day if you can manage) until the dog is not concerned. Then you up the volume a tiny bit, and repeat.
By starting with the quietest sounds you will hopefully be able to slowly increase what the dog can tolerate, but daily training is the key, and little baby steps. It’s a noise phobia, anxiety is a powerful force and you have to be persistent with it. In theory after a year the dog should be able to tolerate more of the Scary Sounds, even if it does need to retreat to its ‘safe space’ to do so.
Some dogs can accomplish this desensitization regime without medical help. Some dogs will reach a volume that they can’t pass without pharmaceutical assistance, and others wont be able to even get started without medication at all.
That’s okay. Sometimes behavior medication is described as a crutch, but sometimes that’s also exactly what you need. Some dogs will then stay on that medication indefinitely if it’s improving their quality of life, others will be weaned off after a few months once they’ve acclimatized to the noise at a higher volume.
Medication is not a magic pill. It must be coupled with training to successfully address a noise phobia. Things like Thundershirts and tryptophan supplements can also be helpful, but the training plan is key.
There are a few different groups of medication we routinely use, but for simplicity I will put them into three groups.
Sedatives like acepromazine were historically commonplace, and are still requested on occasion. Their purpose is to zonk the dog out so it can’t react, but it actually sensitises dogs to sound, which is not ideal for a dog already afraid of a sound. It is likely to make noise phobias worse over time, but is often requested by humans because it’s convenient.
Short-acting anxiolytics kick in quickly but aren’t great for long term use. They may be used for particular known challenging days, like New Years Eve.
Long-term Anxiolytics are of particular use when you see a generalised sort of anxiety pattern, or when the phobia is to a stimulus that is completely unpredictable and the dog would benefit from being medication all the time, such as unpredictable thunder storms.
Often we’ll use a combination of medication to augment the desensitization training, but success requires reasonable expectations, a lot of persistence and a little help.