A review of Donna’s thunder phobia and how the ThunderShirt and other tools helped her

Donna has thunder phobia and one of the tools that we thought we would try with her was the ThunderShirt to manage her thunder phobia. I wrote to ThunderShirt, who so kindly arranged with their local distributor Hound Habitat to send me a sample of the shirt for trial.

Back to the storm brewing over our island over the last few weeks…

I have a nasty collection of storm cloud pictures :P

Donna was home alone when it started to storm

The morning I sent Mr P off at the airport, we left the dog at home. It was obviously going to rain on the way back and I was almost home when it started to pour torrential sheets of rain. So I was trapped about a block away from the flat = = Lucky me.

In my mind, I was conjuring all sorts of nasty images of Donna frantically running around the apartment and drooling all over the place and possibly eliminating in the living room. And it is at times like this, you thank the heavens that the dog has learnt that the sofa is forbidden. Trust me, it saves you a few thousand dollars of heartbreak that you would get if your dog decides it needed to be on the higher ground that is the sofa and then pee on it.

So anyway, when it slackened a bit, I braved the rain and got home and opened the door to this:

Not bad. No smell of animal waste. Donna was happily doing her welcome home cheerleading dance as you can see. Good.

Ignoring the dog, I went ahead to open the balcony doors to air out the living room a bit. It was still raining and quite frankly, I enjoyed the breeze at the balcony door. Donna didn’t. You can see her hanging back behind the criss-cross bars of the coffee table legs in the picture above. Ears pinned back and panting. She stood there for quite a while.

On hindsight, I probably should have called her and treated when she came to me, nearer to the source of her fears. Regardless, she calmed down after a bit on her own, laid down and managed pretty well… behind the coffee table. I always look for that moment to reward her for calmness.

That was a good day.

Thundershirt review: How it worked on Donna

But of course, when the real whopper comes along on a different day, out comes the ThunderShirt to pre-empt her descent to abject terror. Here Donna and her photoshop clone, Donna-02 is slightly worried.

I ignored her, it took her a while to settle down outside and then I treated her. But my treats were not continuous and the storm lasted the whole afternoon. It was just too long, so after a while she grew restless again.

The signs of stress – panting, salivating, whale eyes, ears pinned back, mild trembling – appeared.

I thought I’ll try to be light hearted and so I put a piece of tissue in front of where she was standing stock still and told her to aim her drool there. *heartless, I know…*

It wasn’t long before the tissue became limp and wet.
= =  Right.

She needed to toilet and made for her newspaper. This is where the ThunderShirt worked better for us than the pink human T-shirt that she had before. The ThunderShirt is designed to fit the dog’s body snugly and will not be in the way or possibly be pee-ed on by the dog. Haha!

Eventually I did take out the collar and leash. Instant happiness registered. Marched her up and down the corridor just as thatjenk suggested.

As I described in the previous post, the collar and leash worked much better to lift Donna’s spirits. The ThunderShirt works to subdue and manage her negative over-excitement at the storm, but does not make her happier. Hence, I am more and more using both tools when managing her anxiety due to the thunder storm. While she still gets excited by the bad weather, she doesn’t go beyond threshold and become unresponsive as much as before.

That said, I try to limit the use of the collar and leash because I have observed that if I take it out too frequently, it starts to be less effective. My guess is that she usually reacts with happiness because  she thinks the collar and leash meant we are going for a walk, and possibly escaping the flat and the thunder outside that is making her anxious. But after a few times of having the collar and leash on and not going anyway, her level of joy at seeing her collar and leash dropped. Marching her up and down the corridor did help a bit as it distracts her.

What I am doing in the mean time is to continue to build positive association with the ThunderShirt, such as taking her out for walks in it.

Thundershirt review: Does the ThunderShirt work?

This is not really a fair question for me to answer simply because, besides the ThunderShirt, we have been trying so many other activities concurrently with Donna to manage her thunder phobia.

Some of these activities include:

• Conditioning her to understand that the proper behaviour expected of her when inside the flat is calm behaviour. Unless it is play time, all rowdy behaviour is ignored and not rewarded. All calm behaviour is rewarded. Not hard for a smart dog to make the right choices.
• At least an hour a day of walking outside, a couple of games of fetch and tug, mental exercises such as doggy parkour and practising old tricks and new ones to earn her breakfast and dinner, all with the intent of draining her energy so that she has less energy to react to the storm and the thunder.
• crate training so she has a safe place to retreat to to hide from the storm
• and of course, the ThunderShirt to manage her negative over-excitement over the thunder.

Perhaps what we are doing works to some extent for Donna. In the last two months, more and more there were days when it was raining and she remained calm without the help of any aid.

Have to say the rain in the day tends to be lighter than at night. The story is very different when the rain and thunder comes during the night. There was one period when it appeared to storm every night and because neither of us were enthusiastic about staying up with her, it just meant that her fears were consistently reinforced night after night of rain. She would eliminate and then jump against the bedroom door until I got up to clean up her mess. Once there is a human in her sight, she would be exuberant again.

I usually focused on cleaning up the mess while she calms down and then I go back to sleep because I don’t want to encourage the behaviour of waking us up every night to play/get positive attention. It soon became established as a routine. She still wakes us up at night, but is happy to let us go back to sleep as long as we appear, clean up the mess, she calms down and we go back to sleep.

I have to say this is not the most optimal arrangement, and after a couple of sleepless nights, my temper had soured to the point where I really didn’t care. If that was the best mid-way point we can have, then we’ll just do it that way and hope and pray it stops raining in the night. At one point, I was walking her for 1-2 hrs at night after 9pm, hoping that it would tire her out enough that she won’t react to the rain if it rains. I don’t really know if that would work since the rain at night stopped at that point. Haha~ It did tire me out.

It has however, started raining at night in the last week again. At this point, Donna has sensitised to the wind buffeting against the doors as well. So some nights she eliminates when the wind is strong and shrill, even when it did not rain. D:

We are exploring options to wind-proof and muffle some of the storm sounds but haven’t really settled on a good way of doing things yet since we’ve got to balance this out with the expenses as well.

Meanwhile, I’m waiting for a period where I can get consistent rain in the day to start building positive associations with it and hopefully that will eventually spill over to have some effect for rain at night. One can hope, I guess.

Thundershirt review: My conclusion

Back to the ThunderShirt, I think it is a viable aid that one can try to use with a dog with thunder phobia. And I don’t see a reason at this point to stop using it with Donna. So if I had bought it, I wouldn’t rush to return it within 45 days.

However the ThunderShirt is not a cure all for Donna. Like the other items I have at my disposal, the collar and leash, treats to counter condition her fear, etc, it requires a human to administer them. And yet, my dog gets the worse of her anxieties from thunder phobia precisely when the human is not around, either away from home or asleep during the night. And everytime these anxieties are not addressed, they run the risk of being reinforced and so now our dog is sensitive to wind as well as thunder >.<

In conclusion, the problem is not going to solve by itself. All I can do is try to improve the situation, one step at a time with the help of the tools available to me. The rest… it really depends on the weather.

My dog, the day after a huge storm.

To learn more about the ThunderShirt, visit www. thundershirt.com. If you live in Singapore, there are shops that sell the ThunderShirt, distributed by Hound Habitat. You can probably call Hound Habitat to find out where to buy :)

Other Thundershirt reviews

Finally, here are some of the comments other people have left about whether the ThunderShirt worked for them or no, on this blog:

4theloveofdog: I have a thunder-phobic dog as well and have a Thundershirt for her. While I don’t think its a 100% cure, it does seem to calm her and provide her some comfort when a storm rolls in.

Jan K: Great wrap up to your week! Our golden Sheba doesn’t like wind at all…it’s not just when it comes with thunderstorms, but I’m not sure if she’s making that association or not. Our other golden (who has passed on) was the worst with the thunderstorms (the thundershirt did help some with him), and even the sound of rain would set him off. He could also hear the thunder long before we could. Since he has gone, the two girls aren’t quite as nervous anymore. I think they feed off each other’s anxieties to an extent.

Sand Springs Chesapeakes: We have had great success with the thundershirts at work. I hope that it will be successful with Donna as thunderstorms can be very scary to dogs.

Linda Trunell: The Thundershirt helps Max relax when there are fireworks which really stress him. He runs to the door barking loudly and cannot settle without it. I also use the DAP calming collar and spray and calming music.

Dawn @ American Dog Blog: Pierson tried the Thundershirt for his recent visit to the vet. It didn’t help.

Sue @ Talking Dogs: We had 9 days in a row of wicked thunderstorms and poor Rudy quaked. Thundershirt does not work for him. Neither do natural remedies.

Crazy Dog Lady @ Run A Muck Ranch: Someone gave us a Thundershirt for Willy. It worked great in moderating Willy’s constant battle with Crabby, at least until the Idiots got it off him and used it as a tug toy.

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