This is one of the strangest books I’ve ever read, it was completely different than I expected! The topic is relevant to all dog professionals and should be important to all dog owners, but especially owners of anxious and/or reactive dogs. It’s incredibly important to know about stress! The book is kind of old, originally published in Germany in 2003 (ten years ago!) and in 2007 translated to English when Dogwise published it. It’s important to remember that for 2003, it was a very different book than what was available.
The first section was about the physiology of stress and the chemical changes in the dog. The diagrams and descriptions seemed like those in a textbook and I think would be overwhelming for the average reader. The average person could read through it…but I don’t know that the chapter would make sense. This information isn’t essential for everything that follows in the book, making me wonder why this section was first. It could scare some people off and others probably just skip ahead.
Many, many dog books have a section on body language, this book included. Other than a few books that use pictures, I really liked the descriptions here. This book used enough of a description to give the reader a good idea of what’s going on (better than a list!) but wasn’t overwhelming with information either.
Another big chapter was about a survey the authors conducted online, with about 225 responses. The survey looked at owner-reported stress signs from the dog and details about the dog’s daily lives; types and frequencies of exercise, interactions with other dogs, amount of sleep, where the dog spends time, how often the dog is alone, and more. The survey and a summary of the results are in this book. While it’s interesting, it seemed a little odd to spend 23 pages going over this information. I found it interesting, but I don’t know that the information was important to me.
The last big section was on the “Anti-Stress Program.” This is the part I was most interested in when I first heard about the book and when I purchased the book. There were only a few pages on the specific program, essentially “There is no magic remedy for stressed dogs,” a sample of the intake survey that the author uses and a five page list of bullet point short paragraphs on ways to reduce stress. There are thirty pages of case study notes which are interesting though there seemed to be more background information than time spent on the solutions.
One of the proposals from the author, and one seems like has only gotten more attention in the last year or two, is the idea that excessive exercise can cause more stress in a dog. For people, we know that some amounts of exercise can decrease stress, and there are enough physiological similarities that it probably applies to many mammals that were designed to be active for a period of time. On the other hand, highly exercise, like games of fetch, may not be the best thing for dogs. The chemical changes in the brain during those games may make the dog more excitable at other times, the type of activity creates a very athletic dog, and when the dogs are “good” after exercise, it may be from exhaustion, not from having needs met. I wish this was a book available to me in 2003, as that’s a time when Blaze was getting 4+ hours of exercise a day on the advice of several trainers. That conditioning allowed him to be fit enough to bark for hours at a time, to need a lot of exercise to be satisfied, and probably contributed to his arthritis! It’s hard to know what the balance between enough exercise is and what activities might be contributing to an inappropriate amount of excitement and stress for a dog.
Will I read this book again? I don’t know. Is it something I’d recommend? Maybe if I had an owner or enthusiast who was having a hard time understanding why they should care about stress. The information in the book is so varied that at this point it’s hard to know how to best utilize the information or who would benefit the most from this type of book.