July 4th, Not Fun for Skunky

 My friend Gina found her dog, Skunky, on the streets of Patterson, New Jersey as a pup some 13 years ago. She suspects that he’d been used as a “bait dog” for dogfights, because he was always cowering down, scared of just about everything, but especially men’s loud voices.

Skunky, a black Labrador mix, is better around men now but is still deathly afraid of thunder from a rainstorm, or any loud series of noises—construction sites, jackhammers, or fireworks. Whenever those happen, he begins to shake, and he has to run to Gina and stay right by her side, in order to calm down.

So this year, before July 4th’s firecracker insanity infiltrates her New Jersey neighborhood, Gina bought Skunky a ThunderShirt.

ThunderShirt is a dog anxiety shirt, designed to calm nervous dogs. It follows the same logic as swaddling a baby—that it makes the animal feel enveloped and safe. The shirt goes around the dog’s belly and around its upper chest area, so it feels like it is being hugged from the pressure of the wrap, which is as comforting to dogs as it is to humans. 

Wrap it tight, but not too tight.

The manufacturers boast an 80 percent success rate with dogs that wear them. And Temple Grandin, professor of animal science at Colorado State University, a best-selling author, had astudy accepted last year in the Journal of Veterinary Behavior on the effect of ThunderShirts on anxious dogs’ heart rates and behavior. The study looked at 90 dogs, some of which wore the ThunderShirt and some that did not, and determined that the heart rates of those with the shirts remained steadier.

Gina found out about ThunderShirt through a friend who claims that, when she puts it on her anxious dog, her dog literally sighs with relief.

I’m not here to plug ThunderShirt so please know that it is not the only product on the market that uses the same logic to calm dogs. There are others, including StormDefender and Anxiety Wrap. There will probably be more to come, too.

Skunky has not yet had the opportunity to wear his new threads for a special occasion, but the holiday weekend should offer the perfect moment for ThunderShirt to prove its worth.

For other ways to calm your dog during fireworks, here's thatmutt, a great blog on dogs.