It's A Dog's Life

You may not think so but being a dog can be stressful. Humans think dogs have easy lives. After all, many of us have nice families to share our houses with. We get healthy food and treats and get to go for walks and rides in cars.

You see our happy smiles and wagging tails and think everything is just fine but do you notice when we pant or lick excessively. I bet you notice when we chew up the furniture or pee in the house. Those are some big signs that we are stressed.

Dogs need lots of physical and mental exercise otherwise we get bored and boredom causes stress.  It can be really stressful for working dogs.  Working dogs can’t spend their days sleeping in their crates. I like to relax but even I can’t sleep all day.

Not having enough physical or mental activity is only one thing that stresses us out. Loud noises are very stressful too. Things like thunderstorms and fireworks are very loud but they don’t happen all the time like some of the noise we deal with every day.

Dogs have extra good senses and our hearing is lots more sensitive than human’s hearing. Humans like to play music and although we like music, we don’t like it extra loud. In our house the television is on all the time but Mom keeps the sound low. I like to watch the peoples and animals on the screen but I don’t like to hear some of the loud noises that the television makes.

We live on a street with not many cars but DixieLee and I can hear the big trucks that travel along the highway not so far away. I bet the dogs who live in the houses near the highway find the noise from those big trucks very stressful.

Yelling is the worst noise ever! Mom and Dad are old and they don’t hear good so sometimes when they talk when they are in different rooms they get really loud. When that happens, DixieLee barks to remind them that they should be using indoor voices when they are in the house.

And you should never ever use loud voices when training. Learning new things is stressful enough and yelling makes it even harder.

I’m pretty easy going so I don’t get stressed out often but DixieLee stresses a lot so Mom tries to make it so we don’t get stressed too much. One way is to make things routine. When we know when things are supposed to happen we know what we need to do.

Dad gets awake every day at the same time and we know he will get our breakfast soon. We know when Mom goes to work we have to go into our crates but we know Dad will come home soon and we can be in the whole house or in our pen if we want.

Mom and Dad also spend lots of time with us.  They take us for walks and talk to us all the time to help us have stress free lives.

I like being a dog and I do have a good life but it does get stressful some times.  I'm glad I get to live in a house with peoples who understand and try to keep my life stress free.  Most of the time....

I have to stop now and rest because Mom used her loud voice today when the man came in the big brown truck and we wouldn't stop barking.

Your totally stressed friend,

Zeva

P.S. Blatant Self-promotion.  For the bestest pet gift baskets in the universe, check out pawpalsboutique.com