Hi there everyone !!

I have a problem that I could use some help with. My dog, Dakota is 12 and he is DEATHLY afraid of thunder storms. The other night we had a high wind storm with T & L and he actually got so scared he peed right where he stood and he shakes !! Any good advice ?

I wish our dog would only pee!

she is 10 and has always been afraid of loud noises - jets, thunder, gun shots , fireworks !
but she has gotten much worse this last year.

If we close her in on the back porch - like last forth of July- when we got home to let the dogs out - She had half the door frame tore off trying to get into the house!!
We also tried putting her in the kennel with the other dog and she will bite the chain link and try to tear it apart to get out.
We had to reinforce the chain link with rebar grids because she would bite , yank, and pull the wires apart so she could crawl out between them.

She always has been an escape artist -even as little pup she would figure out how to climb over a 2' door to get out of the playhouse.

The noises don't bother the other 2 dogs at all.
I think drugs will be next -at least for the 4th of July anyway.
doggy tranquilizers.

My dog had a similar problem. She would try to hide, she would pee, she would poop, she would run around the house tearing things apart and knocking stuff over, etc...

I partially solved her fear by talking to her in a calming voice and making a bit of a game out of the noise.... everytime I would see the lightning I would say "here it comes, get ready, here comes the boom" in the voice I use for playtime.

Essentially, by playing this game, she learned that the boom comes after the flash. Once she learned that she was less afraid because she would expect a loud noise after the flash, so it wasn't an unexpected noise that startled her.

After she got used to the concept of flash=boom she was still a bit afraid of storms, but instead of being a terror in the house she would just sit and look out the window and whine a little bit... but she stopped peeing, pooping, knocking things over, etc...

The funny thing is that I got the idea to teach her about flash=boom from a neighbor who had a 3 year old child. She taught her daughter about flash=boom in thunderstorms so that the little girl would stop crying, and amazingly enough the same concept worked for the dog (of course it took longer to teach the dog since the child understood english and the dog did not)
.

WoW! I didn't know I should be so thankful! Our golden retriever would get nervous and hide and possibly dig when storms were rolling in, but never pee, poop, or other things.

We would often invite her to stay close to us, and that helped. Otherwise, we just let her seek out her 'dens'... usually between the bed and the wall. We discouraged digging in the early years, and she stopped that part of it.

She HATED storms, and yes.. we always knew they were coming even when it was still bright and sunny overhead. Fourth of July, she just found a quiet spot and hid.

Cara