Yelling At Your Dog Can Traumatize Them For Life, Reveals This Study

If you are a dog person, you actually feel guilty whenever you have to rebuke your dog.

After all the naughty things they do and after the havoc they wreak every now and then in your absence, you still fall for those puppy eyes, called that for a reason.

Down 05 Blogspot

Now after you read this, it’ll be even harder to do that.

Because, a new study claims yelling at your dogs traumatizes them long-term. That’s the last thing a dog loverE would ever want.

NY Post

This basically means two things. One, it shouldn’t be morally correct to do that to your dog under any circumstance and two, the animals, after proving they are too good for our kinds, deserve better behavior from their hoomans.

UNILAD

The findings come from a new study, in which 42 dogs were recruited from obedience schools, while 50 more from selected from aversion training.

Each dog was filmed for 15 minutes in three training sessions and saliva samples were used to assess the stress level each canine experienced.

Kamloops Matters

To set a baseline, saliva samples were also taken when the dogs were relaxing at their respective homes. Other signals of stress, such as yawning, lip-licking, paw-raising and yelping, were also noted carefully.

Tractive.com

During the study, it was found out that dogs who had experienced shouting and lead-pulling during their training were found to be more stressed.

With higher levels of cortisol in their saliva, the dogs also showed signs of elevated stress. In comparison, dogs who found gentler teachers displayed fewer stress behaviours and normal cortisol levels.

Pet MD

The researchers, led by biologist Ana Catarina Vieira de Castro of the University of Portugal, wrote:

Our results show that companion dogs trained using aversive-based methods experienced poorer welfare as compared to companion dogs trained using reward-based methods, at both the short- and the long-term level.

To further study the long-term effects of the trauma, the dogs were studied again after a month. This time the researchers trained the dogs to associate a bowl on one side of the room, with a tasty snack.

Barkpost

Half the bowls had tasty treats and half of them were empty. Researchers moved the bowls around to confuse the dog and to check how eager they were to find the snacks.

Here, a fast approach meant the dog was more hopeful and a slow approach meant the dog had no hope of securing a tasty snack.

After tallying reports, it was concluded that dogs who were subjected to strict or harsh behaviour were slow to approach the bowl, while gentler dogs worked with more energy to secure the snacks.

This clearly suggested that a reward-based training for your pet dog can be more fruitful and leave your four-legged friend in a more positive frame of mind.