BellaOnline Forums Beauty and Self Stress Management Stress and animals

Do animals feel stressed?

Yes.

Stress in animals can be caused by a variety of things. Tension in the household, one of their humans traveling without them for extended periods, diet changes, new family members, rearranging items in their cage, traveling ... many of the same things that stress humans can stress animals.

Does tension in the hosehold affect dogs?

Absolutely, without question... We may view the dog as a member of the family, but the animal, conversely, considers us humans to be part of the pack. Any kind of emotional upheaval will always be felt by the dog.

Have you had a pet dog?

Alexandra is correct. Dogs function as a pack with their family. I have 2 - one wants to be the alpha female and the other is definitely an Omega. In times of stress, the one that wants to be alpha will try to up her status in the pack by glueing herself to my husband (the dominant male). She will demonstrate hostility to anyone she perceives as a threat to him. The Omega, on the other hand, will try to protect the weakest family member or the one stressed out. She attempts to deflect the interpersonal attention to herself (that is her role as an Omega).

In a different scenario ... my family recently closed up my mother-in-laws house (she's gone into assisted care living). Three generations were there trying to figure out the disposition of things in her house. Everyone had scheduled 2 weeks to take care of it - it turned into six. There was tension from being in a strange place, strange food, stress from the humans who wanted to go home, small interpersonal stresses as the humans disagreed on disposition, etc. The dogs were also hyper-vigilant guarding the house because it was on a busy street corner with traffic at all hours of the day and night. When they all finally came home, the dogs literally slept for three days only waking to eat and go to the bathroom once a day. I'd never seen anything like it. Now they're back to normal: stealing dropped nuts from the bird rooms, begging to be let out to pounce on squirrels, etc. There's no question that the stress of the trip affected them as well as the humans.

Lovely incident.

Of course they do! Every species of animals have feelings, intelligence, empathy, a conscience and a soul.

The term "animals" ranges from the simplest one-cell organisms to intelligent gorillas who can learn sign language and communicate with humans, so I think it's fair to say that amongst the animals we see a wide range of behavior. I doubt bacteria feel much stress beyond "avoid poison" and "go toward food". Elephants, on the other hand, grieve their dead and risk their own lives to save others. So there's quite a range there.

Much of that behavior is instinctive. Hummingbirds go toward certain types of flowers because instinct tells them they are nutritious, not because they have necessarily a sense of "beauty".

Most animals do not have a conscience. A conscience is a moral judgement about something being right or wrong. Most animals do what they need to do because it's what they need to do. If a wolf needs to pee, it pees. It doesn't think about where it pees beyond a desire to mark a territory. It doesn't consider that it might be morally right or wrong to pee on a person's rosebuds. It's just not even a thought to them.

It's mostly us humans who have these complicated thoughts about actions being right or wrong for societal reasons. And even those vary wildly from society to society. For example, the "right" way to tend to visitors is vastly different in some parts of the world than in others.