While travelling, your pet is constantly faced with new situations. Traveling pets are used to that, but it's possible that sometimes the stresslevel rises too high.
Because of that, you have to be able to assess the stress level of the animal in order not to overwhelm your own animal.
Animals often express themselves with superficial signs of the body language - long before they make sounds or have clearly disturbances of behavior.
Do you know typical stress signals in dogs and cats?
Dog:
- panting
- lip licking
- yawning
- paw lift
- tail position deeper than usual
- tail wagging
- put ears backwards
- grimace
- blinking eyes
- posted posture
- shaking off
- frozen
Cat
- yawning
- tail wagging
- bushy tail
- put ears backwards
- enlarged pupils
- excessive fur licking/grooming
Have you ever observed some of these signals of your animal? How do you react?
It often helps to give the animal time to deal with the situation. If this is not possible, a safe retreat is helpful. A box, a blanket or something similar can provide the animal with security. Anyway, it's good to have trained a box to enable stress-free travel, e.g. on a plane. Another possibility are thunder shirts / calming wraps which can give the animal a feeling of security.
There are many possibilities how to work and train on reducing the stresslevel of your pet. Ask professional pet trainers for support.
You find some books about bodylanguage of dogs and cats in our booklist.