Help your pet relax with natural remedies

  

Is your pet a sensitive soul? Do common, everyday events, like loud noises or being left at home, spark fear or anxiety in your pet? If so, your pet is not alone. Many pets contend with anxiety that can be either situational (only triggered by certain events) or generalized (occurring all the time).

No one likes seeing their pet distressed, and so naturally we seek ways to alleviate our pet’s anxieties. But anxiety is a tricky problem to fix. It can have many root causes, which aren’t always possible to determine. It can also vary in severity, from mild discomfort to full panic. Lastly, there is no easy fix for anxiety—your pet’s mind is a complicated place, and modifying feelings and behaviors is not simple.

For all these reasons, the most important step to alleviating anxiety is training with the goal of achieving long-term behavior modification. Your veterinarian and veterinary behaviorist are invaluable resources during this process and will significantly increase your likelihood of success.

Supplements and natural remedies can also help reduce anxiety. For mild, situational anxiety, supplements alone may be sufficient to ease anxiety. For moderate to severe situational anxiety or generalized anxiety, supplements are often used in conjunction with training to help take the edge off and make the pet more relaxed and receptive to forming new, positive associations with their fears.

There are quite a few anxiety-reducing supplements, and they work through a variety of mechanisms. Examples of the most commonly used natural remedies for behavior include:

• Pheromones are chemical substances that only animals can smell and that can stimulate an emotional response. These are species-specific, and the synthetic versions mimic calming pheromones produced by your dog or your cat.
• L-theanine is a naturally occurring amino acid that boosts relaxation by encouraging production of calming hormones and preventing excitatory nerve signals.
• L-tryptophan is also an amino acid, and it is a precursor to serotonin, a feel-good hormone. This amino acid can also be found in supplements containing whey protein concentrate.

So next time you know of an upcoming stressful event that might trigger fear or anxiety in your pet, give a natural remedy a try. Your veterinarian can recommend the anti-anxiety supplement that would best fit your pet’s needs.

Shop our wide variety of behavioral supplements to give your pet the gift of relaxation >>