Pets are susceptible to stressful situations rather like we are. A few examples of stressful situations are:

• Moving house
• Being left alone at home
• Fireworks
• Thunder storms
• Introduction of a new pet
• Multi-cat households have inbuilt stresses
• Travel sickness

You may well be able to overcome these situations with simple solutions but some individuals really do need help and we can usually come up with something useful.

For example having moved, your pet may not settle, may urinate or defaecate inappropriately.

Your dog may howl and/or may do damage to the house or furniture when left alone. This in turn may cause annoyance to neighbours.

Fireworks may terrify your pets especially dogs and thunder storms may likewise be traumatic.

The introduction of a new pet into a stable, settled home situation may upset the pets already present.

In all of the above situations we have suggestions on how to respond, we have drugs which may be useful and necessary in some cases and we have natural remedies which will help in many cases. For example, with fireworks and other noise phobias we have CDs which help your pet adapt to noises. We have pheromone therapies- Adaptil and Feliway (natural products which relax dogs and cats extremely well) and natural treatments such as Calmex which help in numerous situations.

Regarding travel sickness/ motion sickness which is reasonably common especially in young dogs. Many puppies will be nauseated at first by car journeys but exposure to gradually increasing duration of journeys will usually get them used to traveling by car. Some dogs, however will never get used to car journeys. For these poor pets we have treatments which do work and if used persistently will help to get your dog used to traveling. The licensed product for this is called Cerenia. Adaptil used in these circumstances is also very helpful.