Your stress levels affect your pooch

New study indicates that dogs look to their owners to inform their response to new environments and experiences

Dogs have lived alongside humans for thousands of years. They have been used to hunt, guard, herd and perform many other tasks, but today, they mainly act as companions. While their lives today may seem easy compared with their ancestors, they still face many stresses, including visits to the vet.

A couple of years ago, researchers in France showed that how a dog owner behaves at the vet affects their pet's stress levels. The study showed that negative owner behaviour, such as scolding, increased dog anxiety during a veterinary examination.

But before a recent research at Queen's University Belfast conducted by a lecturer from Queen's University Belfast and a PhD candidate from the University of Nottingham, no one had investigated the effect of owner stress on their dogs in a controlled environment. The duo's study differs from the research above, as it looks specifically at the effect of owner stress, measured through heart rate changes, on the stress experienced by their dog when at a vet.

Twenty-eight owners and their dogs took part in this experiment in which both owners and dogs wore heart-rate monitors throughout the experiment so that the researchers could monitor and record their heart rate and heart-rate variability - to measure stress levels.