Pet owner affected by fireworks factory explosion: Treat the hours and days to come with caution

The day is not over and it will likely take a few days to find out the full scale of destruction but I wanted to make sure I came back with something to help in the next few days and hours, and thank the beautiful people who shared this morning's emergency post to reach 203 pets who needed a better owner today.

Bitesize Summary:

Even without signs of stress, treat your pets assuming they are stressed. Avoid high risk situations with strange dogs or mixing dogs. Avoid off-leash exercise completely in public spaces especially around other dogs.

Trauma has a funny way of developing silently. The animal seems to be normal but just a little jumpier than usual but with each new scare their reaction becomes bigger and more disproportionate. That's the sign of a tightly wound animal seeing danger everywhere.

Or they don't react because thats their learned coping style but are masking their fear and might only be clear if you're monitoring their heart rate, breathing rate, pupil dilation or salivary cortisol. But since we do not live in a lab, we err on the side of caution and assume there is some trauma for sure and it may be worse than it looks.

After significant events like this while the animal is still doubtful of what to expect next, animal risk scanning increases, as does their dysposition to act first think later or simply interpret everything through the les of trauma and behsve atypically...

Some years ago working at the kennels on a hot Summer day unbenownced to us, a prode march parade had been permitted to assemble in front of the kennels with all their speakers and mixing boxes. None of our attempts to convince DJs to lower the music worked and pleas to police also fell of deaf ears. And a day I was meant to be celebrting became a trauma for me and the dogs I worked with. The next day one of the dogs who had been our best resident had become so jumpy, he actually got startled by some wind moving a door, twisted himself free and ran head on in front of a cat. My point is, your pet might be just holding on hoping nothing bad happens. Right now they are more likely to interpret the minor unexpected slight as a bigger risk. They are therefore more likely to act defensively and out of character. Theyr'e also more likely to act this way even towards other dogs, so avoid group dog activities and separating pets in multi pet hoseholds when they cannot be fully supervised may be the best idea.

This is similar to how we treat animal post-surgery, post-fight, or post -injury. My experience is that accidnets happen when you don't give them time to decompress before going back to business as usual.