Smells Like Trouble: Do Pets Feel Our Stress?
Published by Sentient Media.
Is the presidential campaign making your pet sick? While the campaign itself may not be, your inadvertent response to it could be impacting your companion animal’s health. Recent findings imply that chronic stress can take emotional and physical tolls on our canine companions.
Peer-reviewed studies suggest that dogs not only smell human emotions but experience them as their own. In 2017, University of Naples biologist Biagio D’Aniello and his colleagues arranged for human volunteers to watch videos intended to provoke fear, happiness, or a neutral response. The team then collected samples of the volunteers’ sweat and presented the samples to dogs. By monitoring the dogs’ behaviors and heart rates, the researchers discovered that dogs presented with the fear samples showed more signs of stress than those exposed to neutral or happy smells.
