I first heard of the Thundershirt from a friend of mine. I was telling him a story about how Zoe, our Weimaraner, likes to hide in the bathtub during thunderstorms. He mentioned the Thundershirt as a product he had seen that was supposed to relax and calm dogs that were scared of thunder. A few months later, we met with a Thundershirt rep while at Global Pet Expo. We started talking about the Thundershirt, and how it cold help pets with all types of anxiety including travel anxiety. With that thought in mind we put together this Thundershirt Review to see how well it worked .
I must admit when I first heard of, and saw, the Thundershirt I was pretty skeptical. I mean, how is a shirt supposed to calm a dog down? Well it turns out there’s quite a bit of science behind it. Dogs, being den animals, like to feel cozy when under stress. Think about a dog in the wild, if it was nervous or stressed out from a storm, it would crawl into it’s den and stay there until the storm passed over. Well the Thundershirt takes that same concept of cozy pressure and applies it with their shirt. The question is, does it work? I would try anything to not have to look at this face again.
When I first unpacked the shirt, I read through all the information. It looked simple enough. The shirt basically just drapes over your dogs back, and then has velcro straps to tie around her chest and ribcage. Tightening or loosening the shirt will then add the appropriate amount of pressure to relax your pet.
I pulled it out of the box and put it on Zoe…. and nothing happened. I’m not sure what I was expecting, considering she was not stressed or anxious about anything at the moment, but she immediately went and took a nap. I figured that was a good sign, at least this thing is comfy.
Within the next couple of days, we planned on taking a short trip in the car to visit a friend, who lived about an hour away. I wanted to test the idea of the Thundershirt helping with travel anxiety, but I had a problem. Zoe’s a professional car traveler. She’s covered over 70K miles in cars, and most of it’s was sleeping. I tried it anyway. I put her in the shirt and got her in the back of the car. Normally she takes 5-10 minutes to settle down for a long ride. This time, she sat for about 2 minutes and was sleeping in 5. I wasn’t 100% sold yet, but things were looking promising.
