How does mental health affect your furry friend?

Before talking about the signs of dog mental illness, it’s vital to understand how a condition like this can affect your companion. Some pet owners tend to overlook seemingly harmless behaviors in their dogs. Frequently, a dog’s anxieties are treated as innocent singular acts or quirks, so long as they aren’t doing any harm to anyone else.

But dogs’ mental health conditions can have much more detrimental and longer-lasting effects on the pup itself. As Nancy Dreschel of the Department of Animal Science at Pennsylvania State University points out, the more anxious and fearful a dog behaves around strangers, the shorter his or her lifespan is.

Since most pet dogs don’t have an autopsy after death, it’s difficult to tell exactly how some pups die. However, there are some signs of dog mental illness that can be visible to humans before their pet’s death.

For example, studies show that separation anxiety, fearfulness, and other forms of psychological distress cause various skin problems in dogs.