The latest fad is the promotion of the idea that you should engage in dosing dogs with stress, and then letting them recover from that stress, and the belief that the relief felt afterwards is beneficial. The assumption is that you can inoculate dogs to be able to handle more and more stress over time.
The studies being used are rat and mouse studies. Rats and mice are not dogs, and have limited emotional processing compared to higher mammals, such as dogs. Dogs also can't practice the human version of Stoicism, deciding how they are going to view being in stressful or harsh conditions. It is never a good idea to extrapolate from one species to another as if you will get the same results, or that you understand what you are actually saying doing things this way. When I read a rat study, for example, I look for clues that might be useful. But it doesn't give me license to then try that thing on a dog. Further, most scientists know little to nothing about dog behavior, and they don't even try to know. They aren't dog trainers, and don't have the years of experience working with dogs of all ages, types, breed and mixes, and various environments and tasks.
I would not be surprised that one of the justifications will be the citing of the swimming rat studies, where the rats were left to swim for their lives for hours until given a chance to escape. The evaluation of stress wasn't the purpose of the study and wasn't assessed.
Traumatizing a dog in the hopes that it will recover is abusive. Not understanding why some dogs, based upon the 4 classical categories of temperament (choleric, sanguine, melancholic, and phlegmatic) confuses those trying to pick apart the results of over a century of animal experiments. Some are better able to recover vs. others, and it has nothing to do with such stress inoculation attempts.
Your dog is not an experiment. To do otherwise is unethical.
Plan accordingly.
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