OK I agree with what you said about preventing bites and all that but I think its safe to say dogs can have PTSD. Just because they cant tell us about it doesnt mean they don’t have it. One of the dogs we adopted had clearly been abused. She knew house rules so she had lived with humans before. Anytime we popped open a bag, even just a grocery bag, she flinched and went into a submissive position. If she was too close, she peed. At first, she peed anytime she was scolded. Later it was only when she was yelled at. Those are signs of abuse and there were a some others here and there. She had triggers. That’s what happens when you have PTSD. And it wasnt just that she was a skittish dog. She wasn’t scared bout anything outside or other dogs. It was only angry people and sudden movement that causes loud noises. Because thats what caused her harm. That sounds like PTSD to me.
Did you seriously just try to tell an actually god given vet that they’re wrong about animal psychology?
Apparently. As someone who has both been diagnosed with PTSD and has studied human psychology and animal behavior, I’m saying that the behaviors our dog exhibited looked an awful lot like PTSD for it to be written off as “not a thing”. Just because you’re an expert in animal care doesn’t mean you know everything there is to know about animals. Do vets even study a lot of animal psychology? I assume they study some but isn’t the focus on physical aspects? That’s a genuine question.
I have also studied psychology in animals and people and let me tell you there’s a pretty big friggin difference between learned behaviour and PTSD. An animal (or even a person subconsciously) can gain a learned behaviour where they associate a certain action- or someone else doing a certain action with being rewarded or punished. You cannot say a dog has PTSD because the tell of PTSD- COMING FROM SOMEONE WHO HAS IT AND HAS BEEN GOING TO THERAPY FOR YEARS FOR IT- is the feeling of being taken back to the incident of trauma like it’s currently happening, sometimes to the point of the person not being able to be counceled until they’re out of it. There is no thesible way to prove a dog experiences that. From what we know dogs have not displayed a thought process of bringing forth past memories and comparing them for a reference in their current situations- thus they have not displayed the capability of bringing back past trauma and being temporarily incapacitated by it.
My dog gets anxious when we bring luggage to the front door. This isn’t because my dog has PTSD- it’s because my dog has learned to associate luggage being brought to the front door with us leaving.
My other dog came from an abusive house hold, where she would be smacked for barking or other negative behaviour, thus she has learnt that when she barks he will be smacked- but she will still bark, and when someone approaches her and tells her to quiet down she will tuck her tail because she’s learned to associate someone wanting her to stop barking with her being punished- not because she has ptsd from her old house cause let me tell you she will NOT stop barking just because you calmly tell her it’s not necessary
Hell with that same dog she barks because she’s excited when someone pulls into the drive way because she’s learned to associate people pulling into the drive way with people arriving and she LOVES people.
I suggest looking into the Pavlov’s Dog experiment as a better explanation for learned behaviour in dogs instead of calling it PTSD when there’s no way of diagnosing a dog with such a thing.
Dude everyone who’s studied any kind of animal behavior knows about Pavlov and learned behaviors. You arent telling me anything new. I know the difference between learned behaviors and triggers. And as ive already said, i have PTSD. Ive also been in therapy specifically for that for years. You aren’t unique. And flinching because you expect to be hit? That’s a trait of PTSD. Ive also seen it commonly called an abuse flinch. Learned behaviors that come from abuse are still part of PTSD. And dogs have shown clear signs of having a memory. They learn to associate baggage with leaving because they remember things. They get happy when their human returns because they remember their human. So why cant they experience being taken back? You can’t say they don’t because by your own logic, we cant know that by talking them. So what do we do instead? We use observation and logic. Dog exhibits a pattern of behaviors. Human who is known to have PTSD exhibits a similar pattern of behaviors. Logical conclusion? Dog also has PTSD. Easy Peasy.
This is like the exact opposite of
anthropomorphism, and it’s equally bad.Look, humans aren’t unique. Our emotions? they’re the same as other animals who have a similar brain. human Emotions are animal emotions. We’re not special. What happens to us, happens to them. It’s one of the reasons why it’s even possible to live with animals in the first place because we can (somewhat) communicate with them based off of body language and vocal tones. Here’s one example of how our brains are wired the same way:
http://www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/full/10.1086/677677
That’s a seal pup, here’s one where the deer responds to the cries of a human infant: https://www.sciencenews.org/blog/wild-things/mama-deer-respond-cries-human-babies
Here’s another experiment you can do; at a park or some other public place, see how many adult women turn around when a kid falls off a swing /starts crying/ says “Mommy!” Now, if there are dogs at the park too there’s a chance that they’ll also perk their ears up and look in the direction of the sound.
The reason why I bring this up, is because the part of the brain that controls parental instinct is inside of the
hypothalamus. Fear is related to the
amygdala, but not exactly controlled by it. Now, most living things with a brain have a hypothalamus and an amygdala. Since they have these parts of the brain, I can assume it means that their brains are receptive to norepinephrine, acetylcholine, dopamine, and serotonin.
From the research I’ve read, “fear” is part amygdala, part hormones within the brain, part flight-or-fight, and part memory. The reason why I mention all of this is,
Here’s a .gov article I found about lab mice and rats being used as models for PTSD in experiments that are supposed to help humans who have this disease.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4694552/
Rats and Mice according to this research can develop Post Traumatic Stress Disorder.
(I also purposely used .gov /org /edu sources so…bite me)
If they can have it, then almost any animal with a brain as developed/more developed than a rat or mouse can have it as well.
Stop acting like once someone graduates from medical school (veterinarian or human) they are a an omniscient being. This is impossible.
Here’s the conclusion for the article;
Animal models are a widely used method to research PTSD without the need
for actual victims. Any finding in a model provides a prediction for
humans, giving scientists a valuable idea of what to expect
mechanistically and in treatment response. When looking at the validity
of the listed animal models, one finds that they all display enough
symptoms of PTSD to have face validity. Since all stressors work at
least roughly via the same fear pathways as PTSD-inducing
traumas, it is not hard for them to meet the construct validity
criterion. Predictive validity, however, is best considered for each
individual discovery, because the symptoms of PTSD and individual human
responses are too diverse to be judged for each model as a whole.
Accordingly, the DSM-5 criteria for PTSD can be used to list the
(behavioural) effect of the symptoms that individual animal models
reproduceSo… Yea. Animals can have PTSD, or a stress-induced disorder similar enough to PTSD for them to be a valid resource for research.
This one’s a .com, but it’s still a good read; https://www.haaretz.com/israel-news/science/.premium-1.608048
Considering that a diagnosis of PTSD as it’s currently written requires knowing whether an individual experienced frequent revisited memories of the trauma, nightmares, disassociative reactions or flashbacks, I cannot say with any certainty that an animal has PTSD or whether it’s something which results in similar behavioral outputs.
Sure, an animal might have a stress disorder post a traumatic event, but I can’t say an individual has PTSD as it is written in the DSM-V. I can’t say that it’s not either, but if the burden of proof is on me in a clinical scenario, I can’t say with certainty that it is the case.
Yes the physiology of emotions are similar and comparable across species, but we have very limited ways of knowing what the cognitive component of those emotions are. Emotions are part physiological and part cognitive, the brain interprets whether the same physiological signals mean you are feeling happy/sad/angry/aroused/fearful etc.
The description of ‘bites tall imposing men’ could be any number of things.
An experimental model that aims to induce PTSD in controlled conditions may conclude that the behavior observed is close enough to be labeled as such, and that’s fine. But in the real world there are too many variables – every second person with a rescue dog claims they were abused at their previous home when this is unlikely to be the case – but I cannot say a dog has PTSD, and I wouldn’t encourage a layperson to do so either.
(Also, the experimental models above evaluate PTSD differently to the DSM-V, including assessing response to increases stressors which are not useful and probably unethical in a clinical setting. It provides a method for inducing PTSD-like symptoms in animals in controlled environments, but it does not provide me with a way to make a diagnosis.)
Say, for example, a dog is just highly reactive, poorly socialized and bites when cornered. If that dog does land a serious bite, and the story goes around that it has PTSD, how is that going to affect the perception of people with PTSD?
If I can’t know for sure then I wont use the label, and I wouldn’t encourage anybody else to either.
We do, however, use other words for conditions which might be equivalent: fear aggression, high reactivity, single event learning, etc. These phrases describe what we see, not what we’re assuming an animal thinks.
Clinical psychologist here. The vet is right, you cannot diagnose an animal of any kind with PTSD because you can’t assess the required diagnostic criteria for PTSD in animals. Simple as that.
FYI:
“
And flinching because you expect to be hit? That’s a trait of PTSD.” Nope! PTSD doesn’t require this behaviour to be diagnosed, and you can express this behaviour without having PTSD.Rule of thumb: stick to descriptions of behaviour for animals. We cannot assess the inner cognitive world of animals in the same ways we can with people, so we cannot describe their behaviours in terms of psychological diagnoses that collect together a range of behaviours, thought patterns and experiences that commonly co-occur together in particular situations.
Also, although the people in this discussion may indeed have PTSD and take no issue with people saying dogs have PTSD, that’s not true of all people struggling with this particularly intense, incredibly frightening, and often disabling disorder. It’s disrespectful to conflate the complex cognitive and behavioural experiences of a survivor of a life-or-self-threatening experience, with the fear reaction of a cognitively very different animal.
Thank you for additional information from the other side of health care.
I’m boosting this because @drferox‘s and @theshrinkonhorseback’s comments cover the basic facts, but I also want to add some commentary.
If you’ve been following the blog for a while, you’ll probably have come across posts where I’m not willing to equate human emotional states with instances where animals appear to be experiencing the same emotion. The reason for that is well summed up in this quote from Ferox in the thread:
“Emotions are part physiological and part cognitive, the brain interprets whether the same physiological signals mean you are feeling happy/sad/angry/aroused/fearful etc.”
We can absolutely say that animals have the capacity for cognitive and emotional states, at this point. We can prove that they have fluctuations in neuro-chemical levels in some of these states that are similar to those of experienced by humans in emotional states. However, what we can’t do – and what I think is more and more the common tendency by people who message about animal behavior – is prove the way animals actually experience those states is analogous to how humans do.
As much as it is a nice thought that Fluffy (or Fido, or a wild elephant) might experience the world in exactly the same way as we do, we know that’s not real – and to project it upon animals anyway because we want it to be true is not only bad science, but it devalues their actual experience of their world. I’ve talked on the blog about the concept of “umwelt” before – for those just encountering the term, it’s the “sensory-perceptual world of an organism.” In plain language, an animal’s “umwelt” is the way in which an the animal’s sensory priorities shape how they interpret the world around them. A dog interprets the world based on scent first, and then hearing and sight; humans ignore their noses entirely and primarily focus their perception on visual stimuli. A tick, meanwhile, does not even have some of those senses – it’s entire sensory world is focused around sensing heat in it’s environment, because they find food by sensing the body heat of passing animals. Think about this in the concept of extremes: a whale, whose entire life is spend suspended in water, surrounded by tactile sound, is highly unlikely to experience the world around it in similar ways to bipedal terrestrial primate. I don’t know about you, but I’d much rather imagine all the ways a whale interprets it’s own life than try to shoehorn the experiences of an animal that can life for centuries and travel the globe multiple times over into a human schema.
When we try to equate human internal states and human experiences to those of animals, we make two errors. One, we unintentionally close the door on ever being able to understand the unique ways that those animals interpret their own world. And two, when we specifically try to equate mental illness to behavioral problems in animals, we continue to perpetuate antiquated categorizations of people with mental illnesses as “inhuman” or “animalic.”
Behaviorists – good ones – do as @theshrinkonhorseback suggested and “stick to descriptions of behaviour for animals” not because they don’t want to believe that animals have internal states or emotions, but because that’s the best way to avoid attempting to label animal behavior in ways that only allow for experiences that humans can conceptualize.
I’m going to jump on the same quote @why-animals-do-the-thing did and expend a tiny bit, as a scholar in media and cognition. I study the way people experience and recognize emotions, especially empathy (which requires recognizing emotions in others).
“Emotions are part physiological and part cognitive, the brain interprets whether the same physiological signals mean you are feeling happy/sad/angry/aroused/fearful etc.”
In affect (ie, “emotion”) theory, we call it the “perceptual-cognitive model of emotions”. The idea that emotions are twofold: a perception, and a cognitive element.
A similar perception (let’s say, involuntarily tense muscles), can be related to many different emotional states (fear, anger, anticipation), but also other factors (cold). The brain then uses a sense called “interoception”, which is the capacity to analyse one’s internal state, relates this perception and internal state to the situation, and comes to a conclusion about the emotion and feeling associated.
For example, the brain goes “oh, my muscles are tense, and I see this scary monster on the screen, this is fear”.
Similar percepts (sensual data) can lead to widely different interpretations by people: for example, that tense feeling you get before going on a rollercoaster is seen as fear by some, excitement by others.
Most of the time, this cognitive evaluation is pre-conscious, or subconscious (the conscious mind has little access to it, outside of specialized therapy procedures). But specialists now agree that it happens.
The issue is that: this process is NOT easily replicable even for human neurodivergent people. A lot of neuroatypical folks (especially on the autism spectrum) do not have good interoception, which means they can find it difficult to analyze and comprehend their own physical and emotional states, and can get overwhelmed or upset in confusing situations.
[as an autistic person myself, this is as far as my knowledge goes, so I won’t speculate more, but there is also evidence that empathy for some neurodivergent people is much more complex than the traditional model allows].So basically what I am saying is that cognition is incredibly complex and varied for humans, and we have to be very careful about transposing concepts or diagnostics to animals.
I hate y’all staying dogs don’t get PTSD because they do. Just because you can’t ask the damn dog if it has PTSD or not doesnt mean it’s not happening. This is the stupidest shit. I’m sorry, all you vets are wrong. My parents dog has one of the worst cases of PTSD I’ve ever seen. I’ve owned a lot of dogs. Dogs remember things. Dogs know. Dogs are smarter and have more feeling than you give them credit for. You are all fucking wrong.
Just because a dog can’t tell you it’s hurting, doesn’t mean it’s not hurting
As vets you should fucking well know that.
After you gonna invalidate a person who can’t communicate’s pain? No. So don’t do it to a dog. Trust the owners. We see our dogs a lot more than you do. We know our dogs better than you do. Just because you’re an expert on diagnosing heartworms doesn’t mean you can fucking say a dog isn’t in pyscological pain when it is so painfully obvious and clear to the people that spend every day with these animals that it is.
I’m sorry, but you’re fucking wrong
You’re not going to sit there and tell me that this dog, who will sit there and cower in fear the rest of the day after someone gets a text message, who will hide in the closet because it’s safe, who will shiver so hard she shakes the furniture she’s on when she’s away from my mom, who will literally pee herself at the sound of fireworks or thunder, does not have a pyschological problem. You’re not going to sit there and tell me she’s fucking cold. I know better.
This is the same as fucking doctors not believing that women are in pain because we’re “exaggerating” or “sensitive” or whatever.
You all are terrible vets and you should be ashamed of yourselves
Quick question: Did you read any of the previous responses?
I know it’s a long post, so let me quote an earlier paragraph.
Firstly, I don’t think you can say a dog ‘has PTSD’. We can’t talk about animal behaviour the same way we talk about human psychology. A human can explain what they’re thinking, with a dog we can only observe their behavior.
Secondly, if your dog is reactive and it known to have bitten people, in whatever circumstance, he is known to be a dangerous dog. That’s not a judgement on his breed, but it’s a fact. He’s ‘drawing blood’. It might be only ‘once in a blue moon’, but you have a large dog who is drawing blood.
You are correct in the assumption that if he bites ‘the wrong person’, meaning ‘anybody that makes a report’ or ‘anybody that is seriously injured’ he will potentially be seized and put down. It’s a difficult situation, but you have to realise that, through no fault of his own, the dog is dangerous.
If he slips up and bites somebody, he risks his life.
So don’t give him the opportunity to fail.
That means not giving him the opportunity to bite somebody. That might include signs on the property about ‘beware of dog’, warning collars, muzzling in public or being confined to a run. Your local council will probably have regulations they want enforced.
Many people in this situation would not accept the risk of their dog biting someone and subsequently being seized and put to sleep. Their reasoning is that if the bite happens, not only will they lose their beloved dog, but they will be wracked with guilt about the bite itself, which might permanently damage another human. So they elect to have the dog put to sleep on their own terms.
There is a big push about ‘pitbulls aren’t dangerous’ and I may receive backlash from calling your dog dangerous, but the facts are that you’ve told be that he bites, he’s reactive, and he’s drawn blood. This individual dog is a ‘dangerous dog’, which means you either need to put precautions in place to protect both people and the dog, or you put him to sleep before something regrettable happens.
Considering that a diagnosis of PTSD as it’s currently written requires
knowing whether an individual experienced frequent revisited memories of
the trauma, nightmares, disassociative reactions or flashbacks, I
cannot say with any certainty that an animal has PTSD or whether it’s
something which results in similar behavioral outputs.If it’s not clear, this means there is no way for me, or you, or anyone else who can’t read the dog’s thoughts to differentiate between PTSD as humans know it and literally any other fear response.
So I cannot, as a veterinarian, say a dog has PTSD. I can describe and label it’s behavior in terms of fear responses but I cannot assume its thought processes are one thing when it’s equally likely to be another.
I really hope that makes sense to you, and you re-read the previous additions by trained professionals to understand what we are saying so that if this conversation needs to continue it can do so in a civil manner. I honestly think everything that needs to be said has already been done so, and as I’ve got a huge amount of hours to work in clinics this week I don’t intend to keep coming back over and over to this topic to repeat myself.
Nobody is saying that dogs can’t be traumatized.
As has been said above more than once, the primary diagnostic criteria for a diagnosis of PTSD is that the patient re-experiences the traumatic event.
It is impossible to tell whether a dog’s fear response is due to re-experiencing something traumatic.
PTSD CANNOT BE DIAGNOSED WITHOUT ASKING A PATIENT WHAT THEY ARE EXPERIENCING. You cannot ask a dog what it is feeling, so you cannot diagnose PTSD in a dog.
PTSD is a very specific form of response to trauma.
What you are describing above is a very non-specific trauma response.
It could be a symptom of PTSD, but there is absolutely no way to tell.
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