A Yorkshire Terrier's diary

I wish humans would learn that most doggies are frightened of loud noises such as bangs from crackers and fireworks.
The fiestas in my the village I live in have just finished and this time we had bangers in the morning and fireworks at night.
Terrible! Who wants bangers at 8 o'clock in the morning when you are still in your basket sleeping. Honestly I feel I need a week at a doggie health spa just to relax.

Many humans wonder why we doggies are afraid of things like firework. First of all some doggies, like for instance smaller dogs like myself, are more genetically prone to anxiety. Yorkshire terriers like myself are predisposed to develop noise phobias. I know it is true because my vet told me so.

Louds noises such and explosions trigger a lot of doggies fight and flight response. A flight and fight response means that we doggies just want run as far away we can from the noise. This is not good if the noise happens when you are out and off the lead because you might run into traffic and hurt yourself. Cars are hard and dogs are soft.

When we hear noises whilst we are inside our homes we might also get frighten. I have a doggie friend Lemon who runs and hides under his mommy's bed. Personally I just run around and bark when I hear loud noises. When I try to go back to sleep in my basket I sometimes dream funny dreams and wake up scared. Normally my dreams are happy but when there are lot of strange loud noises they are scarry.

In Spain there are a lot of firworks and the Spanish people like lots of bangers so more dogs have problems living here.

There are ways in which humans can help us doggies. For instance if you know there is going to be a fire work display you
can turn up the sound on the TV louder, or turn on the radio so we can listen to music. Personally I quite like having the TV
on and watching the Discovery channel. I like him Mike Brewer who buys old cars, and I also like to listen to his friend Edd's voice.

You can also help us by drawing the curtains, or pulling down the blinds so we can't see the fireworks.

My friend Paco suffers from noise phobia really badly. I have found him a very clever web site which is called Relax my dog.
They have really lovely music which you can download.  The music is really nice for doggie meditation, and when my mommy and daddy go without taking me they turn it on so I can listen to it. There is also some good music available on something called YouTube.

It also helps to laugh. Us doggies do some funny things sometimes, and there are fun videos available on Youtube. Click here for the link to the video I like.