Help to ensure that owners don't make this bonfire night a night to remember!

The firework season of 2020 has the potential to pose a huge welfare problem for the estimated 9.9 million owned dogs and 10.9 million owned cats in the UK, all of whom have an innate motivation for self-preservation. Hence, sudden, loud or novel noises immediately alert these animals to likely danger. Unless they have been thoroughly habituated to such noises, our companion animals will initiate increased attentiveness, arousal and an acute stress response on hearing sounds associated with fireworks. So, how would that habituation be achieved? Habituation is most easily achieved during the early development of the young animal, when it is capable of meeting novel stimuli while in a parasympathetic state of relaxation and consequently it is capable of learning that such stimuli can be ignored as they are irrelevant to their safety. The wider the array of stimuli that the young animal encounters during this period, the greater the level of similarity that future novel encounters will hold to the animal's existing concept of safety and the less likely it is that an animal will experience distress on exposure to the novel stimulus.