When working intimately with animals, emotional safety is a fundamental pillar to achieving a safe environment.
The grooming environment is a hazardous place filled with various tools, objects, products and equipment that could pose a real threat to the health and safety of a groomer and any animals in their care if the relevant risk-assessment and procedures weren't in place to consider them.
But this post is not about the Health & Safety at Work Act 1974, this is about emotional safety and what this might mean for your dog when it comes to their grooming experience.
Emotional safety is important because it is something that all sentient animals rely on to live a healthy and happy life.
Emotional safety, despite being so significant, is often not considered in the context of a professional grooming environment.
As a result dogs and groomers suffer needlessly, and many groomers carry on completely unaware of the reason why their processes are not getting the results that they are so desperate to achieve - cooperation and low-stress.
Safety is confused with control
When there is talk about how to create a safe grooming space it's surprising that many groomers will naturally default to tools and devices that have been designed to control a dog during tasks.
The idea that physical restraining devices keep a dog safe is a short-sighted one since it doesn't quite look at the bigger picture, nor acknowledge the very real risks to a dog's emotional safety and how this might influence the overall experience as a result.
What is emotional safety?
Psychologists describe emotional safety to be a "visceral feeling" that a person (or animal) is safe to be who they are and exhibit natural behaviours within a space, place or with others. Emotional safety has often been referred to as "physical pain felt in the body" and it relies on a being feeling free to be who they are.
More than this, I believe that emotional safety is also believing that there is no impending threat to one's life, and that you are free and able to remove yourself should you feel threatened.
When a dog feels unsafe then the environment is unsafe irrespective of the measures a groomer has put in place to keep a dog from physical harm (ie. a physical restraining device).
When a dog is unable to express natural behaviours and/or emotions, the suppression causes an array of emotional and physiological consequences leading to an escalation of more intense/undesirable behaviours.
Restraint is not safety
There are a few common restraining tools that tend to be used over and over again in the professional grooming environment for the purposes of safety, including:
neck nooses
groomer's helper
belly straps
slip leads
muzzles
calming cradles
physical/forceful holds
And while there may be room for some of these tools in very specific circumstances, using them without careful consideration to the emotional state of a dog can often lead a groomer into a false sense of safety for one very important reason:
Physical force activates the fight or flight response in an animal leading to an escalation of behaviours that are often described by groomers as "unsafe", "aggressive", "dangerous" and/or "reactive".
The majority of unsafe scenarios will be naturally blamed on how a dog is behaving, for example:
How cooperative or uncooperative they are during a grooming session.
How likely they are to attempt to jump off of a grooming table and potentially injure themselves.
How often they attempt to air snap or lunge at a groomer or a tool.
When we witness a dog thrashing around a grooming table while attached to a neck noose, we see the behaviour of the dog as being unsafe, and the neck noose the invaluable safety tool that prevents a dog from falling off of the grooming table.
The theory being:
The dog's behaviour is what is making the environment unsafe.
The neck noose is helping to keep the dog safe by controlling how far his behaviours can take him.
The reality of this scenario is:
The dog did not feel emotionally safe to begin with
The neck noose has intensified the fear
The dog is now displaying an escalation of behaviours as per the fight/flight response.
Control and management might very well stop a dog bite or a dog falling but it doesn't make a safe environment.
Emotional safety is acknowledging consent
Knowing the difference between compliance and consent is important since they are often confused for one another.
Compliance - when a dog has learned to accept a certain task will happen with or without a fight, and decides that the easiest path of resistance is to simply let it happen.
Consent - when a dog has learned that a certain task is not a threat and will offer their consent to have the task carried out knowing they can disengage at any moment.
Compliance is basically what trainers and behaviourists would define as 'shut down' and eventually, 'learned helplessness' caused by flooding a dog into enduring a negative stimulus consistently, over a prolonged period of time.
Consent is only achieved when a dog is introduced and conditioned to various tasks through careful desensitisation using positive reinforcements to help build a positive association to the process.
Prolonged stress leads to illness
Finally, to try and persuade you to consider rethinking the way you approach the grooming process I would like to conclude this post with the main reason why it's important - failure to acknowledge emotional safety ultimately leads to chronic dis-ease.
There have been various studies and reports to prove that when a dog is exposed to too many stressful events or subjected to consistent aversive training, they will eventually suffer for some concerning health disorders including:
chronic stress
neuro facial pain
depression
hypersensitivity
immune disorders
heart disease
cancer
Acknowledging that our emotional wellbeing is intertwined with our physical and physiological wellbeing means understanding that everything is connected, and when one thing is off-balance, the entire dog is off-balance.
Reverting to the traditional concepts of grooming that support and endorse devices that's sole purpose is to mask behaviour rather than relieve it, only leads to a more insecure and troubled dog.
Investing in learning more about cooperative based methods and how they can be implemented into the process of grooming is a duty that all professional groomers have to ensure they are providing the dogs in their care with a service that reflects an up-to-date scientific approach.
For more information on this topic please check out my book, 'The Magic of Holistic Grooming' which is available to buy on Amazon, Waterstones, Barnes & Noble and Dogwise Book Publishers.
For more information on the studies and reports mentioned that show the negative consequences of aversive training and physical restraints please click here and/or here.
For more information on emotional security and dogs, click here.