Conditioning patients to manage noise fears

Fireworks, thunderstorms and other loud, sudden noises can be fearful for some companion animals. A continuing education session at the 2025 Fetch dvm360 Conference in Charlotte, North Carolina, presented by Christopher Pachel, DVM, DACVB, CABC (IAABC), a practitioner at Animal Behavior Clinic in Portland, Oregon, discussed using a comprehensive approach with a variety of intervention strategies to address noise phobia and anxiety in canines. During a dvm360 interview, Christopher Pachel, DVM, DACVB, CABC (IAABC), discusses how one of those intervention strategies, behavioral conditioning, works to help improve quality of life for a patient and the pet’s owner.

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The following is a transcript of the video:

Christopher Pachel, DVM, DACVB, CABC (IAABC): When we're doing a conditioning exercise to try to change either their emotional response or the behavioral response—essentially, ‘how do I feel?’ and ‘what do I do when that situation happens?’—what we need to be able to do is essentially avoid the scenario that's triggering the panic response. Not because that fixes it, but because we're trying to get them out of that sort of habitual response, and then to be able to create more intentional exposures at a very specific intensity level.

What I mean by that is. if I make that intensity level of the stimulus—the volume, the duration of the sound, whatever it is that we're manipulating—too soft, too short, enough so that it's not even on the pet's radar, we're not going to give them any opportunity to learn a different set of coping skills. On the other hand, if I'm making it too long, too intense, too much on whatever metric we're working with, I'm more likely to trigger more of the panic response, which now becomes a sensitizing event.

So it's kind of like this little Goldilocks experiment to say, ‘Okay, not too much, not too little, but right in that sweet spot,’ where we have that animal who is alert, aware, and has the opportunity to still be in the thinking part of their brain to learn from that exposure. So we're trying to create that sweet spot, and then whether we're trying to focus more on the emotional response or the behavioral response, then we're kind of programming. That's the conditioning part to then say, ‘Okay, can I pair that with something that is enjoyable for you? Is that food? Is that play? Is that petting? Is it praise? What would be enjoyable to you?’ And can I pair those 2 things so that the experience of that noise, in the case of a noise phobia, can then start to be associated and actually become predictive of a pleasant or enjoyable experience.

And so, both the order of how those things happen as well as the intensity of how those things are being compared or exposed or conditioned, it all matters. We start out at a low enough level that we're able to start to see some momentum, and we get an animal who starts to respond to that predictive conditioning. Once we get that sense that the animal is hearing, experiencing the stimulus and now has that conditioned expectation—amazing—now we can start increasing the difficulty level, and then we can start increasing the duration or the volume or the frequency of the exposure in a way that allows us to build up to something that would replicate the real world experience.

And that's the point at which we're no longer avoiding or sidestepping. We're now connecting the dots that we've onboarded, a set of coping skills to allow that animal to actually function and to continue that process of conditioning.