Episode 6 - Motion Sickness in Puppies: Carsickness Prevention and Cures

1/1/2024

This week’s star question is from a puppy owner who’s puppy is drooling and throwing up in the car.

They’re wondering, is it general anxiety or carsickness? It’s very troublesome because these puppy owners have lots of big plans for travel with their pet and it’s important that their puppy ride well in the car.

What can they do to fix this situation?

In this episode I answer these questions and look at:

The evolutionary reason we experience motion sickness
How to treat and manage carsickness
Carsickness prevention protocols for breeders, and
The prognosis for carsick puppies

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To read the transcript for this episode, click the link below.

EPISODE 7 - TRANSCRIPT

I'm Jane Messineo Lindquist and this is a Puppy Culture Potluck podcast. You bring the topics, we bring the conversation.

So today's topic is another perennial favorite, which is motion sickness, car sickness in puppies. And I'm going to read you the post. This one came in on the From Newborn to New Home discussion group. So this is a breeder writing in and she had a puppy owner write to her and say:

Wondering if you've had or know if any of the puppies in the past have suffered from motion sickness or anxiety when traveling in cars. Mickey is a star in every respect, but he doesn't travel well. We would be glad of any pointers.

Okay, so then I had several follow up questions on that. And these are the things that I wanted to know. Was the puppy fine with car rides when he was with the breeder? When, when was the first time that the breeder took him in the car for a car ride? When was the first time she took the litter? Has this been a consistent problem since they brought the puppy home? And how often do they take the puppy in the car?

Also, can you explain exactly what she means by doesn't travel well, and, this is what the puppy owner wrote back.

The day we collected him, we noticed he drooled excess saliva. We take him in the car quite a bit and have experimented with front, back seats, soft crate and latest booster seat, always harnessed and strapped in of course, we thought the dribble seemed to be lessening, but the last two weekends during a fairly long drive, about an hour, he actually spewed. Because he is little. we pick him up to go in the car.

He has no choice and we cannot tell if he actually wants to. Even a ten minute drive will result in lots of saliva. I was wondering if it was anxiety, except he's actually such a confident pup. Nothing else fazes him. He doesn't startle at anything and will investigate and go anywhere on lead. Big or little dogs, people. They are all his best friends.

So we seem to be left with motion sickness maybe. It will be dreadful for him if he doesn't feel well traveling because we do and intend to take him everywhere with us.

So first of all, I'm going to say this is car sickness, okay? This is not car anxiety yet, although we can create car anxiety if we continue to have the puppy feeling very bad in the car so the two can go hand in hand.

But the root cause of this is motion sickness. So first let me talk about why puppies have motion sickness, so you understand. Motion sickness is actually an equilibrium thing. So when your inner ear perceives that you are standing still, that you are still, but your eye sees motion as in, you know, motion outside the window in a car or even feels that jostling motion.

But you're staying still. Your brain cannot reconcile those two things and you get nauseous. Why do you get nauseous? Because from an evolutionary point of view, the most likely reason for you to have that disconnect between what you're seeing and what you're feeling is hallucination and the time when an animal in the wild would be hallucinating is when they've eaten a toxin.

And if you've eaten something poisonous, the first order of business for your body is to get it out of you by throwing up. So that's why you get motion sickness. Okay. It's this disconnect between what your inner ear is telling you. And when I say you, I mean you or your puppy. What your inner ear is telling you and what your eyes are telling your brain, that is actually happening.

Now, motion sickness is more common in young animals, puppies, children. And and the thought is that it's an immaturity of the inner ear. And it's either an immaturity or it's just that as as you get older, the inner ear gets wiser. Right. It learns, oh, I get it. You know, this is the we don't need to raise the alarm.

We don't need to throw up over this. We've seen this before. We've experienced this before. It's not it's not what we think it is. Okay. So the good news is that in my experience and the experience of even my friends that have dogs, that puppies that are profoundly carsick, it's something that will resolve by around two years of age.

I'm just going to throw in a personal story about this. I developed car sickness in late middle age. I had never had any car sickness or motion sickness, and all of a sudden I couldn't read in the car. I it just shocked the daylights out of me. I just I would get in the car and I'd feel nauseous and I didn't know what took me a long time even to put two and two together, what the problem was.

And it was that I couldn't read in the car. But, you know, the more I thought about it and wondered why, all of a sudden I was getting car sickness, I realized I had started wearing reading glasses. So again, it changed my brain's picture of what I was seeing. It added another layer of I saw the page through or the screen through my glasses, and I saw something not through my glasses plus the motion.

And that was enough to hit me with sickness. So, you know, I just kept doing it and it went away. So again, even, you know, as we as we get older, our brains can learn and can change on the circumstances. So that's what it is. It's this imbalance. Okay. And the brain can be trained away from it so that the puppy no longer feels sick.

And the way to do it is to keep taking the puppy in the car. That having been said, it's a little bit of a catch 22. Okay? Because if the experiences in the car are bad, okay, if the puppy throws up every time it gets in the car, what you can wind up doing is getting a classically conditioned aversive response to the car.

In other words, if you've ever eaten something and then been sick afterwards, okay, you eat chocolate chip cookies, your favorite food in the world. But then for whatever reason, you got the flu, you threw up, you were sick. You remember how you couldn't touch chocolate chip cookies for a long time? Just the smell made you feel nauseous. Condition food aversions are very strong.

Okay, so the same thing with the puppies. If every time they get in that car, they throw up. Even if the inner ear learns that it's not a problem. So they're not the inner ear isn't telling food to throw up anymore. They're going to have a classically conditioned, response averse response to to the car and just the smell of the car, the side of the car, the whole thing of the car is going to make them throw up.

Okay. So now we have to start sort of sorting this out, right. And figuring out what our game plan is for making it as least bad as possible for these puppies in that period of time where the inner ear is being trained not to make them throw up. So, number one, how bad is it? I have not had those profoundly car sick puppies.

The puppies, and I can think of two puppies in particular that did get car sick, it really was pretty mild and limited to when I would take a long trip and get off the highway. They would throw up once. Okay, so and then I would just, my strategy was just to have clean, you know, a plastic bag to put the dirty bedding in and clean bedding and, you know, clean up the crate.

And that was it, you know, it wasn't it wasn't so significant that it colored the entire experience for those puppies. So if that's your situation where it's just happening, like once in a while and it doesn't seem to be affecting the dog, the dog is still happy to get in the car and stuff, I wouldn't I wouldn't worry about it.

Now, Magda Chiarella, who breeds Norwich, has, her genetically Norwich terriers, are very predispose to car sickness and I'll say that to that, what you're always working against here is, is you know, the genetics of this are very strong. So say it's a genetic predisposition to have car sickness. Bull terriers not genetically predisposed. Norwich terriers definitely predisposed. So she really has to go to a lot greater lengths and has put a lot of thought into this.

And in fact I'm going to put up on the show page a link to an article that she wrote that is fabulous, that has a whole punch list of things to do If your dog has car sickness. So for her, if you have a dog again, that's profoundly car sick, they, she does a lot of conditioning with those puppies from a young age, just putting them in the car and just letting them run around and play in the car not moving.

Okay. So you you know, you want to give the puppy some good experiences just in the car, some really fun experience just parked in the driveway. So the puppy doesn't think every time it gets into the car that it's going to be, you know, the bad thing. Second of all, according to Magda, the more you can play with that puppy and tire it out and make it feel relaxed and not in any way sort of high energy and antsy, that's going to help a lot.

It's funny, she told me a story that it's so profound that her instructor, her rally instructor, knows when she's in a hurry to get to class because she hasn't had time to play with and tire out her dog first. And the dog will show up, like with stalactites of drool out the side of its mouth from having to go in the car.

So that's another thing. Tire your puppy out before you bring them in the car.

If it is going to be a long ride. Okay, If it's going to be an hour, you're going to want to medicate that puppy with some Cerenia. It does work very well. And again, you don't want that puppy trapped in there feeling bad for a long time.

Cerenia is approved for animals and for motion sickness and it is very effective. So if you are experiencing this and if you're planning on taking a long ride, definitely you want to medicate that puppy. Because remember, our goal here is to keep the experiences as positive as possible. You're trying to outrun the inner ear so the inner ear can mature and the puppy isn't learning through, through conditioned responses to hate the car.

So I would not hesitate to give medication in that case. I mean, it goes without saying, and I probably should have said it first. You don't want to give food or water before the trip because you know, the less that's in the stomach, the less it can come up. The exception to an empty stomach, according to Magda, and again, I haven't had reason to avail myself of this because my puppies don't get back car sick.

But she will give her puppies a ginger cookie before riding in the car. And she has found that the ginger is, it settles the stomach and it's sometimes you can experiment with it, sometimes even better than a totally empty stomach. Another thing that can be helpful is getting fresh air into the cabin of the car. You know, you can experiment with a lot or a little of breeze, depending on, you know, how your puppy reacts.

But one tip I will give you is that you need to open two windows, not one. And the reason is if you only open one window, you'll get something called Helmholtz Resonance. It's that thumping sound as as the air is passing over the window and it creates a pressure vacuum kind of in the cabin of the car, which is not comfortable for the puppy or anyone else.

But puppies are going to be more sensitive to it. So just balance, you know, open more than one window and that that will balance the cabin pressure down so that you don't get that thumping. Another thing again, that the poster mentioned that they had done is locate the car seat in a place that allows a view of the far horizon.

So put it up higher. It's the same thing like when you when you have seasickness that if you can see the horizon, it's it sort of helps your your brain reconcile the conflicting stimuli. Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn't. This is something that may not be counterintuitive, which is to avoid any products or foods with strong smells in the car, which again, can signal to the brain poison, toxins, anything very strong.

So you want to just keep everything, you know, sounds low key, the smells low key as much as possible. As much as possible? You want the drive to be smooth, so try and avoid bumpy roads if you have to take a little longer way, but it's a highway and it's smooth. Try that. You know, fast stops, turns. Just really try and be considerate of slowing, slowing down.

You know, none of this is going to be magic for you. I'm just saying, except maybe the Cerenia. But again, we're just trying to balance out that that experience so it stays positive. Now, as a breeder, I, the two puppies that I had that got car sickness were not ones that I bred. There were puppies that I purchased.

And I do take my puppies in the car starting as young as four weeks old. I do just take, put them in in a crate in the car, take them to the end of the driveway and back even just around the block sometimes. I know that Pat Hastings used to say that you can pretty much eliminate car sickness in puppies if you get them into the car before six weeks old.

And I think for most breeds, that's probably a good rule of thumb. I do think, again, it's a very strong genetic component for some breeds. So it's not a fool, as foolproof let's say, as Pat said it is, but without a doubt, it's never a bad thing, right. It's always going to make it better to start training that inner ear earlier.

So it's a positive thing, you breeders, to get those puppies into the car as soon as possible and as often as possible. So again, to sum it all up, there are two processes that we have to regulate here. One is the education of the inner ear. It's teaching the inner ear that it's okay. You don't have to throw up, you're not hallucinating, you haven't eaten anything toxic and that takes some time.

Generally speaking, by two years old, if you've handled everything else right, even the most carsick puppies have grown and matured and are not bad at all in the car. But meanwhile, while that's happening, you also have to manage the conditioned emotional response. So you have to do whatever it takes to make it as positive or not terrible as possible.

And you do that two ways. You physically prepare the puppy so they're least likely to feel sick. You give them medication. So, you know, that's on the side of preparation to to minimize the nausea that they feel. And you also give the puppy experiences where they don't get sick in the car. You bring the puppy in the car just to play, sometimes standing still in the driveway.

You roll it just to the end of the driveway, whatever it takes so that the puppy can stay under threshold and not be sick, but be in the car and have a positive experience. That's what you want to see. If you enjoyed this podcast, you'll love our course for puppy owners. Check it out at madcapuniversity.com.

If you have a question that you'd like me to answer on air, reach out to us through one of our web sites: madcapuniversity.com, madcapradio.com or puppyculture.com. Thanks for listening. Bye bye.