Halloween is great fun if you understand what is going on but if you don’t it must be one of the strangest nights of the year. The doorbell keeps ringing, people who don’t normally look frightening suddenly do, children are shouting outside & the front door is opening every few minutes. There are strange decorations around the house, food everywhere & people keep appearing at the door expecting something.
Then we expect our dog to behave as though absolutely nothing unusual is happening.
Some dogs won’t care in the slightest. They will happily investigate everybody who comes to the door, join in with whatever the family is doing & probably spend most of the evening wondering why so much food is being handed out without any of it coming their way.
Other dogs will find the whole thing incredibly stressful.
We need to remember they have no idea what Halloween is. They don’t know the person standing at the front door wearing a mask is a child from three doors down & they don’t understand why somebody who looks completely different suddenly sounds familiar.
A dog who is perfectly happy with the occasional visitor might struggle when the doorbell rings twenty times in one evening. If you know your dog is likely to find Halloween difficult there is absolutely nothing wrong with letting them spend the evening somewhere quiet away from the front door.
Close the curtains, put the television or some music on, give them somewhere comfortable to settle & something appropriate to occupy them. They don’t need to meet the trick or treaters & they don’t need to investigate everybody’s costume.
There is another very practical reason for keeping some dogs away from the front door on Halloween. The door is going to be opened a lot. It only takes a second for a frightened or excited dog to slip past somebody & suddenly you have a dog loose outside on one of the busiest & strangest evenings of the year. Even a dog who doesn’t normally try to get through the door could behave differently if they are already frightened or overstimulated.
Then there are the costumes. I have seen some hilarious pictures of dogs dressed for Halloween & there are dogs who genuinely don’t appear to mind wearing something. There are also dogs who very clearly do mind. If your dog is comfortable, can move around normally & isn’t showing signs of distress then that’s one thing. If they are desperately trying to remove the costume, freezing, hiding or clearly uncomfortable then take it off.
The photograph isn’t that important. Halloween is our celebration. The dog didn’t ask to take part in it.
Food is another obvious problem because Halloween means there can be an awful lot of it lying around. Chocolate can be toxic to dogs & some sugar-free sweets and chewing gums contain xylitol which can be extremely dangerous. Wrappers can cause problems too. It is particularly worth remembering if you have children because bags of Halloween sweets have a habit of ending up on floors, beds & sofas. Your dog doesn’t understand that the bag belongs to somebody else. They just know somebody has very kindly left a large quantity of interesting smelling food somewhere they can reach it.
Decorations are worth thinking about too. Candles & dogs aren’t a particularly sensible combination if they can reach them. Neither are trailing wires, small decorations which can be swallowed or anything fragile sitting at exactly the right height to meet an enthusiastic wagging tail.
None of this means Halloween needs to become a miserable evening of worrying about everything that could possibly go wrong. It just means spending a few minutes thinking about how the evening might look from your dog’s point of view. Because ultimately you know your own dog.
One dog might sleep through the entire evening without giving the noise outside a second thought. Another might become worried after the first knock at the door.
One might love having visitors. Another might want absolutely nothing to do with them.
That’s okay.
We sometimes become so determined to include our dogs in everything we do that we forget they don’t necessarily want to be included.
There is nothing wrong with a dog missing Halloween. Sometimes leaving them out of the festivities is actually the kindest thing we can do.
So enjoy Halloween. Decorate the house, eat the sweets, watch something frightening & have fun. If your dog wants to join in & is genuinely enjoying themselves that’s great. If they would rather spend the evening tucked away somewhere quiet wondering why the humans have apparently lost their minds that’s perfectly fine too.
Happy Halloween from all of us at Dog Desk Animal Action. 🎃🐾