My friend Donora just sent me a very beautiful idea: the Thunder Shirt. Thick me had no idea it existed. It exemplifies a certain approach to the body and affect that is profoundly physical.
It is also quite OOO. The shirt exerts a kind of agency, squeezing and pressing the anxious dog. Temple Grandin invented something very like it for humans—the squeeze machine, and she is constantly cited on the importance of pressure.
The sheer physical proximity of another entity that contains you. Sounds very right.
1 comment:
The Thundershirt is a knockoff. The original, patented Anxiety Wrap was invented 8 years prior to the debut of the Thundershirt by certified professional dog trainer and T-Touch practitioner, Susan Sharpe. Susan experimented with over 90 different prototypes before coming up with her final design. Susan consulted with Dr. Grandin when she was developing the Anxiety Wrap and the original, patented Anxiety Wrap (www.anxietywrap.com) is mentioned in Dr. Temple Grandin's book, "Animals Make Us Human" (pg. 54). As a professional dog trainer who sees dogs with fear, anxiety and aggression on a regular basis I have found the Anxiety Wrap and Animal Plus' other product, the Calming Face Wrap to be remarkably effective and consistently reliable products. I regularly recommend these products to my clients with anxious and aggressive dogs. In a recent clinical study at the Cummings Tufts School of Veterinary Medicine, veterinarian Dr. Nicholas Dodman found that 89% of the thunderstorm-phobic dogs in the study responded to the Anxiety Wrap with a reduction on anxious behavior. There is no similar research for the Thundershirt. The company itself claims to have surveyed its own customers to get its claim of an "over 80%" effectiveness rate. I have personally observed no noticeable effect in the dogs owned by clients of mine who purchased the Thundershirt by mistake. For more information about how the products compare, see this article: http://anxietywrapsays.blogspot.com/
Post a Comment