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Deployment Stress and Homecoming Joy: Pets Feel It Too

Rebecca Champion was accustomed to her terrier mix, Fenway, carrying around her husband’s underwear when he was deployed.

She had even adjusted to picking the occasional pair up in the backyard, where Fenway liked to stash them while her other owner was underway on a submarine.

Champion used to giggle that Fenway would bring the beloved undies to their rightful owner upon his return home, every single time. Once he was home, she didn’t need her unusual comfort item.

But after one particular deployment, when Champion’s husband walked in the door, Fenway was asleep and didn’t notice. It wasn’t until he turned on the water and hopped in a warm bath, his post-deployment tradition, that the dog heard him.

Without a moment’s hesitation, the sandy-brown terrier bounded out of her crate, ran across the house, dragging his boxer-briefs with her, and promptly hopped in the bath as soon as she saw him, dragging the undies with her.

“I’ll never forget it,” said Champion, who is stationed with her husband, Chris, in Kingsland, Ga.  “It was the funniest thing ever.”

Homecoming is exciting and stressful for humans, but pets can be affected, too, often in a whole host of different ways, said Carissa Marks, public relations director for Dogs on Deployment, a non-profit dedicated to helping service members care for their pets before, during and after deployments.

Deployments, she said, are confusing for pets and their humans spend countless hours trying to make it better for them.

“You have to accept that you are not going to fix this. You can save yourself a lot of worry and frustration as soon as you accept that fact,” Marks said.

A pet’s fears, like thunderstorms, become more pronounced while a parent is away.  Some animals will pace rooms looking for them, while others will retreat to clothing that smells like their parent, just like Fenway did.

Animals also reflect how the remaining owner(s) is feeling.

Marks said if you are having a bad day, “you may find that a furry head lands on your knee or in your lap because they are in the same mode or can empathize with the vibe you are projecting. Expect dogs to get more protective of the remaining owner, and quite possibly even the kids.”

And like children, dogs are also known to push boundaries and test their limits when their routine changes and a parent deploys, she said.

Once the whole family has settled in to a deployment routine, including the family’s pet(s), the end of a deployment and preparations for a homecoming can drive all that stress right back up, again.

“They feel the energy change when homecoming starts to get close,” Marks said.

On the big day, a little forethought can help the pets adjust.

Marks said she used to let her big dogs meet her husband, now a Navy veteran, in the backyard with a ball, to avoid the trampling and the chaos that comes from big, excited animals trapped inside.

“I put him in the backyard and then it was ‘release the beast’,” she said.

She said she also lets her multiple animals have one-on-one time with her husband during a homecoming, too.

For example, after their energetic Rottweiler romped with him, she let “his” dog – a boxer-bulldog-pit-bull mix – have a few moments alone with his dad.

“His dog stopped in the doorway and then did like a G.I. Joe army crawl out to him and rolled over with the belly up,” Marks said.

Some animals also have a noticeable lack of reaction, she added.

“One of my best friends deployed and her dog [Dabs] walked right on by her for a week. She’d catch Dabs looking at her when he thought no one was watching,” Marks said.

Don’t stress too much about practicing or prepping a pet for the homecoming reunion, she said.

 

“You can arrange the location, like the back yard for us because we had big dogs,” she said. “If you have excitable little dogs, be prepared to mop if they happen to leak with excitement and remember to not scold them for it. They’re happy.”

If you’ve gotten a new pet while your spouse is gone, you would want to think out the homecoming a bit more, though, Marks added.

She said you can let your spouse feed the pet the first few times when he or she comes home so that the animal understands this new person is their caregiver, too.

Marks herself added a 190-pound English mastiff to the family, which already had a beagle and a cat, when her husband was deployed for 6 months.

“She did try to step between us for a day and then figured out ‘Oh, okay. Mom lets him in’,” Marks said.

After her husband fed the mastiff a few times she accepted him right away, she said.

“Just be ready for the fact that dogs need to trust their humans, and depending on the dog’s background, that may be seconds, and it can be months,” she said.

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