Daisy.
DaisyDaisyDaisy.
[sigh]
It’s just a summer thunderstorm. See, it’s stopping. Nothing bad is going to happen. You can come out now.
Zut alors! She has emerged!
When it storms in the middle of the night, and we’re all asleep and can’t protect her from the thunder, she goes and finds paper to shred (a piece of posterboard, a telephone book, things like that), and apparently settles down and shreds paper nervously until the crisis is past.
I thought for a minute that you were in my house.
Daytime storms are easier. He’s satisfied with being close. But at night, if a bedroom door is open, he’ll jump on the bed, pant and quiver until the storm is over.
He hates summer. Thunderstorms, and starting now until early July, firecrackers. Poor doggie.
Now that my dog is deaf, thunderstorms dont bother her anymore 
My folks yorkie is terrified of thunder. He runs from person to person, shivering, until someone finally makes the bad go away.
Oddly, our oldest dog (to whom one cannot raise their voice lest she wet herself in terror - rescue, pretty sure she was abused) is indifferent to thunder, fireworks, gunshots… Anything really, except displeasure. And vacuums. We should have named her “Nature”.
One of our dogs, a border collie hides in the bathroom.
In the tub.
I feel for you, Duck Duck Goose. I had a 110 lb. Great Pyrenees cross breed that was afraid of fireworks. Every 4th of July would find him jumping on the couch and attempting to burrow underneath any human being unfortunate enough to be on the couch at the time. We had another dog who actually jumped through a glass window during one thunderstorm. She was OK, but had to have several stitches. My two current dogs get a little nervous, but as long as they can huddle near Daddy’s feet and get reassuring cuddles, they’re OK.
My mom’s dog is deathly afraid of thunder, too, but I always figured it was because my Mom rescued her from a “home” where she was kept outside chained to a tree. I assume her fear of thunder stems from bad memories as a puppy. Based on the foregoing posts, now I’m not so sure.
(She also hates the vaccuum. But it’s not so much a “fear” reaction as much as “Oh, look at the time! I need to be going now. I wonder what’s happening in this other room?”)
My cat Smokie was afraid of thunder, so much so that he would hide under the bed if it just rained really hard… then he went deaf. Silver lining and all that, now he doesn’t care in the least.
The vacuum is great for getting cats out from under beds too. You don’t even have to use the vac – just turn it on. Vroom! Cat streak!
We used to have a Cocker Spaniel mix named Sam. He didn’t care too much for thunder, either. One time, he made about a four foot leap from the back of the sofa into Rhiannon8404’s arms after a particularly loud clap.
Our golden retriever, Rusty, is absolutely panic-stricken at storms. Actually, it’s more the electrical changes in the atmosphere preceding the storms – although as he’s gotten older, he’s learned to connect the sound of thunder with the atmospheric changes that freak him out. He absolutely HAS to have a person there, and he still is barely controllable. He once tore the door frame off the bedroom door trying to get through it to find a human when he was left home alone for about 20 minutes and a storm sprang up. 
And his heart starts beating so hard that for a while, when we lived in New Orleans and we had storms almost daily for 9-10 months of the year, we were seriously concerned his heart would burst. We finally found relief in the form of an Anxiety Wrap, which had an instantly calming effect – his heart rate would cut in half as if by magic, for example. We couldn’t just drug him insensible since the storms happened every day, so between the wrap and heartbeat music and lots of good old-fashioned TLC, we got him through it.
Now that we’re in Maryland where it only storms rarely by comparison, we can drug him up, and I think we all find it a relief, especially him! I got a bottle of 30 pills from the vet eight months ago and we’ve only used four, so he’s a much, much happier doggie these days. But we still often have to put a leash on him so he won’t crawl under Papa Tiger’s desk and wrap himself up in all the cables and pull the computer off!
Thunderstorms used to scare the piss out of my parents’ papillon.
Unfortunately, literally.
Poor you if the storm came on in the wee hours o’ the marnin’, as it were. The dog would jump up on the bed…
I had one dog that would freak out when she heard the bell on the dryer indicating the drying cycle was nearly finished. It wasn’t even a particularly loud bell, just a soft little “ding” like in an egg timer that would repeat every 30 seconds or so. But that scared her more than the loudest thunderstorm or fireworks would. And she wasn’t scared of the vacuum cleaner, either. You had to actually bump her with the vacuum to make her get up and get out of the way. But just let her hear that one little dryer bell. You never can tell what an animal is going to get frightened of.
My Abby runs around growling and checking every window at the sound of thunder or fireworks. I guess she thinks she’s guarding the rest of us from the great rumbling beast.
I can always tell by the barks of neighbourhood dogs when the hot air balloons are around. They don’t like the ‘whoosh’ of the burners apparently. Several dogs ran away from home in my town 2 years ago when we hosted the International Ballooning championships. We had over 70 teams competing which made for an awesome sight on a winter’s morning at 8.00am, but the vets were kept busy apparently prescribing tranqs for upset puppies.
It must be in the genes because my border collie mix does the same thing. For her, it’s more than just the thunder. She starts to react as soon as the pressure starts dropping. It’s quite strange for it to be beautiful and sunny and Stella is quivering in the tub.
I have heard of a method of getting dogs to not freak out during storms or fireworks. Get a CD of a thunderstorm. Play it at very low volume for a while each day. As weeks go by, slowly turn the sound up. Eventually you’ll have it cranked up full blast and the dog will learn that the noise isn’t something to fear.
The Husky mix that adopted us when I was a kid always hid under my parents’ bed, until we moved and their bed went to my sister who was just starting her own family. It was funny watching Star (the dog) trying to fit under the new (much lower) bed!
My dog was raised not to be afraid of thunderstorms. I always made a big deal with my folks (who we lived with for the first 3 years of the dog’s life) that we were NOT to make a big deal out of thunderstorms, not to mention it to the dog, not to hold or caress her during them…just act normal and maybe play a bit while it was thundering. It really worked well.
However, since she couldn’t be afraid of thunderstorms, she came to be afraid of other things. Most notably, the computer shutting off. The computer would shut down and cause a loud POP in my sub-woofer, which scared the bejeezus out of her. So now she’s afraid of the Windows shut-down sound…and critical error sounds.
So anyway…a month or two ago we had a storm, which caused power to go out, which caused both the sub-woofer to pop on one machine and for Windows to shut down on the other machine (thus playing the Windows shut-down sound).
Now, for my too-smart-for-her-own-good dog, thunder = computer shut-down = PANIC.
In the 2+ years we’ve lived here, she never went down into the basement. Now, with her new-found fear of thunder, she has decided that as soon as it thunders she MUST be let into the basement RIGHT NOW and stay there until everything is calm.
Unreal!
Thunderstorms?.. nary a whimper or shiver.
But should the battery in a smoke alarm start to die, and in doing so cause it to chirp; then there’s no place safe to hide.
Poor fella shakes so much that his teeth chatter.
