If it feels like nearly every dog in your exam room is anxious, you're not imagining it. A 2026 study analyzed owner-reported data from 43,517 dogs in the Dog Aging Project and found that 91% showed at least mild to moderate fear in at least one of nine behavioral scenarios. The study was led by Bonnie V. Beaver, DVM, DACVB, of Texas A&M's College of Veterinary Medicine and Biomedical Sciences, and published in Veterinary Research Communications.
Noise fear led the list: 42.9% of dogs showed at least mild fear of sudden or loud noises, and nearly 10% rated at the extreme level.
That research lands as Pet Anxiety Awareness Month (PAAW), an initiative founded by pet care expert Kristen Levine, enters its 10th year. This year's campaign runs June 1 through July 4 (extended to cover fireworks season) and puts veterinarians at the center of the conversation, with a new partnership carrying expert-led education across DOGTV's streaming and broadcast platforms.
Why Fear and Anxiety Are Also a Workload Problem
Fear, anxiety, and stress (FAS) conditions are among the most commonly reported behavioral concerns in companion animals, but the campaign highlights a harder truth: early signs are subtle and often missed, delaying intervention. Left unaddressed, FAS strains the human-animal bond and increases the risk of relinquishment.
For practice teams, there's a second cost that doesn't show up in the study: anxious patients make for harder visits. Fearful dogs and cats take longer to handle, raise injury risk, and drain the team's emotional reserves. Their owners, dreading the struggle, start skipping appointments. The visit itself becomes the trigger, and avoidance becomes the care gap.
What Practices Can Do This Month
- Screen for FAS proactively. With 91% prevalence, "does your dog show fear at home or here?" belongs in every intake conversation, especially ahead of July 4.
- Lean into low-stress handling. Fear-Free approaches (pre-visit pharmaceuticals, considered scheduling for reactive patients, treat-heavy restraint alternatives) turn the data into protocol.
- Use PAAW's free visibility. The campaign's expert-led content gives your practice ready-made client education for social channels and exam-room conversations, particularly on noise phobia before fireworks season.
- Meet the highest-FAS patients where they live. For pets whose anxiety peaks at the clinic door, routine care doesn't have to happen at the clinic. As explored in Why Your Pet Hates the Vet, blood draws, vaccines, and rechecks done at home, in the environment where that 91% statistic drops away, keep anxious patients current on care their owners might otherwise defer.
Anxiety Awareness Still Has to Reach the Exam Room
As Levine put it, a decade of PAAW has helped pet parents understand that anxiety is a medical condition and their veterinarian is an essential partner in managing it. For practices, that's an invitation: the clinics that build FAS into how they design care, rather than treating it as an individual pet's quirk, will keep more anxious pets in care and more clients attached to the practice.
Visibility alone doesn't help a specific dog in a specific exam room; what matters is whether it changes what happens at the next visit. For a profession still catching up to a 91% prevalence number, the practical work is less about a single new initiative and more about building FAS screening and low-stress options into every appointment, so the anxious majority stops being treated as the exception.