DIY Dog Calming Spray Recipe | Travel With Doggie

DIY Dog Calming Spray Recipe Using Essential Oils

A custom dog calming spray recipe to exactly fit your dog’s taste can achieve maximum effectiveness. I would recommend it strongly, but be sure you know how to make it properly and definitely be sure to test it, otherwise there may be undesired outcomes. Let me elaborate more on that in a bit.

It is really easy to come up with a dog calming spray recipe. The key ingredients you will need are essential oils, water, and of course a spray. The rest of it is just experimentation to seek out the optimum combination and amount for your dog. And this will take the bulk of your time to get it right.

Lavender – Key Ingredient

The primary constituents in your dog spray recipe should definitely include lavender. If you check the ingredients of the various dog sprays, like the Amazon’s choice: SENTRY GOOD Behavior Stop That! Pheromone Spray, or the ThunderEssence Spray that is well received by amazon customers, you will find that most of them will contain lavender.

Lavender contains linalool, an organic compound that has shown time and time again in various researches to be an effectual catalyst that works wonders on the chemistry with the neurosystems of dogs, as well as human, to induce calm.

Lavender can be purchased as an essential oil, which you can add to the mixture of your dog spray recipe. I personally recommend Canine Coddler Pet Anxiety Essential Oil. It has received great reviews from Amazon customer and you can check them out here for yourself.

Items You Need

Now for the recipe for the concoction.

Small Spray Bottle

You will need a bottle for your spray. Some things to consider when purchasing a spray bottle are:

Material

I personally prefer a plastic one as I tend to be clumsy sometimes. I might just smash a glass one into smithereens on some blue monday morning, and it will not play out well if my dogs, begin forever curious as they are, ingest the essential oils. It is unsafe for them to consume essential oils, which can cause complications like diarrhoea and nauseousness.

Color

I personally feel that an uninteresting color, or a color that is different from your dog’s chew toys, is a key feature to consider when purchasing your spray bottle. This reduces the chance of your dog fiddling with the dog spray and accidentally ingesting the essential oils or spraying it on their eyes or muzzle themselves. Basically, you want to prevent accidents and the color choice may help.

Shape

I hate those sprayer bottle heads as they make it more difficult to pack for my travels. Get one that has a nice shape that promotes compactability in storage.

I personally recommend Black PET Cosmo Plastic Bottles for the above reasons.

A bonus is its slick design as well. I personally find its plastic material sturdy too so it is less prone to breakage on accidental impacts.

Distilled water

4 oz would be ideal for the mildest of concentration of essential oil. The amount is also dependent on your bottle as well. Adjust the amount of water and essential oil accordingly.

Essential Oil

The choice of essential oils really depends on your personal choice and your dog.

Yes, essential oils with an ‘s’. You can combine different essential oils. This is the reason why DIY recipes are excellent due to this customizations.

The key question here is ascertaining the flavor of essential oil and the dosage for the recipe so that it works for both you and your dog. I have written an article on the steps to conduct this experiment to find out the magic numbers. Feel free to check it out here!

I personally recommend lavender, of course, and chamomile. There are other scents that will work on your dogs and may be make more fitting choices for you and your dog should you or your dog not like lavender or chamomile. Check out my article on the various calming scents that actually work on dogs.

The Canine Coddler Pet Anxiety Essential Oil is my go-to essential oil for my dogs. It has worked very well for me and my dogs, and its fragrance is neither strong nor mild.

Other Tips For Your Potion

This section contains some of my personal advice based on my experience with my own witchcraft in making a dog calming potion. These tips are rarely mentioned in other dog related sites that I came across so I hope to gather the formulas that you hope some half-blood prince would have told you earlier here in this article.

Let’s get down to it!

Shake

For the essential oil to work well, remember to shake it well. The oil is much thicker than your cooking oil and does not float up to the surface of the water as quickly. This is how it gets sprayed out even though it is mixed in water. But you need to shake it well enough.

Seal

These oils contain alcohol content too. Alcohol has a lower boiling point and can easily vaporized in room temperature. Once they evaporate, the essential oil will have become practically useless. So don’t take too long to cap and seal your bottle once you have added your ingredients.

Mix and Match

Try out different essential oil and fragrance combinations to get the optimum smell that works for you and your dogs.

Test Amount

Experiment with different number of drops of essential oil you add to the recipe. Too little might result in mild scent that render the spray useless. Adding too much,on the other hand, can pose problems to your dogs and that is not something you will like to have.

Things That Can Go Wrong

The downside of doing DIY is the unknown dangers if things are done incorrectly. Companies have the money to pour into research and quality testing to ensure their products are safe to be distributed in the market. For DIY, you bear the risks yourselves. This are the probable complications when making a DIY dog calming spray recipe.

Irritation

The wrong formula or excess dosage may cause irritation in dogs. Instead of calming the dog down, you might make it more agitated. Finding that sweet amount will take quite a bit of experimentation.

Burn Skin

Too concentrated an amount can burn the skin of the dog if you apply the spray topically on your dogs.

The ingredients of the essential oils used may not be natural. They may consist of a high share of artificial chemical compounds that can a great deal of damage to the skin. I cannot stress enough on the importance of choosing the right essential oil that is made of all natural ingredients.

Toxicity

Certain essential oils might smell good to you but may be toxic to your poor pooch. Do your research diligently on this one. And I do not mean just mere googling and finding articles on the Internet. Those websites may not contain true content or they may not be backed by official researches and experiments that are published according to protocol.

Effectiveness

Certain essential oils, which not harmful, are inert to dogs, or simply promotes anyhting but calm in your dogs. I am aware, however, that rosemary and peppermint oil encourages “standing, moving and vocalising”, with reference to this study. So do avoid these essential oils if you want a good boy to be traveling with you in your car.

Clogging

A high concentration of essential oil can lead to the clogging of your spray over time as well. You might need a different spray bottle if the concentration still did not work for you, and it is already clogging your spray bottle.

Final Thoughts

Doing DIY dog calming recipe is only easy if you know the correct share of ingredients. The research and experimentation is where the difficulty lies, with the untold risks involved. You may want to consider purchasing ready made dog calming sprays in the market if this is too much work for you. 

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