By Hadas Kuznits

How do you keep your pets calm during a hurricane?

During a hurricane, your pets may need comforting.  The thunder, wind, and rain of a hurricane can spook them.

“They like to hide.  Some of them bark a lot and get really frantic.  Cats tend to get really hissy and scratchy,” says Courtney Astalfa, assistant general manager at Doggie Style pet store, in the 300 block of Market Street in Old City Philadelphia.

So what can you do to keep your pets calm calm?

Astalfa says one of the products on the market meant to calm your pet is a piece of apparel called a “Thunder Shirt” (photo above).

“It’s somewhere between a hug and a strait jacket,” she tells KYW Newsradio.  “It’s a shirt that’s designed to apply a slight amount of pressure to your dog, so just like picking it up would calm it down, it’s the same sort of thing.”

She says there are also natural pet drugs and supplements that can help.

“We have Comfort Zone, which comes in a spray and a diffuser like an air freshner, and that is pheromone-based.  And it’s designed specifically to keep dogs or cats calm — there’s different ones for each.

“There’s definitely a lot of products — like Happy Traveler, which is a capsule.  We also have Pet Calm, which has a lot of camomile in it, stuff like that, that you can either put directly in their mouth or in their water.”

She says pets can react to a storm like children do.  All that noise can cause a scare, and being near you can be the comforting thing of all.