How to Check Your Dog’s Heart Rate

Part of caring for your dog is recognizing when something’s wrong. While there’s no need to routinely check the heart rate of a healthy dog at home, there are some situations where knowing your their heart rate may come in handy.

It can be helpful for pet parents to learn how to take a dog’s pulse, know normal values, and understand when to be concerned.

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What is a dog’s average heart rate?

On Reddit or other sites, pet parents worried about their dogs often ask questions like this: “My dog’s been acting a little sluggish today, and I’m starting to get a bit worried about his heart. I’d really like to learn how to check his heart rate myself. Specifically, I'm wondering: Where exactly on his body do I put my hand to feel my dog’s heartbeat? And once I find it, what is a dog’s normal heart rate?”

The normal heart rate for a dog spans a very wide range. The rate the heart beats at is driven by many factors, including:

• Breed

• Excitement

• Recent exertion

• Anxiety

• Hydration status

• Pain

• Age

• Body temperature

• Fitness level

• Heart health

• Medications

• Systemic diseases

Dogs can have heart rates up to 250 beats per minute (bpm) during times of exertion or stress. It’s possible for the heart rate to drop as low as 30 bpm while dogs are sleeping deeply — that’s just one heartbeat every two seconds. In one study, the average heart rate of 60 dogs was 73 bpm, though dogs’ individual averages ranged from 53 to 110 bpm. In my experience, most dogs have a heart rate in the 70 to 100 bpm range when they’re awake and calm.

Newborn puppies have a higher average heart rate than adult dogs. They start with an average heart rate around 200 bpm in their first week of life. Their heart rate gradually decreases to about 110 bpm by week nine. Puppies’ high metabolic demand, rapid growth, body heat loss, and immature cardiovascular system contribute to their higher heart rate.

Is there a difference between a dog’s heart rate and pulse rate?

There is a technical difference between a heart rate and a pulse rate, but this doesn’t matter much in most cases.  Home care guides may tell you how to check a dog’s pulse rate rather than their heart rate.

When you feel a dog’s pulse, you’re feeling the difference in pressure in an artery as the heart contracts and relaxes. This pressure wave will follow the heart beat exactly unless there’s an arrhythmia, so the heart rate and pulse rate are usually the same.

The pulse rate can never be higher than the heart rate, but it can be slower when heartbeats occur too close together. If the heart doesn’t have time to fill with blood between beats, a pulse isn’t transmitted.

Think of it like trying to get body lotion out of a bottle: If you keep pumping rapidly, the lotion never has time to refill the tube. This leads to weak spurts and splutters on each press. Slow, steady pumping gives the lotion enough time to rise up through the tube and come out in a satisfying amount.

Feeling a slight irregularity in your dog’s pulse rate isn’t necessarily abnormal. Dogs can have something called a sinus arrhythmia when they’re relaxed. Their heart rate will naturally fluctuate with their breathing. The heart rate will increase slightly during inhalation and decrease slightly during exhalation. Don’t be worried if you don’t pick up on this because the difference is often pretty subtle.

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How do you check a dog’s heart rate?

Checking your dog’s pulse rate is generally easier to do and doesn’t require any special equipment. I’ll cover how to check the heart rate as well, just in case you’re an overachiever. The process is pretty simple, but it does require some basic math:

• Find the pulse: The easiest way to take a dog’s pulse is to do so via the femoral artery. The femoral artery is located on the inside of the thigh on the upper part of the leg. It’s easiest to approach your dog from the backside while they’re standing or laying on their side.
  Put your hand palmside down on the outside of their thigh and wrap your fingers around the front of their leg. Your fingertips should end up on the inside of their leg, a little below the hip. Move your fingertips around slowly using very light pressure until you feel the pulse. Be patient and make sure your dog is calm. It can be hard to find the pulse if they’re trembling.

• Find the heart: If you’ve got a stethoscope laying around for some reason, you can try to listen to your dog’s heart. This isn’t always as easy as it seems it should be because a) dogs like to pant, which makes hearing things difficult, and b) dogs come in a lot of different sizes and shapes, which can make their heart hard to locate (see: bulldogs).
  With your dog standing, raise their left forelimb and let their shoulder flex so the elbow touches the chest. Put your stethoscope flat against the left side of their chest in the area the elbow touched. The loudest heart sounds should be audible around there. You may also be able to count their heart beat by laying your hand flat in this area, but this is a little less reliable because of interference from the motion of breathing and variability in body shapes.

• Count the beats: Break out something that can count seconds and won’t power down its screen while you’re counting. Count the number of beats you feel in a 15-second or 30-second period. If you’re listening with a stethoscope, you’ll hear the classic lub-dub sound you know from cartoons. A lub-dub counts as one beat, not two.

• Calculate your dog’s heart rate: Take the number of beats you counted in 15 seconds and multiply it by four, or the number of beats in 30 seconds and multiply by two. That will give you your dog’s heart rate in beats per minute. So, if you got 22 beats in that 15 seconds, your dog’s heart rate is 88 bpm.

Why is my dog’s heart rate higher than average?

Context is important when thinking about your dog’s heart rate. If your dog’s heart rate 170 right after they tore around the dog park, that’s pretty expected. If it’s 170 while they’re sleeping, there’s likely a problem. Daily average heart rates gives researchers a baseline of what’s normal, but remember: it’s the average of a dog’s heart rate throughout the day.

Every dog is different, and they’ll each have their own baseline. Some dogs will have a higher resting heart rate than the “average” dog. That’s perfectly normal and expected. I’ve examined dogs with an extremely high heart rate in a busy treatment area. Many returned to normal after a few minutes in a quiet room. It’s best not to panic about a high heart rate, even though it could indicate a problem like dehydration, pain, or a heart arrhythmia.

There’s some debate about body size affecting heart rate. Based on experience, most veterinarians feel that the average heart rate of the dogs seen in-clinic tend to be higher the smaller they are. This rule of thumb hasn’t been proven in research, though. A study that looked at the average heart rates of 60 dogs of varying sizes showed no trends that could associate heart rate with body size.

When to seek expert help

Contact your vet if your dog has a very high (over 160 bpm) heart rate despite being visibly calm or if they have a very low (less than 40) heart rate despite being excited or very active. It’s always necessary to contact your vet ASAP if your dog is showing signs of weakness, collapse, pale gums, or labored breathing, especially if those symptoms are accompanied by a very high or low heart rate.

Also, it’s not safe to assume your dog is doing OK just because their heart rate is normal. The physiological factors controlling heart rates are complex, and I’ve seen some dogs during a medical crisis that had perfectly normal heart rates.

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Bottom line

Knowing how to check your dog’s heart rate at home can be useful, but it’s important to consider the whole picture once you know the rate. Many factors can influence a dog’s heart rate, and it can go up or down quickly based on their surroundings and activity. In general, it’s best not to stress too much about your dog’s heart rate, but it never hurts to know how to check your dog’s vital signs.

References

• Lamb, Allison P. et al. “Correlation of heart rate to body weight in apparently normal dogs.” Journal of veterinary cardiology : the official journal of the European Society of Veterinary Cardiology vol. 12,2 (2010): 107-10. doi:10.1016/j.jvc.2010.04.001.

• Piccione, Giuseppe et al. “The daily rhythm of body temperature, heart and respiratory rate in newborn dogs.” Journal of comparative physiology. B, Biochemical, systemic, and environmental physiology vol. 180,6 (2010): 895-904. doi:10.1007/s00360-010-0462-1.