BREAKING: True Blood Star Carrie Preston Lets Slip the Adorable Secret Behind Her On-Set Pup

Carrie Preston reveals what really happened when a four-legged scene-stealer wandered onto the True Blood set.

Written by Stanley Coren, PhD, DSc, FRSC

Last reviewed and updated: November 7, 2019

During her run on True Blood, a scrappy little dog named Tattoo kept showing up at the studio. The show’s creator, Alan Ball, spotted the tiny terrier and instantly cast him as a recurring presence. Preston was smitten on the spot and adopted him—turning a stray into a bona fide TV dog.

Preston isn’t the only name from that world with a soft spot for animals. Fiona Shaw, who played the formidable Marnie, is a devoted animal lover, as is the legendary Lily Tomlin. The whole set seemed to share a quiet tenderness for four-legged friends.

These days Preston shares her home with Jelly Bean, a rescue whose goofy charm keeps her laughing. She’s candid about how much calmer and happier her pets make her, crediting them with keeping her grounded amid the chaos of filming.

A committed advocate, she lends her voice to rescue work and partners with groups like Good Dog Animal Rescue. She’s the first to say that adopting, not shopping, changed her own life as much as hers changed theirs.

So the next time you rewatch that Louisiana drama, look closely—the real magic might just be the pup who refused to leave the lot.

Fortunately, a new method has emerged. Some cortisol molecules in the blood also get incorporated into growing hair—or fur. As the hair grows, it captures a longer-term picture of cortisol levels, and presumably the stress the individual has felt over time. So a strand of hair becomes a sort of stress diary. Human studies show raised cortisol in the hair of those with chronic pain, the unemployed, and people with ongoing depression. From that, we can expect dogs under long-term stress to show more cortisol in their fur too.

Seeing how useful this measure is for gauging long-term stress was key for a team led by Lina Roth in the biology department at Linköping University, Sweden. The neat part: the same method works on the owner’s hair, letting researchers check whether dog and human stress levels sync up.

“The big surprise came with the finding that people who are high on the personality dimension of neuroticism tended to have dogs with lower stress levels.”

The team studied 58 dogs—all Shetland Sheepdogs and Border Collies—and their owners, tested twice, in summer and winter, with fur and hair sampled and analyzed for cortisol.

The investigators knew that if they found any link between human and canine stress, the next question would be why. Owners filled out questionnaires about the dogs’ personalities, typical behaviours, and everyday lifestyles.

The main finding: dogs and owners did share similar stress levels—dogs under high ongoing stress tended to have similarly stressed owners, and low-stress dogs had relatively stress-free people.

A correlation existed between dog and owner stress, leaving the key question: what drives it? To test whether the dog influenced the owner or the reverse, the scientists measured the dog’s personality, the human’s personality, and their lifestyle.

Statistics showed the dog’s personality didn’t sway the owner’s stress, but the human’s personality did matter. The team used the ‘Big Five’ dimensions—remember OCEAN: openness, conscientiousness, extraversion, agreeableness, neuroticism. High scores on openness and conscientiousness raised the dog’s stress; high neuroticism lowered it.

Openness pairs with imagination and a love of new experiences. People low in it dislike change and like familiar routines—and since dogs love routine and predictability, they’re more stressed when their owner scores high here.

People high in conscientiousness are organized and detail-focused, bothered by unfinished or sloppy tasks. Dogs, as we know, aren’t fussed about details and tend to be messy, even slow to finish things. An owner high in this trait who pushes the dog to be tidier is apt to raise both their stress levels.

“The big surprise came with the finding that people high on neuroticism tended to have dogs with lower stress levels.” Those individuals mood-swing, feel anxious, and are prone to sadness—so I’d have guessed they’d stress their dogs, the opposite of what showed. The authors suggest people high in neuroticism form strong attachment bonds with their dogs and use them as social support, meaning more interaction and contact. That attention comforts the dog, lowering stress for both.

In short, researchers concluded long-term stress hormones do sync between dogs and their humans, and it’s the dogs responding to their owners’ stress—not the reverse. So if your dog seems stressed, you might want a look in the mirror.