Going Deeper With Understanding Fear Behaviours

Has your dog got some unwanted behaviours, like lunging, barking, growling or perhaps hiding behind you or under an object, flinging backwards to the end of the lead, when they see or hear something in particular, perhaps another dog on a walk?

Have you thought to yourself, I wish my dog would stop doing this! Why can't they just get over it! I have had enough of this behaviour!

If you have your not alone, it is really challenging to have a dog that struggles in the world. Behaving in ways that are frustrating, embarrassing and often unsafe. While we just want our dog to stop the behaviour, as pet parents of dogs who struggle, we need to go deeper into understanding our dogs behaviours to have any chance of changing these unwanted responses. These behaviours are just the surface level expression of something more going on beneath the surface.

Conditioned Emotional Responses

Just like humans’ dogs develop emotional associations to stimuli in their environment, including but not limited to people, other animals, sounds, locations. These emotional associations (called conditioned emotional responses i.e., CER) can be either positive, neutral or negative depending on how they perceived the experience.  So, if I said the word dentist to you, there is a good chance, if you have had treatment at a dentist before, you probably felt a negative emotion like dread. Injections, sitting in a chair for ages, having things placed in your mouth, pulling and yanking going on are for most people not pleasant experiences. You have no control over your emotional feeling of dread, when you hear the word dentist, the feeling automatically rises inside you. Likewise, if I said the word chocolate or perhaps cheese most people would have a positive emotional response. Yummy, your mouth might even salivate automatically too. Of course, not everyone has the same emotional feeling to a stimulus, so if you have a dairy allergy and eating cheese sends you to the bathroom then your emotional feeling towards cheese may not be a positive one. When our dog's behave in unwanted ways like hiding, running away, lunging, barking, growling, snarling they are often responding to a negative emotional response of feeling unsafe when they hear or see the scary stimulus in the environment (e.g., another dog when on a walk).

Fear State

We have spoken about how conditioned emotional responses are automatic feelings that rise up within you after you have learnt some sort of emotional feeling to the stimulus due to your experience. Fear (a feeling of being unsafe) is one emotion that can be felt by your dog to a particular stimulus.

So what is happening in your dogs brain when they feel in danger? When your dog (or us for that matter) feels that they are in danger (even if they technically aren't) then their body automatically releases hormones like adrenalin and cortisol, and this then effects other parts of the body like their heart rate increasing. This is all done automatically and your dog doesn't have a conscious choice in this occurring, their built in defence mechanisms come online.

Research has shown that when our dogs (or ourselves) feel they are in danger they typically react in a couple of different ways. The four most known fear, stress or trauma responses are Fight, Flight, Freeze and Fawn.

Fight is where your body reacts to the threat through aggression. You physically lash out to protect yourself. In a dog this may look like lunging forward, barking, growling, snarling.

Flight is where you run away from the threat to protect yourself. In a dog this would look like flinging to the end of the lead away from the threat, running to hide behind their pet parent, hiding under the bed.

Freeze is where the brain can't see a way out of the dangerous situation so essentially "shut downs" instead, no movement perhaps plays dead.

Fawn is where calming type signals are displayed, in a dog this might be making their body appear smaller, turning their head away, basically they are trying to signal that they are no threat so please don't hurt me. Talking in a baby voice is one-way humans can display fawn responses to try and keep themselves safe. Also seen with the Fawn response is submissive and obedient type behaviours, just do as I am told and don't show my true emotions, so I stay safe.

Remember these responses can also occur if we are technically safe but don’t “feel” safe. So, if you are afraid of heights, you may feel very frightened to walk over a see-through bridge. Even though you are technically safe, the structural engineering has been done to ensure the bridge is strong and secure, you don’t feel safe seeing the ground so far below you and therefore you might go into Freeze mode, for example, and be unable to move because you're so frightened.

What Now?

So now that you have dug a bit deeper below the surface of why these behaviours might be occuring what do you do now?

You basically have three options (assuming you are not considering re-homing):

1/ Ignore - keep doing what you want to do, if they react then just keep walking or socialising with friends and ignore their outbursts. This choice of course comes with safety and welfare risks, your dog might end up biting another dog or person, your dog is living a life of fear and stress which can negatively affect their physical and mental health. Your relationship with your dog will probably continue to deteriate.

2/ Manage - don't let your dog encounter the things they find scary. This may mean never going on walks, always having your blinds closed at home, never having anyone come to the home etc. While management can certainly be a good strategy to reduce stress on your dog and stop the unwanted behaviours (well as much as possible) there is a high likelihood that your life and your dog's life will be quite restricted and may negatively impacted on you both long term. This doesn't mean you shouldn't manage the situations your dog is exposed to, helping them feel safe, (it is certainly part of my training plan guidelines for those coming through my programs) but this option is highly unlikely to ever change their behavioural response to their trigger stimuli.

3/ Train - Slowly and carefully start to build positive associations to your dog's trigger stimuli. Help your dog learn that their trigger isn't scary but in fact is a good thing or at least nothing for them to worry about. Teach your dog new behavioural strategies that they can do when they feel unsafe. This is no easy task and rehabilitation takes a lot of time, patience and dedication but it can be such a rewarding experience when you start to see your dog's confidence peaking through and hopefully long term shining through. While there is no guarantees when it comes to rehabilitation, and you always need to be thinking about safety, for a lot of dogs it can make such a positive difference.

Don't want to try doing this alone, feel like you need professional support? Please check out my Confidence Booster Program and give me a call to discuss your dog.