Last week I discussed how dogs have greeting rituals, not only with other dogs, but with humans as well.
A friendly, social yet unfamiliar dog may not be all too willing to allow a human into its personal space on first meeting. When a human reaches out to touch or interact with the dog, the dog may display avoidance behaviours such as ducking away from the hand or stepping out of the way of an intended touch. This behaviour does not mean the dog is fearful, it simply means the dog is expecting that proper greeting protocols be respected before physical interaction takes place. This week I'll discuss fearful dogs, or dogs that lack adequate socialization and therefore act in a manner that is not inviting. Fearfulness in dogs is a very complicated issue often related to past experiences, or a lack of past experiences from which to draw reference.
When dealing with a negative past experience, a dog will react when something in the present environment triggers its memory - a fearful response is always preceded by a stimulus, it is never unpredictable.
The route in the brain from the stimulus to the response is referred to as a neural pathway. The trick is to find what the stimulus is and then desensitize the dog to it. The problem is trying to determine all of the stimuli present when the initial fearful reaction occurred.
A common fear in dogs is the fear of men. An obvious stimulus would be a man. The not-so-obvious might be the black hat the man was wearing, a particular cologne or a blue car driving behind the man at the exact moment. It might be the large crow landing on the ground, a child yelling in the background, even the shade of a tree falling across the ground in front of the dog.
All of these are stimuli to a dog that the brain has placed in the memory along with the major event of the man with the black hat. This means that even though we may desensitize the dog to men with black hats, any one of the other stimuli present at the time of the negative experience has the potential to trigger a fearful response if the man with the black hat is not present. It gets even trickier when you realize that these stimuli can elicit a fearful response when presented together or separately.
Unlike fearfulness due to past experiences, when there is a lack of early socialization, there is literally no picture within a dog's head that it may refer to. Since the dog has no reference point to compare the current experience with, it may react fearfully towards men in black hats because of unfamiliarity rather than negativity.
Because of the complexity of fear, it's never a matter of fixing the dog to like men with black hats as much as it is learning how to redirect a dog's emotional state to a more positive one so that a new neural pathway is created. This results in the dog creating a new picture in its head from the new emotional state around men in black hats. The focus is on the dog's emotional state rather than the stimuli itself because in reality, we will never know what is going on in a dog's mind when it displays fear. All we can do is redirect the dog's attention and encourage it to choose a peaceful response to create a new state of mind in the once fearful environment.
Training is a multi-staged process. The first stage is working with a dog in a purely positive space and creating a "cue" that triggers a peaceful response. It is then reinforced until predictable. The next stage is to introduce the negative stimuli in a controlled environment and use the cue to keep the dog peaceful within this fearful set-up. These two stages may take months, not weeks, to perfect. Once the dog becomes predictable in the set-up it can then be tested in the real world.
Fearfulness in dogs is very complicated and working with a qualified trainer makes it less complicated. Next week I'll discuss how to help the dog, the owner and the trainer when working with a fearful dog.
Joan has been working with dogs for more than 15 years in obedience, tracking and behavioural rehabilitation. Contact her at k9kinship.com
