Fear cannot be reinforced!

I have literally just emerged from the darkness. It has been, for once, a sunny day here in my part of the world. I have missed a lot of it though.

One of Finn's long list of arch-nemeses is the window cleaner. This goes back to my very first attempt at introducing him to them when he was about eleven weeks old. He did not like the noise of the ladders at all, and I made the error of trying to force the issue. I know an awful lot more now than I did then, so I recognise the difference between the socialisation of just exposure and the good socialisation of doing it properly (and wrote about it previously). The poor little fella ended up peeing himself in fear. I have tried hard to mend the damage, but to no avail. As soon as he hears those ladders he's on edge and guarding the house.This is an example of what is known as single event learning. Finn encountered the window cleaners and their ladder once, and he has always remembered that he was scared, so to him they are a threat.

We used to have our windows cleaned every six weeks (on the outside, at least. Inside is more like a gallery of nose art than anything else!) Because Finn finds it stressful, we have moved that to every three months, so four times a year.

Conventional canine 'folk wisdom' says that I should ignore his fear, or I am reinforcing that there is something to be scared of. That I should just carry on as normal and leave him to it.

Leaving a scared dog to be scared is never the right answer

This is completely wrong. Fear is an emotion. It is a psychological and physiological reaction to a situation that has no root in conscious control. Unconscious reactions cannot be reinforced. For reinforcement to take place, there must be a conscious action to be reinforced. What we can reinforce when it comes to situations that the dog finds scary are behaviours, what they do when the scary thing turns up.

Finn starts to react when he hears the ladders outside our house. For a long time, he would growl and bark and run around the house trying to make the window cleaners go away. Every single time they did in fact leave and so, in Finn's mind, the behaviour of barking was reinforced because the scary people with the big metal things left. This was starting to become an ingrained pattern and so I wanted to find a different way to deal with it.

I'm fortunate in this that I live next door to family who have their windows cleaned at the same time and so can deal with the cleaners for me. As soon as we hear the ladders nearby or (even better) I or my family can see that the window cleaner's vehicle is in our road, we put our action plan into motion. All the curtains and blinds in the living room are closed as is the door to the rest of the house. I have a couple of loud live concerts on the DVR box, so we put one of those on and cuddle up on the sofa. 26kg of over sized border collie turns into a lap dog as he climbs on me for comfort.

Again, conventional wisdom would have me push him off, to show him there's 'nothing to fear'. In Finn's mind, the things outside are terrifying so yes, there is something to fear. His default behaviour when he is scared is to come to me. Either sitting on my feet, or climbing up onto the sofa and laying on me so I can cuddle and fuss him and talk to him. And so we sit, in the darkness, listening to Iron Maiden, until I get the call that it's all clear and they've gone. At that point we have a ritual of checking the boundaries, where Finn will go around the garden, sniffing out where the strangers have been. Once he's sure that they have gone, you can see him relax, and then he'll crash out for about an hour's sleep.

The thing that I love about this is the fact that my scared dog's safe place is me. I have done many things wrong when it comes to socialising him and helping him work out his place in the outside world, but the fact that he clearly feels safer when he's in contact with me show me that I have done something very right indeed.

There is a photo on the Lothlorien Dog Services Facebook page with the caption 'Ignoring fear is as useful as saying you can smell the colour blue!' which sums it up beautifully.

I have heard of people arguing this point by saying 'I'm scared of clowns and I make myself get on with it!' or whatever to back up the ignoring the dog and leaving them to it argument. A human being a bit scared of something is not comparable to how a dog experiences fear. They cannot understand it, or reason their way through it. A dog scared of something is like a human with a true phobia, one where they react without thinking. I have a phobia of dolls, anything human-like in appearance really, so properly called automatonophobia, a fear of things that resemble the human form. On holiday in the lovely city of Chicago, I was in a shopping mall with a couple of friends and, when I walked around the end of an aisle, I came face to face with a four feet high Chuckie. Yes, the one from Child's Play. My friends found me outside the store, with absolutely no recollection of how I got there. There is no reasoning through a reaction like that. A fully grown and developed dog reaches roughly the same intellectual level as a human toddler. Would you comfort a young toddler when they cry because they are scared?

Comfort the dog. Give him a hug, if he's a dog that likes hugs. Help him feel a little better about his world at that moment in time. You cannot make the fear worse, but you might help his ability to cope with it better.