One unpleasant little gem sometimes seen as advice for those with a fearful dog is to make them face their fears and ‘get over it’ that way. This is, in my opinion, one of the worst pieces of ‘wisdom’ in existence.
As anyone that has read more than a couple of posts on this blog will have realised, the subject of fearful and reactive dogs is one that is particularly close to my heart, and one that I have put a lot of hours of thought and study into. All dogs deserve treatment with kindness, respect and with thought given to their emotional state. This is particularly important when it comes to our scared furry friends.
The concept of putting a dog into a situation and making them remain there and ‘face their fears’ is known in technical terms as flooding. It is an outdated and frankly cruel technique. The supposed theory is that at some point the dog will have to realise that no harm is coming to them from being in the situation and so learns to accept whatever is happening. Of course, this is not what is actually happening. A dog forced to remain close to the things they find stressful with no hope of escape will shut down, and give up all hope. There is no escape for them from the cause of the fear and so they stop trying. This is not the action of an animal that has ‘got over’ their fear. This animal has utterly given up on any chance of escape and has shut down.
I regard my relationship with my fearful dog as being at the heart of trying to help him with his fears. I want him to feel that he can trust me to keep him safe while we work on altering his emotional perception of the world around him. That is clearly not going to be the case if I force him into inescapable situations to the point that he stops trying when he meets the trigger of his fear. This is what is known as ‘learned helplessness’ – the state in which the dog knows that, no matter what he tries, there is no way of escape.
Think about that for a moment. If there is something you are scared of, try to imagine how it would affect you if you knew you had no way of avoiding it, and that you would just have to wait it out until the thing goes away, no matter how long that took.
With learned helplessness, the outward problems that we deal with when we have a reactive dog have gone away, but the internal situation is exactly the same. The dog still feels the fear, with the resulting biochemical changes and reactions, but simply does not express them as there is no point. The issues with long term exposure to stress hormones and the illnesses and poor health caused by them are still there. So now you have a dog that is feeling ill and cannot trust you any longer. This is only going to damage your relationship.
Helping a fearful dog to overcome their fears is not an easy task, there is no quick fix, and forcing them to face it is definitely not the answer. A program of desensitisation or counter conditioning will help, improving their confidence and resilience to deal with their world. If in doubt of how to proceed, seek out a force free trainer or behaviourist to help implement these.
Your relationship with your dog will be much stronger and happier, and that’s what we all want in the end – a happy family together.
I find there are a surprising number of people who don't understand the difference between flooding and desensitization. The latter of course being brief exposures to small amounts of the fearful stimulus that gradually increase until the dog is no longer fearful. My Finna was terrified of children yelling as they played on our street. We began with a few seconds outside behind our house while kids ran around yelling on the street and as she got used to that we moved to the side of the house or spent longer outside behind the house. Over a long time she's now fine with kids running and yelling on the street no matter where she is in our fenced space but over Christmas when the next door neighbor had all the grandchildren visiting and running up and down our fence yelling Finna indicated that was too much and asked to go back inside. I was delighted that she knew she had a choice and made a good one.
ReplyDeleteI think you're right, there is a lack of knowledge of the difference between the two. I plan to expand a little more on behaviour modification techniques in future posts. I do wonder how many people inadvertently flood, through misjudging how much their dogs can tolerate. And miss the fact that the dog has shut down, mistaking that for calmness in the face of the trigger.
DeleteI love hearing how you've improved things for Finna, she's lucky to have such an understanding guardian.