For the Love of a Dog (21 page)

Poor Blaze. There he was, terrifying visitors with his panicked barks and his flashing teeth, when all along he was terrified himself. Blaze was afraid of unfamiliar people, and rather than hide in the back of the house like some dogs, Blaze expressed his fear with that age-old “I’m going to get you before you get me” philosophy. Dogs like Blaze remind me of scraggly bearded hermits who threaten visitors with shotguns, in the belief that anyone unfamiliar must be dangerous.

Fear in dogs can be expressed in a multitude of ways, from cowering in the corner to lunging at visitors, but it’s the emotion behind a multitude of behavioral problems. Like Blaze, lots of dogs behave problematically because they’re afraid of people. Other dogs are afraid of members of their own species, and are defensively aggressive when encountering other dogs on neighborhood walks.
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They may look scary when they’re barking and lunging, especially if their behavior is directed toward your own dog, but sometimes all that drama is just a desperate attempt to keep the other dog away.

While fear motivates some dogs to growl, snap, or bite, it causes others to melt into pathetic puddles, or to buzz up into panic-stricken whirling dervishes. Separation anxiety (the fear of being alone) and noise phobias can lead to some horrific behavioral problems in dogs. Missy the Weimaraner was so afraid to be left alone that she went through a plate-glass window and carved a road map of lacerations into her back. In ten short minutes, after a truck backfired on the adjacent highway, Frito the Golden Retriever did $10,000 worth of damage to his owner’s apartment. The consequences of phobias in dogs are highly reminiscent of phobias in people, and are yet another reminder of how much of our emotional life we share with dogs.

Fear may cause a lot of problems in both species, but the good news is that there’s a lot we can do to alleviate the problems caused by it. We can’t cure every fear-related problem in dogs, any more than we can in people, but a little bit of knowledge can go a long way. That’s why this chapter will begin (as will each of the chapters on three of our most primal emotions—fear, anger, and happiness) with information about the biology of the emotion. Next we’ll talk about fear from three different perspectives: (1)
the genetics of fear
, and how some brains are hardwired to be overly reactive to the potential of danger; (2)
early development
, during which dogs can be programmed to be fearful of unfamiliar things or overreactive to stress; and (3)
learning and experience
, and how dogs can be traumatized just as people can.
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Each of these factors can influence how much fear an adult dog experiences, so it’s useful to understand them if you want to understand fearful dogs. Fear is designed to be aversive, and it’s an emotion most of us don’t want our dogs to experience, except as part of learning to keep themselves safe. In this chapter we’ll talk about the influence of each of the three factors, and in the next chapter we’ll talk about practical and effective methods to treat behavior problems based on fear.

Surely fear must be the most universal of emotions, given its importance to survival. Without fear, even civilized urban dwellers wouldn’t live to pass on any of their genes, because they’d stroll in front of buses and forget to lock their doors at night. People who experience little fear are at great risk: individuals born with no pain receptors in their skin have a hard time learning to be afraid of harmful things like fire and electricity, so they live far more dangerous lives than the rest of us.

Animals who don’t feel fear aren’t going to live long enough to reproduce: it’s as simple as that. The value of this emotion is evident in studies in which mice have had their amygdalas, those almond-shaped centers of fear and anger in the brain, mechanically stimulated. The mice fearlessly attacked any animal brought into their cage, including fully clawed cats. This is not a good strategy for a defenseless animal that weighs less than two ounces. Fear, the brain’s way of protecting the body, is one of the most ubiquitous and primitive of emotions. Puppies develop their first “fear period” right around the age they become fully mobile, which is the first time that a lack of caution could get them killed.

Given all we know about behavior and the brain, it’s hard to argue that complicated animals like mammals aren’t able to feel fear. While more complex emotions like pride, shame, and love may be controversial, almost all biologists are convinced that human and nonhuman mammals experience fear in ways at least somewhat comparable. Temple Grandin says, “Fear is so bad for animals, I think it’s worse than pain.” Although highly functional and with a Ph.D. in animal science, Temple Grandin is autistic. She argues, reasonably, that the biology of fear and pain is more similar in autistic people and animals than in typical people and animals, and that as an autistic person, she has centered her life around the management of her intense fears. She sees those fears reflected in the lives of other animals, especially herbivores like cattle and sheep, and she supports her argument with good solid biology.

One of the differences between autistic and typical people is a difference in the activity level of the prefrontal cortex, one of the areas of the brain involved in controlling fear. A high level of prefrontal cortical function—found in most humans—allows one to control fear, but
is associated with higher levels of pain. Lower levels of the same function are found in nonhuman animals and autistic people; they correlate with reduced pain perception, but higher levels of fear.

As a universal emotion, fear has predictable consequences on an animal’s behavior. These patterns can be useful to dog owners, in that they can help us decode our dog’s emotions.

Imagine you’re walking down the street with your dog, and suddenly there’s a loud crashing noise right behind you. This information—“very, very loud noise, very, very close”—begins its usual path to the “thinking” part of your brain, but on its way, the signal runs through the amygdala, both in your brain and the brain of your dog, which takes over in a potential crisis before the cortex can evaluate the situation. The amygdala signals
“Emergency!”
in a split second, and initiates a flood of messages that prepare your body for action. No time for analysis here—every millisecond counts if you’re in serious danger. “React first, and ask questions later” has kept many an animal alive, whether the danger was from a predator, a tree falling in the forest, or a car careening onto the sidewalk behind you.

We’re all familiar with that visceral feeling of panic flooding through our bodies—our hearts beat faster and our blood pressure rises, accompanied by that hard-to-describe feeling of tightening and fluttering in our chests. Something similar must flow through your dog’s body too, because she has all the same initial physiological responses that you have when she’s startled. Remember, the thinking cortex—the part of you that is very different from your dog’s—hasn’t yet been engaged, so there’s no reason to believe that at this point your dog’s response would be any different from your own.

We call this universal response of the body to potential danger the fight-or-flight syndrome, but, to be accurate, we should include “freeze” in the equation. Freezing, ever so briefly, is the most common response to an emergency signal from the brain. In the absence of information, it can be hard to know what to do. Run? But what if you end up running
toward
the danger? Attack? But is that really your best choice? Most animals
freeze
, even if just for a millisecond, before they
decide whether to stand their ground or run away. This is an involuntary response, in which the inhibitory part of the nervous system, the parasympathetic system, calls a screaming halt to everything for a microscopically brief moment of reflection.

Remember those extended freezes we talked about in Chapter 2? Now you know why they might be a signal of danger. A dog frozen in place over his chew toy could be feeling afraid or angry, but, either way, his body is ramped up for action. Don’t be fooled by the stillness of a dog who isn’t moving. His body may be still and silent on the outside, but inside it is a cauldron of activity. Stiff-postured dogs always remind me—bear with me here—of submarines in old war movies. If the camera is looking at the sub from the outside, all seems peaceful and calm as the sub glides soundlessly through the water. Inside, however, is a whirlwind of activity, with alarm whistles shrieking and sailors scrambling in response to an oncoming threat. Dogs who react by freezing in place may look passive on the outside, but they are usually highly aroused on the inside.
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These freezes can vary in duration, from eternally long stand-offs between two stiff-legged male dogs, to the briefest of pauses to warn you away from a chew toy. Once you start looking for them you’ll see them everywhere, and once you recognize the long, obvious ones your ability to notice the short ones will rapidly improve.

Dogs who freeze are both sending out signals and awaiting more information, so how you respond will make a big difference in their subsequent behavior. However, before we talk about the best way to respond to your dog’s fears, it’s useful to look at the factors that influence how they are experienced and expressed. Let’s talk about genetics first, not only because it comes first chronologically, but also because it often seems to be the least understood. Let me start with a story about Tulip.

Frozen in place as if in terror, Tulip stood at the doorway to the living room. In the classic expression of a frightened dog, her mouth was clamped
shut and her eyes were huge. For the longest time, I don’t think she even took a breath. Tulip is a Great Pyrenees, a breed developed to guard sheep from wolves in the Pyrenees mountains, and I have no doubt she’d fight off a pack of them if they went after my sheep. Without any training in protection, Tulip watches over the sheep and the farmhouse, and, bless her, over me. Normally as quiet and sweet as a spring afternoon, Tulip has fearlessly leaped into the fray when something was in danger, whether that something was a sheep, another dog or a person
.

“Fearless” isn’t the word that came to mind when my big brave guard dog stood stock still in the living room doorway. Tulip was so frightened by what she saw that she wouldn’t enter the living room for hours, and for days afterward would enter only through a different door. You might think there had been a wolf in the house, or at least a shifty-eyed stranger who appeared out of nowhere. But the problem wasn’t that dramatic. The problem was an empty cardboard box, sitting in the middle of the floor
.

Tulip stared at it, stiff and immobile, for two or three seconds, and then let out a series of barks that raised the house off its foundation. She barked as though we were all in peril of losing our lives. The cat dashed up the stairs, pursued by phantom demons. The Border Collies ran into the room, Luke and his daughter Lassie alarm-barking as they scrambled across the slippery kitchen floor. I ran to the window, expecting to see a truck the size of Connecticut in the driveway or a raging bull on the lawn. Nothing. Just a box. An empty cardboard box
.

I’d bought a new VCR that afternoon, and had left the box it came in on the floor. That’s what caused Tulip to first freeze, and then bark as if we were all about to die. After I finally realized the source of Tulip’s concern, I tried to coax her over to it. She planted her feet and raised her head like a frightened horse. I threw food by the box. She wouldn’t touch it. She wouldn’t even take a piece of lamb that I offered in another room, out of sight of the killer cardboard box
.

I carried the box to the garage and flattened it down into sheets of cardboard. When Tulip walked by it later that night, she paid it virtually no attention. But the living room was a different story altogether. For days afterward, she’d hesitate before entering it, leaning her body backward while she stretched her nose forward to investigate. She wouldn’t enter it at all through the same door she’d used when she first discovered the box. That wasn’t a crisis; she could use another door. But that door wasn’t very handy
,
and it somehow seemed absurd that a Certified Applied Animal Behaviorist couldn’t get her own dog through the room’s most convenient doorway
.

Tulip goes in and out of the living room now as if nothing had ever happened. It took a few days of classical counterconditioning and an old horse-trader trick I had learned years ago at a stable.
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Because Tulip was comfortable going
out
of the room once she was inside it, I simply walked her one step out the doorway, turned her around in a circle three times in the middle of the doorway, and then walked back
in
without taking a pause. After you’ve spun around in a couple of circles, the difference between inside and outside gets pretty blurred, so this, along with the addition of some particularly tasty treats as she entered, helped Tulip put aside her fears and start acting like the living room was, well, a living room. But why did she react with such drama in the first place?

No doubt her reaction to the killer cardboard box was influenced by learning and early experience—as a sheep-guarding dog, Tulip lived in the barn for the first three years of her life, a place devoid of VCRs and cardboard boxes. She’d only been living in the house for six or eight months when the killer cardboard box arrived. Now that she’s lived in the house for seven years, the arrival of a new box or piece of furniture might elicit a good sniff, but it won’t produce signs of alarm.

However, it wasn’t just a lack of experience that affected her response. Like most dogs bred for guarding, Tulip is extremely reactive to changes in routine. This makes a lot of sense when you think about it. It can be hard to know whether something new is dangerous or not, so for the one in charge of security, its very novelty makes it worthy of cautious attention. We all intuitively understand this to some extent, but security experts learn to be especially sensitive to change. We are often warned to “watch for anything out of the ordinary” in time of danger, so it makes sense that dogs bred to be four-footed security guards would have similar tendencies.