For the Love of a Dog (23 page)

In the last few decades, scientists have capitalized on the genetic influence of behavior by studying a line of “genetically nervous” pointers. These dogs are so shy they can’t tolerate any human interaction. They freeze and tremble when petted, and no amount of loving-kindness can calm their fears. The study has confirmed the genetic basis of their behavior: normal dogs raised by nervous moms did not become nervous themselves, while dogs from nervous mothers were fearful, no matter who raised them. Currently, Karen Overall and colleagues at the University of Pennsylvania are studying the neurophysiology of some of these dogs, and another researcher, Greg Acland at Cornell, is studying a line of more typically shy Siberian Huskies. The goal of these projects is to teach us more about the biology of fear and anxiety in both people and dogs, and they remind us yet again how much of our emotional life we share with dogs.
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Although the consequences of shyness can be a serious problem in both people and dogs, domestic dogs are actually much less shy than their closest relatives, wolves. Wolves are notoriously shy, so much so that researchers used to crawl into wolf dens and handle the puppies while the
parents hid in fear.
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These are the same animals who’ll fight off grizzly bears to protect their pups, so bravery is not the issue—familiarity is. Remember, fear of the unfamiliar improves your chances of staying alive if you live in the wild. Domestic dogs, like many domestic animals, show a much higher tolerance for coping with unfamiliar things than do their wild counterparts. That’s one of the defining characteristics of domestication. No one has illustrated this more clearly than the Russian biologist Dmitri Belyaev, who selectively bred only the tamest and friendliest of Russian fur foxes. Not only was he able to create foxes that acted for all the world like domestic dogs, he found that the friendliest foxes, whom he called the “domesticated elite,” were physiologically different from the shyer, wilder foxes. The docile foxes had a delayed fear period during development, and their levels of cortisol, one of the products of an active amygdala, were lower.

Shyness, or the lack of it, is the basis for a popular, and very reasonable, hypothesis about the evolution of the domestic dog. In
Dogs: A Startling New Understanding of Canine Origin, Behavior and Evolution
, Ray and Lorna Coppinger argue that dogs are derived from a subset of wolves who were bold enough to forage on the outskirts of human settlements. The shyest wolves stayed away, and remained wolves as we know them today. The boldest ones hung around humans and, through both natural and artificial selection, became dogs. Perhaps that’s one of the reasons it is so hard for us to equate human shyness with the behavior of our dogs—so many dogs seem oblivious to social stress, with the hearty boldness of a door-to-door salesman. But as we’ve already noted, a trait like shyness has a lot of value, so it’s hard to eliminate from an entire species. It’s no surprise then, that many of our dogs retain varying degrees of it.

No matter how much research supports the influence of genetics on personality traits like shyness, there is still resistance in some quarters to the idea that there are genetically influenced personality traits that
remain stable over an individual’s lifetime. True, some studies show that experiences early in development can wipe out the effect of genetics; for instance, genetically shy rhesus monkeys can end up as functionally normal adults if they are cross-fostered with the right mothers. But other studies suggest that personality can be stable over time; children who were categorized as “timid” around unfamiliar people showed similar behavioral and neurological responses to the sight of unfamiliar faces when they became adults.

Perhaps some of the resistance to acknowledging the impact of genes on fearful behavior comes from the belief that “genetic” means “unchangeable.” A book about shyness in people written by the psychologist Philip Zimbardo in the 1970s suggests that acknowledging a genetic effect on shyness is tantamount to assuming that all shy people are doomed to a life of fear and anxiety. He calls it the “born to be a loser” approach. The same assumptions appear today, in articles in popular magazines and newspapers. I read one recently that suggested if shyness is “genetic” then it is permanent and can’t be influenced. I shouldn’t be surprised then, when my clients ask, with drawn faces and held breaths: “Is it genetic?” as if “genetic” were a curse that no magic potion could cure. Yet that’s not how genes influence a behavior as complicated as shyness or aggression. Think of genetics in these cases as creating a predisposition, or a tendency to behave a certain way. Like a driverless car rolling down a slight incline, these tendencies can be influenced by someone who hops in and puts on the brakes, or can cruise along on their own, picking up steam as they flow downhill, headed for who knows what.

How much you can affect a trait like shyness depends on the intensity of the individual genetic contribution to it. No one can cure the “genetically shy” pointers; the wiring in their brains is so extreme it can’t respond to any type of treatment. That level of genetic influence, however, is rare. More often, one can do a lot to increase an animal’s level of comfort; it’s just hard to know how far you can take them until you try.

It’s also good to remember that you can only work with what you’ve got—extremely fearful individuals may learn to be comfortable around strangers, but they’re not going to love selling widgets door-to-door. The same is true for dogs. I worked with Kato, a Great Dane puppy
who was so frightened of strangers that, at twelve weeks of age, he growled at me when I entered the house. Lucky for Kato, he was owned by Brenda Scidmore, now a professional dog trainer, who went into socialization superdrive when Kato was still a young pup. Kato lived the life of a social butterfly for his first year, never being overwhelmed, but given frequent opportunities to meet new people in a variety of environments. Kato learned to associate strangers with treats, and because of it, he grew into a dog who was gracious and polite. As an adult, Kato was quiet and reserved, and his owners were wise enough not to try to turn him into Larry the Labrador. However, his fear never evolved into something dangerous, which it well could have if the Scidmores hadn’t taken that first growl seriously and taught him to associate strangers with yummy treats.

Most of us have a personal and intuitive sense of the interplay between an inborn personality trait like shyness and the influence of practice and experience. Shy individuals may make great strides in overcoming their timidity, even becoming great public speakers, but they’re probably not going to become nightclub hosts. Keep that in mind if you’re breeding dogs, or if you’re picking out a puppy. You can only work with what you’ve got, and what you’ve got—a set of genes wrapped up in silky fur and floppy ears—was created a long time ago, in the heritage of your dog’s ancestors.

I don’t want to give the impression that shyness is always a behavioral disaster. A little bit of caution about new things can actually make a dog easier to manage, especially as an adolescent. It’s the dogs with extreme shyness who seem to suffer so much, and who can cause untold suffering to their human family. Shyness doesn’t combine well with some other genetically mediated traits. Dogs who are shy along with being territorial, overreactive,
and
quick to use their mouths are at risk of biting visitors who enter your house without knocking. The last thing most of us want is a dog who defines anything new as a crisis and feels he has to confront it with his mouth. Rather than run away from the killer cardboard box, Tulip could have charged at it, which would have been the response of a dog who goes on
offense
in response to her fears, rather than on
defense
. I’m eternally grateful that Tulip is on the lookout for anything new or different at the farm,
and
that in over ten years she’s never taken it upon herself to charge into battle unless an animal was being physically attacked. Thus, the cardboard boxes at Redstart Farm remain safe—unless they take it upon themselves to attack me, another dog, or my sheep. I’m lucky that Tulip has the ideal combination of shyness, protectiveness, and docility to welcome visitors but protect the farm from danger.
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That’s not always the case, and we’d do well to remember it. Shyness in dogs can, and does, combine with other personality traits to turn into aggression. That important fact of biology requires more attention than it presently gets.

Far too many puppies are produced from shy parents, with little regard for the effects on the dog and on the family in the dog’s new home. If you’re looking to buy or adopt a puppy, ask yourself whether an adult version of a shy pup is going to respond to her fears on offense or on defense: that’s the difference between a dog who hides behind your legs when the mailman hands you a package, and a dog who lunges out to bite him. You can get genetics on your side by using the information in Chapter 2 to read the emotional expressions of the puppies in a litter and by evaluating their relatives; most important, you can obtain a puppy from a reliable, responsible source.

Keep in mind that it’s not just
shy parents
who can produce shy puppies; you can breed shy pups from parents who seem relatively bold, if one of
their
parents was a bit shy. Remember that shyness is a “conservative” trait, so it’s going to hang around in the gene pool, even if only somewhere in the background. If you’re the one doing the breeding, be sure, before you decide on a mating, that you’ve learned about the behavior of the entire line, not just the behavior of the parents. If you’re the one doing the buying, do enough research to discover if your potential pup’s parents, grandparents, and aunts and uncles ever had any problem with excessive shyness. This information is impossible to obtain if the parents have lived in kennels all their lives. In that
case, nothing ever changes, so how can you know how the dogs will cope with something new or different? This is one of the many reasons why we should all be actively fighting against the plague of puppy mills, from which millions of dogs are sold to unsuspecting people with no regard for the disposition of the parents.

The story of Blaze, the dog who began this chapter, is a perfect example of the importance of
early development
on fearful behavior in dogs. Blaze was aggressive to people because he was afraid of them, but in this case the cause wasn’t his genetics. Blaze warmed up so fast in my office, and seemed so happy to be around people once he relaxed, that it seemed impossible to believe he was hardwired to be fearful. I suspected that Blaze was afraid of visitors because he’d seen so few of them, especially during the phase of development called the
critical period of socialization
. Blaze had grown up in an isolated house in the middle of nowhere. Rather than being genetically shy, Blaze had had little exposure to people as he was growing up, and therefore he saw anyone who was unfamiliar as a threat. As he matured, he began to act on those fears, desperately trying to protect Father Murray and the house from invasion by aliens.

Blaze’s story exemplifies how both nature (genes) and nurture (development and learning) play essential roles in behavior. If Blaze had been well socialized, I doubt very much that he would have become aggressive. If he hadn’t inherited a certain amount of friendliness, I doubt he ever could have been rehabilitated. However, he was also hardwired to be exceptionally reactive, and he had a lot of trouble keeping himself from becoming overaroused. The combination of these factors created both the Blaze of the past, who would’ve bitten you, and the Blaze of today, who’ll lick your face and welcome you to his new farm. We’ll talk in the next chapter about how that turnaround happened, but for now, it’s worthwhile to talk about how Blaze’s aggression to visitors could have been prevented in the first place.

The period of early development has a profound effect on an individual’s level of fearfulness about the world. We’ve learned that warm, supportive parents lead to bolder, more confident children. We know
that genetically shy monkeys and human babies can be brought out of their shells by being cross-fostered with attentive mothers who provide what’s called a “secure attachment base.” We talked at length in Chapter 3 about the impact of an enriched environment with respect to a dog’s ability to cope with change as an adult, and this effect is equally important on a dog’s tendency to be fearful or bold. If you think about it, an enriched environment is not that different from a changing environment—even a complex environment stops being enriching if it never changes. You can’t have something new without change. That’s why any properly enriched environment includes chances to meet new people and dogs; that’s why both puppies and children need to be introduced to enough new people and dogs that meeting individuals who are unfamiliar becomes familiar itself.

Both breeders and puppy buyers will have happier dogs if they are mindful of the importance of socialization. I mention breeders because we know that the primary “sensitive period” of socialization begins as early as three weeks of age, and is over as early as twelve weeks. Good breeders invite lots of friends (who have washed their hands and left their shoes outside, thank you) to interact with the pups. Good puppy raisers do the same, and take the pup out and about to meet people and polite, healthy dogs of all descriptions, making sure that the interactions are good ones. Effective socialization creates positive experiences that enable your pup to feel comfortable with a variety of people and dogs, and to learn that strangers, no matter how many paws they have, are a good thing.

Puppy socialization classes can be a great addition to a socialization program. The good ones get you started on lots of fun and practical training exercises, while introducing your pup to a variety of other sizes and shapes of dogs. Be cautious, though, about puppy classes in which all the pups are thrown together in a mosh pit of activity, with instructors blithely saying, “Oh, it’s great for puppies to learn to work things out for themselves.” Puppies work things out just like young children on playgrounds do—with little regard for emotional control or the social niceties of life. There’s a reason that an adult is always assigned to monitor the playground at an elementary school; otherwise, we’d have
Lord of the Flies
acted out at schools all across the country. Unregulated puppy classes can create the same dynamic, by reinforcing bullies (yes,
even young puppies can act like bullies) and traumatizing some of the more timid puppies. The problems associated with unregulated puppy classes are a good reminder that “socialization” doesn’t mean throwing your pup into the deep end of social interaction and assuming he’ll learn to swim. As we’ll see in the next section, that can cause more problems than it solves. Be sure that your pup’s socialization process is a series of positive experiences, not a series of negative ones.