Fear Season Episode 2. | Why fearful dogs tear up the Rulebook
One of the things I’ve learned working with fearful dogs over the years is that more than any of the other types of issues that I work with, it is the fearful dogs that many other professionals struggle with the most, because fearful dogs don’t seem to follow the normal rules of dog training.
They need a completely different approach - one that takes a long time to master, and even then isn’t quick or easy. And most of the time, it’s easier for many professionals to write the dogs off as broken or beyond help, rather than to recognise that they might have more to learn.
With an excited or frustrated dog, there’s a lot that you can do to solve the problem, regardless of the approach that you are taking. You can normally very easily redirect them onto some form of toy or other play exercise. You can also provide food or praise in a range of different styles. You can change up the training tools you are using to put limits on volatile or difficult to control behaviour. And its normally fairly easy to structure exercises and activities around your dogs development - no matter what type of training style you want to follow.
But when you are working with a fearful dog - very often the things that many professionals rely on become not just ineffective, but often detrimental. Many fearful dogs don’t want anything to do with strangers - so just being there inherently causes more stress - and any activities you want to do represent additional challenge. For training professionals that follow a “positively only” of working, this throws up a major challenge - because there is no way around the fact that you are, at least in the beginning, an inherently unpleasant and stressful addition to that dogs life - just by being there. These same dogs are highly unlikely to take food - it’s one of the first things that nervous and fearful dogs stop doing. So the ‘logical’ strategy of trying to get that dog to like you by giving it treats tends to just exacerbate the situation.
“This point in particular highlights a fundamental flaw in “Positively Only” Training. You cannot even begin to think about opportunities for Positive Reinforcement with fearful dogs until these underlying negative reinforcement pathways are resolved - because with fearful dogs we cannot control and cannot limit a dogs exposure to fear when they live within it every waking moment of the every single day.”
The rest of the training community don’t have it any easier. Because you can’t force compliance in a fearful dog, any more than you can force trust or force respect. Getting a dog not to lunge, bark or bite is easy with a well placed correction and some good handling skills - but getting a dog not to cower in a corner or hide in a bush? The more firm you are, the more the dogs shut down. And trying to use excitement or play just feels like being a comedian at a funeral.
The fundamental problem is that training works on the basis that the dog in front of you is happy, healthy and confident, to a greater or lesser extent. To put it another way, dogs that are not in Defense Drive (a defensive state of mind) - which is where the fearful dogs spend most of their time. When working with fearful dogs, everything is about survival - and its understanding survival instincts that acts as the key to unlock these most difficult of behavioural cases.
Intervene against Survival Instincts.
The goal for fearful dogs is survival. If fear has kept them alive, their instincts will tell them to keep doing it. In practice, what that means is that the more that fearful dogs are left to their own devices to practice unhealthy behaviours like hiding under furniture or in cupboards, or avoiding people, or biting at people that come close, the more they will keep doing it. Fearful dogs degenerate very rapidly once they get set on this path, and without a solid system of intervention, they will only continue to get worse. Letting them ‘come round in their own time’ is the most poisonous form of kindness that any fearful dog can be given. All dogs fundamentally work on the basis of patterns, and fearful dogs certainly will not make any attempt to change those patterns or behaviours without the intervention of a human being.
Get to Grips with Negative Reinforcement. It consumes the reality of fearful dogs.
Negative reinforcement is the reinforcement that occurs through the removal, release or escape (that’s where the word negative comes from) of things that an animal considers undesirable. And when working with fearful dogs, that’s normally a very long list of stimuli, and it is this mechanic that fundamentally reinforces defence drive (Fight, Flight, Avoidance, Shutdown) in fearful dogs. Working through their fear starts with fundamentally understanding where these reinforcement mechanisms are in place, and beginning to either block these pathways, or change the behaviours that operate them.
“Know your least bad options. Know your progressions - and learn how to nurture these decisions in the short term, to open up opportunities for something even better in the long term.”
These behaviours are many and varied, but the most common behaviour many owners see is panicking and pulling away on a lead - and it’s a good illustrator of how fearful behaviour works. The lead tension is almost always associated with the things that fearful dogs are scared of, either loud noises that they cannot get away from, people on the end of the lead, or places that they don’t want to move towards. In these cases, the resolution to the fear is intimately tied to the resolution to lead tension - usually flight or avoidance (e.g when we move with them in the direction of flight). Only by teaching the dogs that flight is wholly ineffective, and to relax instead of panicking can we change these pathways and begin to resolve the underlying fear.
This point in particular highlights a fundamental flaw in “Positively Only” Training. You cannot even begin to think about opportunities for Positive Reinforcement with fearful dogs until these underlying negative reinforcement pathways are resolved - because with fearful dogs we cannot control and cannot limit a dogs exposure to fear when they live within it every waking moment of the every single day.
“Good” is not a reasonable first objective. Only “least bad”.
When working with fearful dogs, a huge amount of success comes from recognising what the least bad options are, when there are no good options available. No fearful dog is going to give you what we’d consider to be perfect behaviour, or anywhere close - but we can make a lot of headway by progressively moving through a number of least-bad behaviours into something that feels workable, and from workable behaviours into something that feels comfortable.
For example, a dog that runs away from visitors to the house and hides behind furniture is not going to instantly turn into a happy-go-lucky character. But being able to exist in peoples social space (5 metres) without the need for flight is a big improvement. Walking with people who can practice “No touch, no talk, no eye contact” is a further step forward. Being able to relax and lie down within a metre of people they don’t know is a further progression.
In another example, a dog that is terrified of loud bangs and will bolt is not going to be able to go to a gun show anytime soon. But going from bolting (flight) to just sitting still (calmness or avoidance) is a big improvement from a safety perspective. Being able to walk calmly on a lead with gunshots from crowscarers in the distance and not balking or panicking is a further improvement again. Being able to focus on another activity like playing with a ball or a tug is another significant improvement.
Know your least bad options. Know your progressions - and learn how to nurture these decisions in the short term, to open up opportunities for something even better in the long term.
Understand a Dogs sensory order, and stop talking.
Sensory order is the principle of how dogs prioritise the information that they receive from their various sensory systems. Our order is invasive Touch from our environment, then Sound, then Sight, then Scent, then exploratory touch we make ourselves. Dogs by comparison prioritise Invasive Touch, then Scent, then Sight, then Sound, then their own Exploratory Touch. So whilst we both prioritise touch, Sound is second on our list, but it’s almost last for a dog.
When a dog becomes fearful, they deprioritise these systems from the bottom up, meaning that sound is one of the first things dogs lose - or to put it another way, they stop listening. When dogs become very fearful, sight and Scent also begin to shut down, which means that they stop responding to the information they are receiving through these stimuli, until touch is all that is left.
If you want to be able to communicate with a fearful dog, building a system of communication through touch - both through your own physical contact and through the lead, becomes your only option. So everything you need to be able to communicate has to be done in this way - with a high degree of clarity. You should be able to ask a dog to sit by touching them, and ask them to follow you just by using the lead. Because when your dog starts to panic, they won’t hear what you are saying.
This is of course a huge contrast to obedience training, that orients around the idea of teaching dogs to respond to sound or visual cues. Having the ability to apply principles of sensory order with fearful dogs often makes it clear why so many people struggle to communicate with their dogs (it’s actually a solid principle when working with dogs generally).
Recalibrate your Calmness
My final rule for fearful dogs centres around a perspective of what it means to be a fearful dog. When we think about the words calm, quiet, gentle and patient - everyone’s scale is going to look different. My personal scale of 1-10 may look very different to someone else’s, and both of our scales may look different to a third persons. With fearful dogs, everything changes - and it takes a very special kind of person to be able to recalibrate themselves (their intensity, their excitement, their volume, their patience) down to the level of a fearful dog - but this is part of the nature and requirement and working with fearful cases. It takes time, it takes practice and repetitions - and it takes a lot of mistakes. But there is no better dog than a fearful dog to teach people these skills.
There are no easy options when working with fearful dogs, and it’s also difficult not to make things worse when you try to treat them like other dogs - but there are still options. Every dog can make progress - with the right approach.
