Helping Your Fearful Dog Feel Safe

by Eileen Anderson (www.eileenanddogs.com)
December 22, 2014

If you have a fearful dog, you probably read all sorts of conflicting advice about what to do. Everybody has an opinion, and unfortunately some of them include very poor methods.

Even if we rule out methods based on aversive practices, like prong collars or shock systems, we are not out of the woods. A lot of the suggestions made regarding fearful dogs can easily cause our attempts to help our dog backfire.

My favorite way to assess methods is using the three principles that Debbie Jacobs of Fearfuldogs.com has distilled from the best information available about fear, behavior change, and how dogs learn. They are:

1. Help your dog be safe and feel safe.
2. Use desensitization and counter conditioning to change your dog’s emotional response to triggers.
3. Use positive reinforcement to teach your dog behaviors.

The Hardest Step

Even though #2 and #3 on this list above require mechanical skills and familiarity with concepts that are new to most people, I believe that #1 is the hardest.

So here is my take on what generally fits into “Keeping the dog feel safe” and what does not.

What “Keeping the Dog Feeling Safe” Can Consist Of:

It might be any of the following:

• Looking away from your dog if eye contact scares her
• Setting up indoor gates and “airlocks” to prevent your dog from accidental contact with family members, visitors, or other animals
• Blocking windows or using window film
• Playing white noise or non-dramatic music to mask scary sounds (only if your dog isn’t scared of the music itself)
• Disabling your doorbell
• Protecting your dog from the advances of scary strangers (or even friends)
• Being directive with veterinary staff about your dog’s needs
• Exercising your dog in the yard instead of taking her for walks
• Driving her to remote areas for walks (assuming she’s not scared of leashes, you, or riding in the car)

What it doesn’t look like are any of these myriad things people, no matter how well-meaning, suggest to try to get dogs to accept proximity to whatever it is they are afraid of:

• Having strangers give your dog treats
• Having anybody pet her if she doesn’t like it
• Cuddling or hugging her if she draws away
• Looking directly at her
• Walking your dog past what scares her, instead of changing your route
• Taking your dog to dog parks
• Taking your dog to a training class or trainer using compulsion methods
• Keeping her in a public area of the house since she might as well get exposed to everybody as soon as possible
• Forcing her into a crate, instead of acclimating her to a crate at her own pace
• Dragging her up to the thing that scares her to show her that it isn’t really scary

Don’t be dismayed. Yes, the “do’s” are a lot of work. The “don’t’s” are hard to avoid. But as extreme as some of those measures seem, the better you do at helping your dog feel safe, the faster she may be able to progress.

Step #1 is powerful indeed. But it is a baseline. The point in taking steps to help your dog feel safe is so she is in a state where she can learn, little by little, using desensitization and counter-conditioning, to be comfortable in her skin and happy in her life with humans. Not to mention that you get the satisfaction of knowing how much you really helped her.

You can read about steps #2 and #3 at the CARE for Reactive Dogs website. The CARE techniques work just as effectively on a dog who is frozen in a corner as with one who is hollering at the end of the leash. And by the way, the CARE website also covers keeping your dog feeling safe, under the Respite and Relaxation section of PrepCARE.