Dog Fear & Anxiety Explained

Understanding our dogs emotions, & how they are expressed through their behaviour

Fear is the instinctual feeling of apprehension caused by a situation, person or object that presents an external threat—whether it’s real or perceived.

The response of the autonomic nervous system prepares the body and activates the freeze, fight or flight syndrome. It is considered to be a normal behaviour that is essential for adaptation and survival.

The context of the situation determines whether the fear response is normal or abnormal and inappropriate. Most abnormal reactions are learned and can be unlearned with gradual exposure (counter-conditioning & desensitisation).

Anxiety, meanwhile, is the anticipation of unknown or imagined future dangers. This results in bodily reactions (known as physiologic reactions) that are normally associated with fear.

Where we see undesired behaviour , we need to understand that it is simply the dog expressing how they are feeling about a situation, their communication is all through body language. A dog needs to feel safe, it’s a primary need. They cannot talk and say ‘ This is making me feel scared’, instead we often see either cowering ( freeze response ), running off ( flight response ) or commonly barking and lunging generally on a lead ( fight response ). Frustration can also cause barking and lunging on a lead, but that’s for another blog.

Different stimuli / triggers, are processed with cognitive thought, this in turn creates an emotion and we see the behaviour. Trigger stacking is when a stimuli or trigger happens, then another and another and before you know it your dog has gone way over their threshold and straight into the undesired behaviour. Or it can be just one trigger that causes it.

It’s really important we understand what causes the behaviour we see, as humans it’s easy to perceive it as ‘naughty’ behaviour but what we are seeing is a product of an emotional response and often out of the dog’s control, so they aren’t being naughty, they are expressing how they are feeling (communicating ) through their behaviour.

Learning to listen to our dog and giving them the right answer through our actions. Helping them to feel safe in these situations.

A stimuli / trigger produces a cognitive thought which produces an emotion and we see the behaviour.

For example the stimuli ‘a stranger approaching‘ , cognitively a dog who is fearful of strangers will think ‘potential threat approaching, I’m not safe’, this thought is processed in his brain and the limbic system ( the part of brain that deals with emotions) kicks in and he feels a negative emotion ( there are 7 primary emotions some negative some positive, in this case he will be feeling something within the fear negative emotion).

The limbic system controls what the body does in response to these emotions, so in this case his body responds by producing adrenaline and cortisol a ‘flight or fight’ response, activated by his sympathetic nervous system ( part of the autonomic nervous system). He can’t stop himself once this emotional response has been acted on by his body and chemicals are released.

When he thinks the threat is gone his emotional state will change and then the limbic system in his brain will tell his body to go back to a normal state, that's the parasympathetic nervous system.

To change these behaviours we first need to understand our dog, we need to help our dogs negotiate these feelings of fear and anxiety. There are some great natural products available which can help enormously, allowing us to support and motivate our dogs to change and to offer a different ( desired) behaviour to the stimuli / trigger, so we see less and less undesired behaviour. Motivation using positive reinforcement.

This is Home Team Barney, thinking he’s a lap dog ! He came to us as an emergency foster with a history of aggression, he is the goofiest most loving dog. Yes he can still have a bark at people that he sees as a threat, but by understanding his behaviour and training a different behaviour we now have a dog living his best life !