I want to clear something up.
In my previous post, I talked about how Faith stayed in the living room for over a year before I could coax her out into the dining room. Maybe you thought I should have just forced Faith to face her fear of leaving the room by dragging her out. I know that some trainers advocate that approach. “Make the dog face its fears,” they say. Other trainers contend that all you have to do is show the dog who the alpha dog is — it or you. One way of doing that is by rolling the dog over.
Barking at a Scary Visitor
Both approaches might work with normal dogs. But they would have been dead wrong with fearful dogs like Faith. In fact, if I had done either one, I probably would have increased Faith’s fear of leaving the living room instead of decreasing it.
So I wasn’t coddling Faith by not forcing her to leave the living room or by spending over a year encouraging her to leave. On the contrary, I was setting her up to overcome and conquer her fears. It’s just that sometimes it takes awhile — perhaps a long while — for a fearful dog to gain confidence enough to overcome her fears in a healthy and nonthreatening way.
You have to keep in mind that a fearful dog views the world differently from the way normal dogs do. For example, if you put a suitcase on the floor of the hallway, a normal dog wouldn’t pay any attention to it. But a fearful dog might find the suitcase scary because she’s never seen it there before. So the dog might might be afraid to go into the hallway until you remove the suitcase.
That happened with Faith a few months ago when Lisa and I came home from a short vacation. I left my suitcase in the hallway between the living room and the dining room. Faith, who was in the living room, just stood at the threshold of the living room staring at the suitcase. She refused to come greet me until I’d removed the suitcase. Then she was fine.
There are good ways and bad ways to help a fearful dog overcome her fears. This post focuses on three things you should avoid doing.
Don’t Negatively Reinforce a Fearful Dog’s Fears
I heard a person say that he taught his dog to heel by jerking on the leash so that the dog almost choked. The technique worked like a charm and the dog has heeled nicely ever since.
Jerking on the leash to make the dog stop doing something is a great example of negative reinforcement. If you did that to a fearful dog, it would probably increase the dog’s fears.
What is negative reinforcement? It’s punishing the dog for doing something wrong. A normal dog — such as that person’s — might know why you jerked the leash. But a fearful dog probably wouldn’t. In fact, the dog might not know why you punished her. She might even associate the punishment with the situation in which you punished her.
For example, suppose you yell at your dog to stop barking at a visitor. The dog was barking because the person is new and scary. Or perhaps the person is invading the dog’’safety zone (which, in Faith’s case, was the living room). When you yell, the dog might stop barking, but might not associate your yelling with the fact that the visitor is a friend. Okay. So the dog stops barking, but inside she becomes even more afraid of visitors because they make you yell. So in her mind a visitor is something to be be afraid of.
Don’t Comfort a Fearful Dog When She’s Afraid
Don’t comfort a fearful dog when she’s afraid because you’ll only increase her fear of whatever it is that’s scaring her. Why is that? Because the attention you’re giving the dog tells her that whatever it is that’s scaring her really is scary. Otherwise you wouldn’t be comforting her.
A good example of how comforting could have hurt Faith took place when she was living in the basement. The floor is tile and slippery. A lot of times when I played fetch with Faith, she would slip and fall. If I’d made a big deal about it, she would have thought that slipping and falling was bad and might have avoided playing fetch — or even walking on the tile floor. Instead, I ignored her falling or made a light joke about it. As a result, she thought that slipping and falling was normal and kept playing fetch.
Don’t Flood a Fearful Dog
Don’t flood a fearful dog when you’re trying to help her overcome a fear. What’s flooding? It’s putting the dog in a scary situation with no way to get out of it. People who advocate flooding think that by forcing the animal to face the thing that scares her, she will realize it’s not scary. What will probably happen is that the dog will become even more frightened of whatever it is that scares her. She might even associate you with the scary thing as well and stop trusting you.
With Faith, I could have dragged her out of the living room into the dining room (assuming the 40-odd pound dog would let me). And I could have forced her to stay in the dining room untill she calmed down. But by doing that I would have flooded her. And just because she’d calmed down wouldn’t have meant that she had overcome her fear.
Too much is at stake to take a chance with flooding a dog to make her face her fears. Most likely the flooding won’t work and will only make things worse for both the dog and you.
