Do everything you can to help your dog cope. I will do desensitization work with sound because I don’t think it can hurt. Therefore, when I have a thunderstorm-phobic dog, I give the dog a place to go to, like the basement, where the dog can take itself off to, or a closet, which is warm and dark, and I’ll leave a radio or television on. I think it’s the noise, it’s the visual of lightning, and it’s maybe the static shocks it’s getting. I don’t think we can really comprehend how a dog feels. Long before the storm comes, dogs feel changes in the barometric pressure. There’s also a theory that dogs feel static electricity. And there’s no way you can replicate the sounds of a real thunderstorm. Do you think this kind of desensitizing works?Ī: I’ve used it, but only with other therapy. Q: I’ve heard playing a tape of storm sounds at increasingly louder volumes can help a dog get over its fear of thunderstorms. This is something I’m becoming a lot more interested in because, more and more as I do my training and the more dogs I see with fears, the more fascinated I’m becoming with how smell can help a dog overcome fear. Because the dog’s sense of smell is immeasurably superior to ours, when you activate that sense of smell, you can deactivate the emotion of fear and anxiety. You’re actually training the brain to function in a different way. This is where food plays a really powerful role. Get the dog to try to focus on something other than the fear. Q: How can I help my dog get over these fears?Ī: Try to redirect the behavior - the fear - onto something more positive, like a game, a toy, some food, or attention. But you need to provide a reassuring arm and a reassuring voice and a reassuring presence so that the dog knows you’re there. You don’t want to go completely crazy with your dog and mollycoddle it. It used to be thought that you should ignore your dog when it was fearful because, if you were giving comfort or attention, you were reinforcing the fear.īut research has shown that’s actually not the case. Q: What should I do when I see that my dog is afraid of something? Should I comfort them? Ignore them?Ī: Obviously, it’s different for every fear. Any dog, really, has the capacity to suffer from it, depending on their upbringing and their predisposition. And I’ve had golden retrievers that have had severe separation anxiety or storm phobia. That’s not to say if you get a border collie your dog’s going to suffer from anxieties. It’s almost like they’re wired in a different way. You’ll find that collies and shelties and even German shepherds can be predisposed to suffering very much from fears and anxieties. Q: Are some dog breeds more prone to fears or anxieties?Ī: Border collies, the herding dogs, because I think they’re bred to be so sound sensitive and to be environmentally sensitive. There’s no doubt that genetic predisposition has a great effect too. You cannot overwhelm your puppy, and you have to make sure all the experiences it has are pleasurable. When you have a puppy, you have to introduce it to 100 new experiences and all different kinds of people and all different kinds of dogs in a lot of different environments. But it can become offensive when the dog realizes that they have been successful.Ī: It can literally be from lack of exposure when young - lack of socialization. Aggression starts as a purely defensive gesture. Many dogs that show aggressive response to other dogs or humans have incorrectly been labeled as a dog that’s trying to be dominant. It’s when the dog is hyper-attached to the owners and cannot cope when the owners aren’t there.Īnother big one is aggression, which is deeply based in anxiety and insecurities. Q: What are the most common fears or anxieties you’ve seen in the dogs you’ve worked with over the years?Ī: The biggest one is separation anxiety - that’s pretty major. ![]() We asked Victoria Stilwell, the internationally known author, dog trainer, and star of Animal Planet’s "It’s Me or The Dog," why dogs do these things. Or maybe your dog is the one that ate the living room couch while you were out. You've heard the stories: a dogs is so terrified during a thunderstorm that they jump through a picture window to escape.
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