For the Love of a Dog (25 page)

Prior experience is an important factor in how a dog reacts to a frightening event. An attack by another dog is going to have much more impact if it happens to a pup who’s never met another dog; that’s why I was so worried about young Tigger. In contrast, Pip recovered from being jumped by a client’s dog relatively quickly, because she had had years of good experiences with other dogs. It also matters to dogs, just as it does to people, what happened in the days preceding an incident. Just as I was primed by being frightened in the car the night before my medical procedure, so dogs can react differently depending on what has happened in their own recent past. A dog might react very differently to an attack if he’d been scared the night before by a thunderstorm, or just been to the vet’s for vaccinations. The impact of the environment can be additive, which is one of the reasons that dogs
seem
to behave erratically. Perhaps your dog might welcome a guest one day, and bark like a banshee at the same person the day after. Don’t let some inconsistencies in your dog’s behavior throw you. Many factors influence how frightened a dog will be by any one event. What has happened in his past is just one of them. Usually the effects of any single incident fade away over a period of days, but on occasion, just as in people, one single incident is enough to change a dog forever.

Some dogs are so affected by what happens to them they behave as though they have been clinically traumatized. Someone rolled her eyes once when I used this term in relation to dogs. She asked, her tone dripping with sarcasm, if I wasn’t being just a little bit anthropomorphic when I used such a “human” term in relation to a dog. No, I replied, I wasn’t—at least, not in a problematic way. “Trauma” is defined as a serious shock or injury to the body or the emotions; an event that causes “great distress and disruption.” There’s virtually nothing about the way dogs are designed to preclude their being “distressed and disrupted” by a terrifying event. As we’ve seen, dogs share the brain design and neurochemistry that influence fear and anxiety in humans— if we didn’t, people wouldn’t be continuing a line of perpetually terrified pointers to better understand how to treat generalized anxiety disorders in humans. That dogs can be frightened by something, and that those fears can affect their behavior, is hardly surprising to any of us who know dogs. What did surprise me was my gradual realization over the years that dogs exhibit many of the same symptoms as people who have post-traumatic stress disorder.

Lefty, the dog whose story began this section, is a classic case of a dog who behaved much like a person with PTSD. As is often true in humans, his behavioral problems didn’t begin immediately after he had been scared. Also, like a human PTSD victim, he began to generalize the triggers that he associated with his fear, first being afraid of just one twelve-year-old boy, then of other boys of similar ages, and eventually of males of any age. That’s often how trauma affects humans—its effects aren’t always obvious right away, and over time the victims begin
to generalize their fears from one specific stimulus to wider and wider categories of events.

An infamous story about the progression of trauma comes from the work of John B. Watson, the behaviorist mentioned in Chapter 1. Watson wanted to show the power of associative learning, in which an innate reaction to one thing (like the fear of a loud, startling noise) can be transferred to another thing (a benign object, such as a small, furry animal). Watson brought Albert, an eleven-month-old child, into his laboratory and sat him down in front of a friendly little white rat. Albert was charmed by the furry creature in front of him, and cheerfully tried to pet it. However, every time Albert reached for the animal, Watson slammed a hammer onto a piece of metal just a few inches behind Albert’s head. After one short session, poor little Albert burst into tears every time he saw a white rat. By the end of the week he had become afraid of anything furry, including a rabbit and a fur coat. This experiment was heartless enough given the knowledge of the time, but is made even more painful to contemplate by our current knowledge that Watson was permanently changing the function of Albert’s brain, and predisposing him to be far more reactive to trauma than he would have been before his unknowing mother brought him into the laboratory.

Little Albert the boy and Lefty the dog have a lot in common: both suffered from an event that was frightening, and in both cases a specific fear became generalized to anything that their brains had associated with the trauma. Albert started with an attraction to white furry animals, and Lefty to little boys. However, when these things were paired with something frightening, they became frightening all by themselves. Over time, both boy and dog began to generalize their fears: Albert to anything furry, Lefty to anyone male. Lefty was friendly to me not because I’m a trained behaviorist, or because I love dogs, but simply because I’m not a guy.

The bad news is that trauma can stay with us forever; just ask the victims of war or other violence. We know this is true of many species besides ourselves—rats who have been traumatized by inescapable shocks have long-lasting changes in their physiology, and deficits in their ability to learn. Traumatic events can change the performance of an individual’s amygdala, which, paired with its partner the hippocampus, can carry memories of past dangers for a lifetime.

One of the most common symptoms of PTSD in people is an increased level of reactivity to almost any stimulus that could possibly be associated with danger. I knew a Vietnam veteran who startled to any abrupt noise, literally throwing himself to the floor if a car backfired on the street below. His behavior and expressions were dead ringers for those of a client’s traumatized Golden Retriever, who was the victim of a childhood prank. I don’t know whether the kids who threw the firecracker meant it to land on the dog’s back, but it did, a microsecond before it went off. Frito was terrified, and after that one incident he responded to any loud, abrupt noise with panic, just as my friend did after being in combat.

This hyperreactivity is the result of what researchers call “an overly efficient neural pathway” between the amygdala, the hippocampus and hypothalamus, and the production of stress hormones like cortisol and adrenaline. In these cases, the brain lives in a state of chronic over-arousal, which can inhibit the ability of the cortex to help the body decide what’s dangerous and what isn’t. This “priming effect” can result in some surprising findings, like that of one researcher who found that Beagles had higher levels of cortisol when taken back to an area where they’d been shocked
one month before
than they did immediately after they received the shocks. That means that one entire month after being shocked, the poor dogs were more stressed about being taken back to the location than they were after the actual event. That’s a perfect example of the results of trauma, in which a single event can have pervasive effects on an animal’s emotions, and after which the fear worsens over time rather than improves.

It’s also a good example of how the brain does its best to record and remember things that are associated with fear or danger. The Beagles’ brains told them that the place was dangerous, because they had been shocked there, even though the place itself actually had nothing to do with it. You might feel nervous when you hear a song that was playing on the radio when you had a car accident, although you won’t even be conscious of the connection. Many of these associations are unconscious, but they probably drive our behavior as much as they do our dogs’.

There’s good news, though, about trauma and its effect on people and dogs. For one thing, most frightening events don’t result in clinical
levels of trauma, and dogs can be as resilient as people can in recovering from a scare here and there. Being scared at the vet’s office or being charged by a frightening dog isn’t likely to cause lifelong problems in a healthy, stable dog, any more than one bad experience at the doctor’s is going to leave you with a phobia about getting a physical. Of course, how you or your dog responds depends on the intensity of the experience and on whether you’ve been scared before in a similar situation or have a genetic predisposition toward an active amygdala.
¹⁰

The other piece of good news about our reactions to frightening events is that as we start to understand more about the biology of fear, no matter what its source, we’re also starting to develop better ways to treat fear. Some of these methods are dependent upon speech and are of no use to those of us with traumatized dogs. But other methods work without words, and can do wonders for dogs whose fears are compromising their lives. That’s the subject of the next chapter, in which we’ll talk about tried-and-true methods that can help you help your dog overcome his fears.

I remember the storm that almost killed Blue as if it had just happened. The thunder was so loud I gave up trying to sleep, and alternated between reading and attending to my dogs, who were clustered around me, panting and pacing. A huge branch, itself the size of a tree, blew off the weeping willow in the front yard. I was sure the power would go out, and it did, right on schedule, about an hour into the fury of a typical Wisconsin thunderstorm. The Midwest may seem like a quiet backwater to some, but not to those of us who live here. In part, that’s because of the weather. Thanks to tornadoes, thunderstorms, and blizzards, we don’t need to watch television to bring drama into our lives. I thought about that as I hunkered down on the second story of my old farmhouse, hoping that the maple tree didn’t fall on the garage, and that the roof stayed on the barn for one more year
.

Blue lived a mile and a half down the road. He was a working dog who lived outside, the better to protect an organic vegetable farm. It wasn’t people who were the concern, it was deer. You may not think of deer as dangerous predators, but that’s because you’re not a cabbage. Deer can eat up a season’s worth of vegetables in just one night, and they are hard to keep out once they learn that there’s a buffet open in the neighborhood. Blue had proved himself invaluable to Vermont Valley Farm, living in the middle of the most vulnerable crops, barking at the first sign of deer. The smorgasbord in the fields may have tempted the local Bambis, but the presence of Blue was enough to convince them to eat elsewhere
.

Surely that night the deer were hunkered down, finding what protection they could from the pouring rain and flashes of lightning. Blue had done the same in past storms, but not this time. We’ll never know why this storm was the one that sent him over the edge, but it did him in. No longer content to seek shelter in his doghouse, Blue ran in terror through the tomato vines, across the cornfield, trying somehow to outrun the thunder. Tearing wild-eyed down the centerline of a county highway, Blue came within inches of being hit by a passing motorist. The driver saw him at the last instant and managed to avoid a collision. Blue’s luck continued: his savior was a local, and knew where Blue belonged. Blue was happy to jump into his truck, and was escorted home to safety while the thunder still rolled and the sky flashed from light to dark
.

Fear may be essential to survival, but sometimes it can work against us. That’s as true for dogs as for people. Thousands of dogs die every year because, terrified of thunderstorms, they run headlong onto highways or launch themselves out of second-story windows trying to outrun the noise. Thunder phobia is only one type of fear that can do dogs more harm than good, but it’s a good reminder that both people and dogs can suffer terribly from chronic and acute fear. Some individuals are so afraid of strangers that they can barely manage normal social interactions, and live their lives in a state of chronic anxiety. Others have been frightened so intensely that they develop post-traumatic stress disorder, and live in a constant state of hyperarousal. The good news is that many of these conditions, in both people and dogs, can be cured or at least substantially improved. That’s what this chapter is about—how to help dogs whose fears are compromising their lives, and the lives of the people who love them. However, before we talk about what
to do
, I want to talk about what
not to do
. I wish I didn’t have to bother, but the fact of the matter is, instinct often isn’t enough when it comes to dealing with frightened dogs.