For the Love of a Dog (26 page)

There’s one universal truth that relates to all fear-related behavior in both people and dogs: punishment is not a good way to fix it. You’d
think it would be obvious that hitting or yelling at a frightened dog would be counterproductive, but, sad to say, people do it all the time. I suspect that the reason has more to do with our own emotions than those of our dogs. Frightened dogs can also be “aggressive” dogs, at least in the sense that some dogs growl and flash their teeth when they feel threatened. These dogs don’t want to hurt anyone, although they might if trapped or pushed too far. Usually, they’re just trying to defend themselves, and they’re using the only means they have. We respond, understandably, with our own set of fears. As primates, we have a visceral reaction to something coming at us with teeth bared, as well we should. Nothing like a set of white, shiny teeth to get a rise out of your limbic system, even if part of you has noticed that the dog’s facial expression includes signs of fear. Take it from me, never does your skin feel quite so thin and useless as when a dog is about to sink her teeth into it. If a dog is flashing her teeth, at you or someone else, it takes a special kind of training (or a high level of empathy) to focus on her fears rather than your own.

You’d be wise to try to see the world through her eyes, at least to the extent of acknowledging that fear is one component of the dog’s behavior.
¹
Aggression often breeds aggression, and never is that more true than if it’s motivated by fear. It’s a sad irony that one of the things we share with dogs is the tendency to become aggressive when we’re frightened. Defensive aggression is common in both species, and it can feed on itself like a forest fire.

Surely the most common fear in all mammals is the fear of being hurt. This isn’t surprising, when you think about it—being injured isn’t going to help an animal pass on its genes. It’s a shame dogs can’t more easily tell us when they’re hurt, or afraid of being hurt, because I think it’s a common motivation for what we think of as aggression. If only people would be
more
anthropomorphic when their dogs are behaving badly: I’m surprised at how few of us think of pain as a motivation for the growls and snaps that some dogs are so quick to deliver. Pain is a common factor in aggression in our own species (ask any hospital nurse), and you’d think we’d be quicker to consider it when our dogs get snappy.

I remember one dog, a lovely little Springer, who had bitten her owner repeatedly—and badly—whenever she reached toward her collar. The dog seemed sweet and submissive at all other times, perfectly happy to let me handle her paws, take away a special chew bone, and ask her to lie down and stay. The owner had been told the dog had “dominance-related aggression,” but the context of the bites didn’t look as if she was trying to control the household; she just couldn’t tolerate anyone reaching toward her collar. In the office I noticed that her movements seemed a bit stiff, and asked whether the dog had been given a thorough medical exam. She had, but her vet had found nothing on the X-rays to suggest a problem. Because the aggression was elicited only by a reach toward her neck, and because her movements seemed just the slightest bit “wrong,” I suggested a second opinion. Bless the client’s heart, she took her dog for a second opinion, got referred to a certified canine chiropractor, who located a misaligned vertebra, and in just one treatment the dog was restored to her sweet, docile self. This kind of “miracle cure” is rare—it’s probably one of the reasons I remember the case so well—but it serves as a good reminder that dogs can be aggressive because they are afraid of being hurt. Punishing her for growling and snapping (which the owners had tried) only exacerbated her fear and made things worse.

If you’re in the middle of a vicious circle of fear-related aggression between you and your dog, don’t expect your dog to figure a way out (although I’ve seen a number of dogs do their best to try). You’re the human with the big, brilliant cortex, so if you see signs of fear in your dog, as described in Chapter 2, take a deep breath, tell your limbic system to calm down, and think yourself out of the problem. If fear could be a component in your dog’s behavior, you need to take the threat away and work on teaching him what you
do
want him to do, not punishing him for what he did wrong.
²
Try to avoid getting caught up in a spiral of fear, because it can be a downhill ride to trouble.

Here’s another example—a regrettably common one—of how punishment only exacerbates problems that are based on fear: someone’s shy dog snaps at an unfamiliar visitor who overwhelms her by trying to kiss her on the face. Alarmed and embarrassed, the owner yells at the
dog and smacks her on the rump. Ask yourself, What did the dog learn? Most likely she had her fears confirmed: “Yes, unfamiliar people are just as dangerous as I thought they were, and worse, my own owner, whom I was counting on to protect me, becomes dangerous in their presence as well. I hope no one unfamiliar ever comes into our house again.”

Being punished for acting out of fear is a staggeringly common problem. I’ve worked with countless dogs who were punished for growling when they were afraid of a person or another dog.
³
Many did indeed stop growling, but these dogs are often more dangerous than the ones that keep it up. Afraid to growl, they sit stiff and silent, but ready to blow at the slightest provocation. If people aren’t aware of the meaning of a closed mouth and a stiff body, they push the dog until he can’t control himself any longer, and he lashes out “without warning.” “Out of the blue!” the owners tell me. “His bites come out of the blue, with no warning whatsoever.” And yet, when I reach toward the dog in a consultation, his mouth closes tight, his body freezes, and his eyes round like dinner plates. All along the poor dog had been trying to tell them he was about to blow, but they took away the only warning system they understood—growling—and couldn’t interpret the signals that were left.

Some dogs don’t stop growling if they’re punished for it. They escalate the barking and growling, in a desperate attempt to keep the approaching person as far away as possible. “You stay away from me! You’re dangerous! If you get closer my owner is going to hurt me.
STAY AWAY FROM ME!
BARR RARR RARR RARR!” This, too, is a common reaction to being punished for fear-related behavior, and I’ve seen hundreds of dogs in my office whose quiet growls evolved into deep, hateful barks because their owners had inadvertently confirmed their worst fears.

There’s another reason that people use punishment in response to fearful dogs, and it, too, relates more to our own emotions than to those of
our dogs. Fearful dogs are sometimes afraid to respond as asked, and dogs who don’t “listen” can result in frustrated, angry owners. We’ll talk about that in depth in the chapter on anger, but for now suffice it to say that getting angry at a frightened dog rarely solves the problem. This is yet another time when being anthropomorphic can help both you and your dog. Would your performance improve if someone slapped you because you were nervous before giving a speech? I’ll admit that in rare cases that kind of shock might be helpful (“Thanks, I needed that”), but that’s the exception, not the rule. I was so nervous when I gave my first academic speech at a scientific meeting that my goal was to make it through without fainting or throwing up. I did, but the graduate student who spoke after me dropped like a rock in a dead faint after his first few sentences. I suppose if someone had slapped him beforehand it might have improved things—he could’ve fainted in private instead of in front of five hundred people.

Although it’s important to avoid doing things that make your dog worse, there are lots of things you can do to help your dog conquer her fears. The methods described below work as well on people as they do on dogs, a handy fact to remember next time you have to give a speech. I’ve used them myself to get over my own fear of public speaking and to keep myself from bolting out of the chair at the dentist’s office.
⁴
I’ve written all the examples with dogs as subjects, but don’t hesitate to think about how you can get these methods to work for you, too.

Unless your dog was both born profoundly shy and grew up all alone in a shed, chances are you can do a lot to soothe her fears. The best way to do that is to use classical conditioning, the type of learning discovered by the Russian scientist Ivan Pavlov and his drooling dogs. Unlike most of us, who don’t appreciate long, slimy strings of drool, Pavlov wanted his dogs to salivate so that he could study the extra-large chromosomes that saliva contains. However, he was frustrated when they began producing drool before he was ready to collect it. He had
expected them to start salivating when they got their food, but the dogs would start dancing and drooling long before—when they heard their dinner bowls being handled, or the sound of the keeper’s footsteps approaching the door.

This is not a stunning revelation to most of us who are used to our dogs anticipating something they love with excitement, doing jumping jacks when we pick up the leash or open a can of food. No doubt dogs have been doing similar things for ages, spinning joyful circles when some humanlike primates picked up their clubs and put on animal skins on the way out of the cave.

But it was Pavlov who first realized the implications of the fact that dogs would drool in response to a sound, rather than to food. He recognized that by linking two previously unrelated things, you could get the same response to one as you did to the other. Not only that, but the response wasn’t voluntary or under conscious control—you can’t make yourself salivate, at least not without conjuring up an image of food, which is just another example of classical conditioning. Many of us can’t stop ourselves from blinking before a camera flashes, because the “anti-red eye” feature includes a small flash that is always followed by the “real,” brighter flash. Unconsciously, we’ve learned that the first, weaker flash, which is normally not enough to make you close your eyes, means a larger flash is coming. The sequence starts out
little flash—big flash—blink
, and turns into
little flash—blink—big flash
.
⁵
You can illustrate this yourself, without a camera, by pairing a clicking sound with a puff of air blown into your eye. After as few as ten trials you’ll find yourself blinking just to the click, in anticipation of the puff of air. You don’t decide to do it, it just happens.

Pavlov was so impressed by what he had found that he changed his scientific focus and spent the rest of his life studying the process of classical conditioning. He published 513 papers on classical conditioning, and found that it occurred in every species he studied. His work suggested that, ideally, the “neutral stimulus” (the bowl, the leash, the bell) should be presented about half a second before the stimulus that naturally evokes a response (dinner, a walk, visitors at the door), and that
the neutral stimulus needed to come first for the association to be made. In other words, your dog associates the doorbell with visitors because it rings
before
they enter the house, not afterward. But even Pavlov would be astounded by the implications of his discovery and by what we’ve recently learned about the power of classical conditioning to affect emotions and behavior.

The effects of this type of learning on the lives of people and animals are extraordinarily far-reaching. In one notable example, a researcher paired a red light with the of a receptive female into a male quail’s cage. Sure enough, after a few repetitions, the males became excited by red lights alone, and if a female did come to visit, the males produced more sperm and more semen, and copulated faster, if there was a red light on. (You have to love the researcher’s choice of color.)

Lest you start to feel smug about the foolishness of a male quail, keep in mind that people are as susceptible to conditioning as birds. Malcolm Gladwell, in the book
Blink
, recounts a study in which people’s behavior could be affected by the task of creating four-word sentences from seemingly random sets of words. But the words weren’t random: each set contained one word associated with old age, either directly or indirectly. Examples are “shoes give replace old the” and “sunlight makes temperature wrinkle raisins.” Believe it or not, simply reading words such as “old” and “wrinkle” embedded within four neutral words was enough to cause people to walk more slowly when they left the room than they did when they entered it. At no time were the subjects aware that their brains had unconsciously focused upon the words associated with old age, and had cued their bodies to behave appropriately. Apparently, “You are what you eat” needs to be broadened to “You are what you read.”

I just about fell off my chair as I finished that paragraph, realizing for the first time that there just might be a
tiny
little connection between the fact that I have become more and more fearful about my ability to do justice to the subject matter of this chapter, which would be, uh…fear. Good grief. I’ve read tall stacks of articles on fear, and the word FEAR seems to be burned into my brain. And even though I’ve been reading and writing about fear for several months,
it just
occurred to me that there might be a connection between that and my
own emotions. This stuff is scary. Heaven help my friends: the next chapter is on anger.

Unconscious associations like these are happening all the time to every human on the planet. That’s why advertisers spend so much money linking cuddly-cute puppies to their products, so you’ll feel the same good feelings about toilet paper and laundry soap as you do about dewy-eyed baby dogs. It’s no accident that beer commercials usually contain stunningly beautiful and scantily clad women. Long, lustrous hair and hourglass figures may have nothing to do with beer, but they evoke the kind of interest and desire that beer producers want viewers to feel for their product.

However, as we’ve seen, classical conditioning isn’t always a good thing for either species. Remember the little boy Albert who was traumatized in the laboratory? His terror of anything furry is a perfect, though tragic, example of classical conditioning, in which the soft white rat elicited the same response as a fear-inducing noise. Examples of this phenomenon abound in daily life. You may feel a bit sad every time you hear the song that played when you broke up with your first love. Chemotherapy patients become so conditioned to feeling nauseated in a medical facility that many of them begin to feel sick any time they enter a clinic.
⁶
Here in my own hometown, one former cancer patient illustrated the phenomenon when she ran into her chemotherapy nurse in the supermarket. “Susan!” she said to the woman who,
two years before
, had administered the nausea-inducing medicine, “it’s good to see you again,” and promptly threw up on the organic broccoli.