When I was a kid, I read tons of library books about animals, particularly dogs and horses. Like so many other animal lovers, I watched the popular TV shows about animals like The Wonderful World of Disney, Mutual of Omaha’s Wild Kingdom, Lassie, and Mr. Ed. These resources gave me my first information about fear as well as other animal behavior topics.
Don’t Choose the Fearful Pup
I learned from my reading that when considering a litter of puppies, one should not choose the pup who stays back from the group, avoiding interactions with you and maybe even with his littermates. I learned that one should choose a more confident pup, a puppy that solicits interaction, play, and affection from humans. Scientific studies have demonstrated how fearful puppies grow up into fearful dogs.
Fear is easy to recognize when it’s chronic and generalized. It’s obvious, intensely and displayed in response to a variety of stimuli, sometimes shown almost continually.
However, fear can be subtle. Subtly expressed fear responses are often overlooked. They may even be discounted in current times, when there are so many fearful rescue dogs around. Not everyone chooses a puppy or dog that is the best fit for them. Acquiring a new dog/family member requires adjustments, moreso when the dog is fearful. I would be remiss if I did not mention that I offer a comprehensive course in Dog Reading. It will help you get better at understanding dog body language.
Healthy Fear
Healthy fear is essential for all organisms. It keeps us safe! Fear responses are completely accurate in some situations. If a tiger is attacking you, you should be scared! For best health, fear responses should be infrequent, short, followed by quick recovery. They should be shown in situations that are actually dangerous. They should be followed by behaviors that help mitigate the threatening conditions.
Helping puppies learn to manage their fear responses along with their other emotional responses is the function of the socialization process. The critical period for socialization occurs from about 3 to 16 weeks of age. Not all puppies get the socialization they need to help them navigate the human world they live in. The fearful dogs and puppies I discuss here are those with fears they are unable to successfully cope with.
Different Ways to Acquire Dogs
Statistics show that these days, the most common ways for people to get dogs are from shelters or breeders. Good breeders don’t continually produce fearful puppies. They change their breeding strategies as needed to produce healthy, confident dogs. Unplanned or poorly planned litters of mixed-breed or purebred puppies can show extreme variability in temperament.
During my childhood in the 1960s, when my family got a new puppy, it was always from a litter at a friend or relative’s house. I’m sure my family’s socioeconomic group played a role in how my parents acquired dogs. That’s what I remember about how most people we knew got a new dog in those days. I know people had purebred dogs, bred them, and participated in dog shows and sports back then, but I did not know those people. I learned about dog shows and purebred dog breeding from books.
Childhood Experiences with Purebred Dogs
My direct memories of purebred dogs are all about two different types of hunting dogs. My exposure included my Uncle Willie’s squirrel dogs which I now know were Rat Terriers. He bred them from time to time because they were really good at their jobs. In fact, his line of squirrel dogs lived on as his son continued breeding them on a limited basis until recently. I would estimate that Uncle Willie’s squirrel dog line continued for close to 50 years.
Squirrel Dogs
The squirrel dogs were very friendly pets and also performed their job of treeing squirrels as a pack with gusto! They confidently piled into Uncle Willie’s old Jeep or raced behind it when the men in my family grabbed their guns to head out. The dogs excitedly let everyone know when they treed a squirrel. They reliably headed home when the hunt was over. They enjoyed ripping up a squirrel skin as their reward when my dad and uncles cleaned their catch. Yes, my relatives cooked and ate the squirrels! I went along on some hunting trips but did not partake in the meals afterwards. LOL
Coon Hounds
Uncle Alvin competed in Coon Hunting events with his purebred Black & Tan Coonhounds, but to my knowledge, he did not breed them. He bought the dogs he wanted to hunt with. His dogs were not friendly pets. He was the one who cared for them and took them hunting and to competition hunting events. I’m sure they had great lives doing the work they were bred to do, but I had no direct exposure to it.
Both the squirrel dogs and coon hounds had to be confident and able to work in groups to find their prey and alert their handlers to it. Rat Terriers and Black & Tan Coonhounds are selected for breeding by those committed to improving the breeds based on these traits. (Those called backyard breeders typically select dogs for breeding based on traits chosen subjectively and not necessarily those beneficial for dogs or humans.)
Fearful hunting dogs are typically culled in puppyhood. This culling can be done in a way we don’t want to think about or those pups deemed unsuitable for hunting may be placed in pet homes.
Our Purebred English Setter
My family got our first purebred dog, an English Setter, from our neighbor Mr. Cleckley. He hunted birds and ran his Setters in field trials. He tested Maggie’s litter to see which ones were gun-shy and which weren’t. She was, so we got her for free at the age of 8 weeks. I was about 2 years old, so Maggie and I grew up together. She lived to be 17, a ripe old age for a larger dog.
A Fearful Beginning
We did not choose Maggie. The breeder gave her to us because she did not fit his needs for a bird-hunting dog that would learn to love gunfire. Gunfire is positive for gundogs because it signals an opportunity to set and point birds, the work these dogs’ genetics prepare them for. Gundogs are rewarded for this work and they relish doing it. As you know, both genetics and experience influence a dog’s learning. We use conditioning to develop the skills we want them to have.
Maggie was found to be “gun-shy.” She showed fear, most likely intense fear that took a long time to recover from. We won’t go into how much the testing for gun-shyness itself might have contributed to her fear. As you know from reading my blog posts, animals can be conditioned to stimuli. “Testing” can actually be a contributing factor to the problem being tested for when it is not done well.
Testing vs. Conditioning
I don’t know anything about Mr. Cleckley’s puppy testing, but gundog breeders often simply fire a gun and look at the pups. They may not know to take into consideration what else was going on in that moment or any other stressful stimuli the pups had been exposed to in that past couple of days. It’s always better to carefully condition puppies to new experiences than to simply “test” them for problems. There’s room for more application of behavior science in many dog breeders’ procedures.
What we know is that when Maggie was less than 8 weeks old and a gun went off nearby, she startled or showed fear in some way. Maggie’s fear was not isolated to gunfire.
If you understand behavior, you know that behavior never stays the same. It grows in one direction or another. Through reinforcement and association, behaviors become stronger and/or more frequent with every response. Through generalization, behaviors occur in different settings, in response to different stimuli, or shift to include adaptations that solve similar problems for a dog.
We use these behavior concepts productively in training dogs. When we don’t use them productively, we see further development of behaviors we don’t like. Fear-related behaviors are no different than other behaviors.
Generalized fearfulness is not something you can easily extinguish. It comes from a combination of expressed genetics and the dog’s previous experiences. Genetics and learning influence each other in ways that are the stuff of neuroscience. We won’t go into that here. Suffice to say that it’s important to understand the depth and breadth of what you’re dealing with when training a fearful dog. It includes the concept of threats to the animal’s survival and the potential of trauma. These impacts result in behaviors that help dogs be serving functions for them.
The Growth of Maggie’s Fear
I don’t have all the details of the development of Maggie’s fearful behaviors, because I was just a kid when she was a puppy. I became a somewhat cognizant human during her lifetime and I clearly remember her expressions of fear, avoidance, and escape from the sounds of fireworks, thunder, gunfire, and other loud sounds.
How Maggie Expressed Her Fears
Maggie was known to hide under the bed for 2-3 days during thunderstorms at home. At our country place, if we forgot to put her inside the house when we were setting off fireworks on the 4th of July, or there was hunting and gunfire going on in the area, Maggie ran to the woods to escape and hide. This behavior created a challenge to find her. I was terrified when this happened, but my dad always found her and brought her gently home. We all assumed that her behavior was simply to be accepted, managed as best we could, and that everything was “fine” between these events. We didn’t know any better.
When I look back now, with my years of experience and education in animal behavior and training, I cringe knowing each of these events was further building Maggie’s set of fears and the behaviors that made sense to her. They are learning all the time, you know.
Running away as fast as she could helped her reduce the decibel level of the scary sounds a little. Hiding under something, going over the berm into the muddy edge of our pond or under an outbuilding probably helped decrease the noise a little through the use of sound barriers. She probably felt a little safer in a contained area.
Human Impacts
My dad dragging her out of her hidey-hole when he finally found her was most assuredly not a positive experience for Maggie. He meant only to get her safely home. She had done what worked for her and he was taking away that bit of safety she had found. He carried her back to the house where the people who loved her were waiting but this did not take away the terrifying series of experiences she had just gone through. She often had to endure being washed off at that point, an additional stressor because she didn’t love baths. She didn’t eat after these events, which just how highly stressed she was.
Generalized Fear
Maggie’s initial fear of gunfire grew in strength and generalized to other loud sounds, including fireworks, thunder, and more. She used various strategies to escape and protect herself. Her goal was to solve her problem of coping with the immense stress caused by the noises.
Maggie only feared loud sounds, from what I can tell based on my memories created with limited knowledge of dog behavior at that time. She loved people, hung out with other dogs, rode well in the car, was well-behaved at the vet’s office and a polite house dog when she was indoors. She played and sniffed and behaved like a normal dog. The fearfulness itself may not have generalized to other stimuli that were not loud noises. I don’t have enough information to really analyze her case, though.
Maggie’s Trainability
Maggie was quite people-oriented but also very oriented to the vast environment around her, like English Setters tend to be. After all, they are bred to scan the fields to find birds. She clearly had bird-hunting genetics, as her sire and dam were bird-hunting trial champions. This heritage brought along an aspect of being pretty easy to train, as that is required of a line of fieldbred Setters competing in hunting events.
Running Away – Related to Fear?
If we opened the gate and neglected to take measures to ensure she stayed in, Maggie took off at a hard run to tour the neighborhood. Like many “runaway dogs,” the way to catch Maggie was to drive in the car to where she had stopped to sniff, open the door, and invite her in. It worked every time.
Although my parents blamed her running away on Maggie’s English Setter genetics, running out any open gate may have also been influenced by her fears. It is possible that seeing an open gate or door was associated with the way she tended to escape the onslaught of a loud noise, which was by running away from it at top speed. Seeing that exit, even without the associated loud sound, became a stimulus that drove her to bolt.
Of course, my family never trained her the way I train my dogs to wait inside doors until they are invited to go through, and Maggie could have learned that with no problem. If we had done focused training of this kind, Maggie’s strong awareness of an open door or gate would have diminished and been replaced by a strong awareness of cues given by humans that resulted in good things for her.
You have seen in my blog how I focus on teaching dogs to choose to wait inside doors and gates. It’s likely this is partly due to the impact of the many times we had to retrieve Maggie from somewhere in the neighborhood, which could have ended in tragedy.
Maggie was a Potty-training Star!
Maggie’s potty training was impeccable. As stated previously, she was known to hide under a bed for 2-3 days when there was a thunderstorm. There was no pee or poop in the house during these events. Though they weren’t common, it’s not likely this resistance to relieving the potty needs is good for a dog.
However, Maggie never had any health issues and lived to be 17 which is a lovely, old age for a larger dog. She never got heartworms, either, despite heartworm prevention only becoming available about halfway through her life. She never received it and still, astoundingly, never got heartworms. There doesn’t appear to be any scientific evidence that individual animals can be immune to heartworms, but the concept of variability points to that possibility.
Other Factors: Related to Fear?
We can’t know exactly how any of this information relates to Maggie’s fears and her responses to loud noises. It was a long time ago and observed when I was uneducated in animal behavior.
Getting Altered
Few dogs were spayed or neutered during the time Maggie was around, which was from 1963 to 1980. She was spayed at a young age. I’m not sure whether she had already gone through an estrus cycle before spaying or not. My parents had 3 dogs before Maggie and we got one of my Uncle Willie’s squirrel dog puppies when Maggie was probably 3 or 4 years old. 2 of these dogs were female, neither of them spayed. Both had a litter or two of puppies, sired by loose neighborhood dogs, given away after weaning. But Maggie never had puppies.
I think my parents had Maggie spayed because she was a special dog, a purebred English Setter, the first purebred they had ever had, and they might have been a little proud of her and wanted her to be well cared for. I don’t know for sure; we never talked about that, but they did take very good care of all our dogs. Of course, “taking very good care of dogs” is a highly subjective statement, and one that lies at the foundation of the judgements we hear about pet owners from other pet owners. “How to take proper care of dogs” changes with culture, trends, education, the advancements of science, and more.
Fearfulness: Subtle or Obvious
If you had met Maggie, you might have thought she was a lovely, polite dog who loved people and was friendly with other dogs. She was! However, the darker side was the time she spent in terror, under the bed for days or hiding in a muddy pit from what to her was a threat to her life, or being dragged out of that hiding place by my dad. Dogs are learning all the time and we must be cognizant of our impacts.
In the world we currently share, plenty of dogs live in constant terror, every single day. Their body language is easy to read, as it’s pretty much always the same – ears, mouth, and body weight drawn back, hiding from things that we consider normal parts of life, and being taken for granted as dogs that “just don’t get it.”
There are the subtly fearful dogs, too, like Maggie. Reading their body language is a bit more challenging for most people, as our psychology may direct us to ignore their fearful expressions because they are infrequent. How often do you hear that dogs are “fine” in various situations, but only every once in a while, under certain conditions, show stress, anxiety, or fear? These fearful responses are still taking a toll on those dogs’ lives.
We must do the work to help dogs to be successful at coping with the stimuli in the typical human world. Shelters and rescue groups, as well as the general public, must apply behavior science to the needs of dogs and the other animals in our lives. We can help them change their behavior. It begins with the critical period of socialization but carries throughout the lives of dogs.
Be the first to read our monthly educational and inspirational blog posts like this one, best enjoyed with a cup of coffee or your favorite relaxing beverage. Subscribers also receive a monthly post with a training application you can try with your own dog, right away. Sign up for our mailing list at the bottom of this page!