If we are to teach anyone, we must identify a starting point. What does the learner already know about the topic?
The Dog’s Point of View
To find the starting point, seeing things from the learner’s point of view is key. If you see a video on social media titled, “POV: You thought homesteading would be easy,” you know the video will probably show you some funny failure surrounding building a self-sustaining life off the grid. If you see one titled, “POV: Your husband is a redneck,” your expectations of seeing a guy applying country-boy skills or adaptations to a home, likely with his partner expressing concern or dismay, will probably be met. The acronym “POV” gives you a heads-up as to whose perspective the video will present from and it would be important to know if you wanted to teach that person something new. The announced “POV” would allude to some aspect of a starting point for learning.
My Dog’s Afraid of. . . .What?
When considering what’s going on when your dog is afraid of a particular person, there’s no title to tell you what you’re looking at. You have to do some additional work because you can’t apply your own point of view. Humans and dogs are different. It’s easy to quickly limit your own point of view to the characteristic of a stimulus picture that is most immediately obvious to you.
Emotions like feeling under-confident about just how dogs typically view the world can get in your way. The human your dog is afraid of may be someone you love and that may cloud your observations and analysis. After all, this person is kind and gentle and loves dogs; how could your dog not see that?
Your Dog’s Afraid – Not You
You’ll likely analyze scenarios from your own point of view because it’s just downright difficult to put yourself in the shoes of another being, even a fellow human. But if you want to help your dog change how she responds to a multi-faceted stimulus picture, you have to examine every detail and ask yourself what you don’t know you don’t know.
Your Dog’s Afraid Because of Someone’s Behavior
Your dog might well be terrified of men with beards. A naturally fearful dog who never happily met a friendly man with a beard during her socialization period before the age of four months may well have a problem with a man who has a beard. However, the dog might also have a problem with the way the man presented himself to her when they met. In my experience, behavior is the most common characteristic of a human that dogs respond to either with fear or with friendly gestures.
Both the general way a person looks and their behavior choices are visual experiences for dogs, and dogs definitely use their vision to read body language and identify friendliness vs. threat. The way people smell is certainly a factor in whether a dog will perceive someone as a person that is safe for them to be around or that should be avoided. Deep, booming voices are an auditory characteristic that most dog parents recognize as possibly problematic, especially for a fearful dog.
Your Dog’s Afraid Because of Association
Not as commonly known, but constantly occurring, is Association, a.k.a. Pavlovian Conditioning or Classical Conditioning. Just like Pavlov taught the dogs in his lab to salivate when they heard a bell or a metronome, your dog learns through association all the time. If a clap of thunder happens to accompany her meeting a man with a beard, it could be enough to create an association between men with beards and fear. While this pairing is pretty unlikely, a man with a beard could certainly approach your dog using behavior that she sees as threatening and create that same association with fear.
Your Dog’s Afraid Because of Trigger-stacking
There’s also the possibility of trigger-stacking, presentation of multiple stressful stimuli at once that push your dog over her limit. These triggers might include a beard if that’s unfamiliar or already scary. Add to that inadvertently threatening behaviors, a clap of thunder, and maybe multiple people in the room or the fact that your dog was already not at her best that day due to other stressors. Now you’re witnessing a dog who is simply over-threshold; she has too many things to deal with and just can’t manage it.
Body Language Tells You Your Dog’s Afraid
People approach dogs in lots of ways, many of which dogs commonly perceive as threatening. Because people don’t typically have a complete understanding of dog body language and behavior, they often miss a dog’s initial indications of fear or not wanting to go near someone. Even if they see those indications, people sometimes ignore them, assuming that the dog can simply “deal with” this intrusive situation, even if the dog is on a leash, in a kennel, or otherwise unable to leave the area to allow herself to feel safe. Leashes and other restraints can also limit a dog’s ability to clearly express her feelings through the body language that other dogs and humans can use to understand her point of view.
You Don’t Know What You Don’t Know
Unbelievable? Not when you take the point of view that there is a whole realm of things that each of us doesn’t know that we don’t know. You may know engineering principles if you’re an engineer, or even if you’ve done a lot of reading on your own about engineering. If you have a dog, you probably know a lot about dogs. But how would you know what you don’t know? It’s a mystery. To you, the most obvious characteristic of the man your dog was afraid of is his beard but most obvious to your dog may have been his behavior. Explore, discover, and analyze; consider everything with an open mind. Try to look at things through your dog’s eyes.
Dogs Don’t Lie
My recommendation is to consider everything your dog does to be a true expression of her true feelings and not take her indications for granted. Dogs don’t lie. If their body language tells you they have a problem, know that they are going to deal with that problem, with or without your help. They have to. It’s a survival instinct, and you would do the same.
Your Dog’s Behavior Will Escalate
Consider that when a dog bites someone, it was not her first response. The bite incident started with an indication of stress due to some stimulus she came into contact with and grew through body language like stiffening up, showing teeth, growling, snapping, and finally biting with even more tiny steps in between. All this happened whether the local human noticed or not. Is this something you didn’t know you didn’t know?
Assist and Guide Your Dog
When a dog shows signs of stress, THAT’S the moment to respond with assistance and guidance to start solving the problem right now and changing the dog’s behavior for next time. Get the dog out of the situation. Protect her from what she is likely to do next because you don’t want her learning or practicing that set of behaviors.
Dogs are Learning All the Time
If you read my blog you know that dogs are learning all the time, from how every situation turns out in terms of consequences and also from how their emotions are associated. Just as with humans, a dog’s fear can and will grow. A dog may initially respond to her fear by avoiding a stimulus but when in a position where she can’t get away, she will be forced to defend herself. At that point, or maybe even before that, trauma is probably happening and trauma produces lifelong outcomes that would be easier to live without.
Dealing With Fear Takes Effort
We are often cautioned not to anthropomorphize because dogs are not humans. But it can be helpful to consider what it would be like to have no way to deal with a fear. Even when humans “can” solve a problem based on fear, it’s not fun and can take a long time. Sometimes humans need professional help to apply an objective viewpoint, education, and experience to an overwhelming fear. Your dog needs your help when she shows you she’s afraid.
Explore With an Open Mind
When you bring a dog into your home to live in a human-centered world that is unfamiliar to her, it’s your job to help her adapt successfully. Do not fall victim to your hopes and wishes that the problem will simply go away. Fear doesn’t work like that. You’ll need a plan that is based on observable facts and documented realities. Open your mind to possibilities other than the most obvious. You may have to learn something new, and The Mannerly Dog is here to help.
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