Pet Anxiety: When Being Alive is Scary

June is national Pet Anxiety Awareness month, and anxiety in our furry friends is something that is near and dear to my heart. As a dog trainer and professional pet sitter it is something that I encounter on a regular basis in my career. It is also something that I have personally dealt with in our own animals. No pet parent or animal professional enjoys seeing animals suffer, but sometimes it is difficult to know what to do when our dogs and cats are scared. I wanted to share some tips with you!

Don’t Flood Your Pet

Flooding is a form of behavioral therapy that was developed in the late 60s and utilized most in the next few decades. This technique involves exposing the animal (or human for that matter) to stimuli that causes a fear response in them. The school of thought at the time, was that fear response had a time limit and that after a certain amount of time being exposed to the trigger, the patient would relax. Through continued and forced exposure sometimes the patient’s fear response SEEMED to decrease. In more modern times, scientists and psychologists have started to move away from this technique due to potential fallouts as well as ethics. This is especially true in animals since they cannot tell us how they are feeling verbally in the way that humans can, making it easier for well meaning human handlers to miss stress cues and push them to the point of shut down. The problem here is that an animal that is shut down often is perceived as “well behaved” and “calm” to humans that aren’t educated in animal behavior and body language.

If you have taken classes with me, you will undoubtedly remember how much I love human examples for behavior in animals. The example I love for explaining flooding is as follows. If I am scared of spiders, and you throw me in a room full of large, furry spiders and lock me in there, I will be terrified. I will likely scream and scratch and claw at the door and attempt to escape. After a while, if my attempts to escape are unsuccessful, I will probably stop crying and such. My behavior has changed, but my emotion has not. I am still not gonna feel great about spiders!

Work with a Professional

Instead of flooding, I recommend working with a professional positive trainer to implement a desensitization and counter conditioning protocol to improve your pet’s behavior AND their emotional response to what is scaring them. Working on and changing BOTH is absolutely critical in establishing a lifelong bond built on trust with your dog as well as helping them to learn healthy coping skills. Desensitization is the term we use for safely exposing a pet to the stimulus that causes them to be afraid. Doing this effectively requires that we start below their threshold, or the point at which the animal is likely to exhibit fear. Counter conditioning involves pairing something that our pet views as negative, with something that they have a very positive association to already, such as a special treat or a favorite toy. These techniques combined are very effective at humanely causing a change in emotional response as well as behavior. A professional trainer with experience in anxiety and fear issues in pets will be able to help you integrate this into your daily life and help you manage situations better. Please see my blog post on choosing a dog trainer, here.

Let’s go back to that human example, shall we? If I am scared of spiders and you tell me, “Dulcey. Every time you see a spider I will give you $100.” I see a spider and you hand me a crisp $100 bill. After some time and repetition I am going to start LOOKING for spiders!

Talk to Your Vet

I cannot recommend this one enough. If you are concerned that your dog is going to self harm or if their fear response is severe and unhealthy, PLEASE reach out to your veterinarian. Get them involved sooner rather than later. New and/or sudden onset of anxiety, phobias, or behavior change all can have medical causes. For anxiety and aggression I will typically recommend a complete physical and blood panel with your regular veterinarian to rule out any medical condition that could account for these changes. If it is a medical condition I CANNOT help you or your pet, and no trainer can. And honestly, we could do a lot of damage if we tried to treat it behaviorally. Once medical cause is ruled out, then we can start a training program.

I am also very quick to recommend discussing behavior modification drugs with your veterinarian. The rule of thumb has changed drastically from when I first started training professionally over a decade ago! Common practice used to be that we used prescription drugs as a last resort for anxiety, etc. We tried everything else under the sun first, and then if nothing else worked, that’s when we discussed with the vet. Now it is often one of the first things I recommend doing! Veterinary behaviorists and other leaders in the animal behavior field are now telling us that we should consider medications much earlier in our treatment plan. Now, this doesn’t mean that medications will be all that is needed to help a dog. I always recommend working with a qualified professional trainer to discuss management of the anxiety and to begin desensitization and counter conditioning, and any other needed behavioral therapies at the same time. Most of the time prescription drugs can help calm the dog and decrease their level of anxiety which helps us INCREASE the progress that we see through training.

I hope you found some of this information helpful! Anxiety and phobias are all too common and it is heartbreaking and frustrating to watch our pets suffer. But remember, there is help available and there are things that you can do to make them feel better and to increase their quality of life (and also yours).