Hi All, I'm hoping someone can give me some advice and perhaps some reassurance too. Our puppy is now nearly 9 months old. I feel we did the best we could to socialise him from very early on. We carried him around before he had his jabs, took him down near the river where other dogs were walking, to the shops and around traffic etc, etc. He goes to training classes - has completed the KC Puppy and Bronze courses and is now doing the Silver course so is socilaised regularly. His exercise is varied - either walking on the fields, playing frisbee or walking around a housing estate or down at the river. His loose lead walking is good for his age and he is also very good off lead, checking in regularly. However, we seem to have rather a large issue whereby he is frightened of everything! He has become frightened of traffic passing when out on walks and will shoot behind me cowering every time a car goes by, when he wasn't frightened when he first started going for walks. He cowers and tries to run away when other dogs greet him (despite the fact that he REALLY wants to say hello himself!). He barks in the garden at the slightest noise, even people talking on the road outside or in the garden next door, and nearly every new person he meets, will bark at them for at least 10 minutes and genuinely looks scared of them, even if in our own house. I have horses and I park my car next to the stables and leave the boot open for him to get in hus crate should he wish to. I want him to have a safe place to go and relax when he wants but he regularly jumps in there trembling if he's heard a noise or has seen something he doesn't like. I've heard about the 'second fear' stage...is this what this is and will he just grow out of it? I am disappointed and feel like i must have done something wrong but yet I feel like we have done our very best and I don't want my poor boy to be so fearful of everything. Is there anything I can do? I am trying not to go and fuss him and reassure him when he looks frightened as I don't want to almost reward him for his fear so I try to just carry on as normal. Is this the right thing to do?
Firstly, you can't reinforce fear, so by all means reassure him when he's upset. It's not going to help if he feels he has to manage alone. What you don't want to do is pre-empt the fear, though - I made this mistake with Willow. I use a soothing "it's OK" whenever she is afraid, which is fine in itself, but if I see something that might bother her, and use that same tone of voice, she'll immediately get worried and start looking around for what it is she should be scared of. So, keep that in mind. Anyway, this is an ideal time to use the technique Look At That from the book Control Unleashed. It's a way of "reprogramming" your dog to associate his triggers with something positive. It's really worth looking into - there are videos and articles about it online, so you can search for it. It's also been widely discussed on this forum, so have a search here, too. No, he's unlikely to just grow out of it. Whether there's any such thing as a "second fear" stage is up for debate, but it's certainly a thing that many owners experience. I think it can generally be attributed to your dog getting to the age where he's naturally getting more independent of you, so he has to start making his own decisions about whether something is threatening or not. His first instinct is "yup, that's scary!", which makes sense, for survival. So, you need to help him along the way to working out that no, not everything and everyone is out to kill him, so these reactions don't become practiced too much. Set him up in scenarios to help. So, for example, if he's scared of traffic, start with sitting a long way away from it, C&Tig every time a car goes past. It should be at a distance where he doesn't react. Very very gradually (over several sessions), move closer to the traffic. What you're doing is counter conditioning him - taking something that he has a negative association of and replacing it with a positive one. Good luck, it can take lots of commitment to sort this out, and don't expect changes overnight. Be prepared for this to be your top priority for several months.
This article is pretty good: http://dogcommunication.co.uk/wp2/i...oked-secondary-fear-phase-in-adolescent-dogs/ It stresses it's important to let your puppy have breaks even in the gentle DS training you'll be doing, as the stress hormones need a little while to leave the body, so give him plenty of days off just doing fun things where he doesn't have to face his fears. It may be that it's over in a couple of weeks, if you're lucky. It probably depends at last to some extent on the genetic predisposition to anxiety in your puppy. With my two, it's still ongoing with certain things at two and a half years of age! I hope yours is over in a flash, like is more common.
Hi @Dino7 I agree with @snowbunny 'so comments and suggestions. What I would add is that it is perfectly OK to give reassurance to a scared dog but you do have to be matter of fact about or run the risk of re-informing the fear. I use normal talking voice and just refer to the trigger as 'it's only a car/lorry/plane/horse and encourage to carry on with whatever we were doing.
Hi @Dino7 this article talking about fear in dogs just popped up on FB and thought you might find it interesting. It'sounds a bit long buy worth a read https://m.facebook.com/story.php?story_fbid=10155130245947070&id=49741042069
