Your attitude is critical to successfully interacting with your fearful dog. It can be very easy to feel sorry for her, imagining the circumstances that caused her fearfulness, but unless you know for a fact what your dog’s history is, you are doing her no favors by assigning her a past that she may not have lived. Instead, stay in the moment and really see the dog in front of you. A positive mental approach really does set the stage for successfully connecting with your fearful dog.
Following are four ways you can prepare yourself mentally for working with your fearful dog:
Time
Give the dog the gift of time.
Fearful dogs may need many short, positive encounters with their caregiver in a familiar, safe environment before the caregiver asks the dog to move to larger, unfamiliar places. They may need extra time to work through what is being asked of them. Rushing to get them out of their crates or harnessed for a walk usually adds to an already stressful experience. Give yourself and your dog plenty of time for each step of the process.
Mental Flexibility
You need to be able to change plans pretty quickly (and cheerfully) when working with your fearful dog. Let your dog guide you in what she can do that particular day, and give her choices so she feels that she has some measure of control in her life.
Patience
Working with your fearful dog requires sometimes unlimited amounts of patience. Your dog is not choosing to be “dominant”, “willful” or “stubborn”; she is scared. If your dog is scared, the thinking part of her brain shuts down and she can’t learn. If your dog can’t learn, she can’t substitute more productive behaviors for her fearful “default” behaviors. If your patience is wearing thin, take a deep breath, relax your shoulders and ask yourself if there is a better, less stressful way to get the behavior you need, or if you can skip it altogether, at least for the time being.
It may take multiple tries over many days (or weeks or months!) to connect with your fearful dog.
It’s also o.k. to end a session and put some physical and emotional distance between yourself and your dog, so you can gain some perspective and your dog can calmly absorb what she’s learned. Patience isn’t always about pushing through; it’s about knowing when to stop!
Compassion
Put yourself in your dog’s paws.
Being afraid is self-limiting, exhausting and takes a tremendous amount of energy. If you can’t seem to make progress with your fearful dog, ask for help from a professional, or take a few mental and physical steps back. You can often find a different way to make a connection that eases your dog’s fears simply by acknowledging her concerns and offering your dog choices. It is essential, both for you and your dog, to celebrate any victory, no matter how small. Working with any fearful dog is not so much about the race to a destination, but the quality of the journey.
Photo Credit: Pixabay / Empiep
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