A Night in the Woods
I spent this past weekend at a mandatory Girl Scout Leader Overnight Outdoor Training Session. Nineteen brave leaders and two not so brave leaders (which included another woman and me) gathered in the woods to fully experience the glories of camping. Our instruction included gathering wood, learning to build and extinguish two different types of campfires (no lighter fluid for us!), knife safety, cooking over an open fire, constructing a solar oven, and sleeping in platform tents.
Over the course of the training, I struck up a friendship with a wonderful, funny woman who led a troop in one of the more urban parts of the county. She was a very reluctant camper, feeling that her talents lay firmly in anything that was NOT wilderness related. She hadn’t grown up camping, nor did she feel an affinity for living close to the land. If an overnight didn’t include a good hotel, she didn’t want to participate (and truthfully, neither did I). But yet, she overcame her deep seated fear of the unknown because she loved her daughter and wanted her troop to have the full Girl Scout experience.
Every rustle caused my friend to stiffen up and look around fearfully. The hickory nuts and autumn leaves fell to the ground in the surrounding forest, and the squirrels scampered freely through the trees, but with each sound, my friend’s knuckles turned whiter as she gripped the edges of her camp chair. In order to lessen her fear, we took to naming all the sounds we heard, but it did little to alleviate her apprehension since she had never been exposed to the sounds in less stressful situations.
As evening fell, the scene took on an idyllic quality: the warm glow of the campfire cut through the inky blackness and a chorus of insects serenaded us as we reveled in being one with nature…except for my friend, who zipped her jacket up to her eyes and huddled in her seat. For her, there was nothing idyllic about it. The blackness was impenetrable, the bugs were deafening, predators could possibly be lurking just beyond the campfire and the biggest injustice of all: we had to use an outhouse!
Flee, Freeze or Flight
My new friend’s response to a challenging set of circumstances reminded me of how our fearful dogs must feel when confronted with new situations. Without previous, appropriate exposure and positive outcomes, our dogs simply don’t have the skills to navigate the unknown. If our dogs are afraid, then the cerebral cortex (the thinking, learning and reasoning parts of the brain) shuts down and the limbic system takes over. The limbic system offers three immediate reactions to survive the experience: flee, freeze or fight. None of these options allow any room for learning new, more productive behaviors, and in fact strengthens the likelihood that fleeing, freezing or fighting will happen faster the next time the dog is exposed to something scary or novel.
The Thinking Part of Her Brain
The key to successfully introducing a fearful dog to new situations is to do it as slowly as necessary to keep her in the thinking part of her brain. That means that the dog, not you, determines the distance she needs to be able to take treats, look away from the thing that concerns her, sniff the ground, and, if she chooses, to walk away and put even more distance between the novel or scary object and herself. If the dog is pulling forward or backwards on the leash, staring for more than one or two seconds, standing stiff or cowering or shaking, then you are far too close for the dog to learn. The ideal distance is the distance that allows the dog to learn that she can remain calm and the scary thing won’t come closer. In fact, every time she sees the scary thing, she will get delicious treats and the choice to move even further away.
Both my friend and I survived our camping initiation, and we did manage to become qualified to lead our troops on outdoor camping expeditions. Fortunately, our limbic systems did not kick in and dictate that we bolt to our cars and drive to civilization, but it wasn’t easy to stay burrowed in our sleeping bags as the owls started calling to each other in the middle of the night.
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