I would love to be your friend but I can't

On our last post we discussed some important factors about fear motivated aggression. Now I would like to turn to the same issue where fear, instead of triggering aggression, elicits escape behavior. Obviously the same underlying problem but with a totally opposite response.

Rudy was a small  three year old female shepherd cross of about 35 pounds. She was very sweet at home and tolerant of a toddler who literally climbed all over her. She loved her people and was very attached to them; the model pet. However, she was petrified of strangers, be them dogs or humans.

The owners had consulted with their veterinarian who correctly diagnosed Rudy as shy, fearful and poorly socialized. He recommended to enroll Rudy in obedience school, take her to dog parks and in general expose her to a lot of social situations - a procedure commonly known as socialization. They did all that but instead of improving, Rudy became more fearful. Now predicting where they were going, she shook in the car  and began to snap at other dogs if they got too close to her in the park or school. Rudy's people stopped all procedures and called their veterinarian back who then referred the case to me.

We spoke on the phone and they conveyed the above information to me. My first response was that since Rudy was very happy at home, they could easily solve the problem by just letting her be the way she was and not expose her to anxiety provoking situations, why rock the boat? After a short silence and considering my suggestion, they replied that they would be OK with that if it wasn't that Rudy seemed to be suffering: if she saw a dog from the distance, she would get very excited and cry wanting to go out there and interact but if they let her go, she would become frightened and immediately run back, cry some more and show intense anxiety which took a while to settle. We went a bit deeper into that and I sensed their own suffering over Rudy's conflict, they wanted to help her overcome her fears and be truly happy. I got it, they were deeply connected to Rudy and they wanted to help her.

We then set up an appointment in my office in the next few days so I could run some standardized tests there. I did not have much hope for change and told them so since these problems are usually associated with a genetic predisposition described as the animal having a low threshold for emotional reactivity. Simply stated, this means that each one of us will spook with different intensities to the same fear producing stimulus, it is built in: emotionally reactive dogs spook more easily than the average dog and the same for people or any other animal for that matter. In my experience, these animals were very resistant to change. But I could at least listen and maybe ease the human's discomfort through understanding of the problem; also I might be able to learn something from the interview that we could use to help Rudy.

When they came into my office, I asked the owners to sit on the couch and to let Rudy move about the room freely and investigate bones and toys strewn on the floor. This is a modification of a standard laboratory procedure to test for emotionality in small animals -the Open Field Test. The average well adjusted dogs will explore the room openly and manipulate the objects as soon as they come into the Open Field, they are relaxed and their attention is focused on the activity of exploration. On the other hand, shy and emotionally reactive dogs will either not move at all or will hesitantly move about on the edges of the field: the body is tucked up, mouth closed and  demonstrate alertness to danger (more on this in future posts).

The test indeed showed Rudy to be very emotional - she froze in place. When I tried to interact with her  (as her test behavior would predict) her arousal level increased and she tried to hide behind her owners (escape). "Fine, she is very emotional", I thought, "but at least she chooses to leave rather than get nasty when freaked out like Thor". Then I laid down on the ground in order to make myself smaller, vulnerable and less threatening to see if by doing this I could reduce the intensity of the emotional response. I also talked sweetly to her - baby talk - in an attempt to demonstrate caring behavior and slowly her demeanor began to change: after a couple of minutes of this, while watching me from behind the couch, she took a couple of steps toward me. Her ears were pinned back and her mouth was retracted backwards, in a submissive and fearful smile. Her body was tucked up as well as her tail, but the tip of the tail was wagging and she tried to approach me indicating the desire to interact but in conflict (her owners were right, she wanted to be social).

 Her message to me was: "I would love to meet you and be your friend but I am so afraid that I really can't". So I continued with the baby talk,  coaxing her to me. Eventually she let me pet her, which I did softly for a few seconds (maternal behavior?) and then stopped to see what effect this had on her. She reacted by getting a bit more excited and nudged me for more! Her tail came up a bit and the wagging increased, the submissive facial expression shifted and became more relaxed. Then she shook herself as if getting rid of a heavy burden and began to move around freely, exploring the environment like a typically well adjusted dog would do when first entering the Open Field. I, of course, was pleasantly surprised. No, I was elated since I expected Rudy to be more recalcitrant because of the powerful pull of the genetic component in fearful behavior. I was just intuitively and in a very human way using baby-talk and  trying to show Rudy that I was not a threat and she understood. At this point I learned about a new (to me anyway) and very powerful tool in psychotherapy by sincerely showing empathy to this poor little animal.

I got up and  began to move around the room as well, threw a toy for her and she pounced on it in play/predation mode, then I playfully chased her around the room. All fear toward me had disappeared. She got into the spirit of the game and if I ran away from her she would chase me! We had a great time. I was now a non-threatening known playmate. I liked this little dog and we became friends. I now saw the problem as the owners saw it. When I went back to my professional psychologist mode and discussed the case further with them, she would not leave me alone. She was so enthralled by the experience that she could not have enough of it. Obviously, Rudy was starving for social contact outside the family but her fear kept her locked inside.

Then I exposed her to Cleo - a very clever female basset hound from my pack - to observe Rudy's reaction to dogs. Cleo  was the smartest and most independent dog I had. She was a trip and knew how to read my therapy dogs. She was so aware of my work that she would not even come into the open field if she sensed that the other dog was dangerous, commands from me be damned - a good thing for me to know, I could use her behavior as a guide. So Cleo walked in, did not pay attention to Rudy and came over by me and just hung out while I talked to her.

When Rudy realized that Cleo was not going after her, she approached us cautiously,  sniffed Cleo's anogenital area (her butt). Cleo was fine with that. She knew the ritual and sure enough, when Rudy saw that Cleo was neutral and friendly, her shyness diminished significantly; at first she was tentative in showing displays of sociability, then she allowed Cleo to investigate her too. They both began to wag their tails and their bodies relaxed - Rudy's emotions had shifted from fear to sociability. I picked up a toy again and played with both dogs, they competed for the toy and my attention but there was no seriousness to the competition, it was all play motivated: we had a good time of course but I also learned that Rudy did not have problems with hierarchical and dominance issues, her cognition of a harmonious social matrix was intact - she knew how to be social - but was blocked by her fear of strangers.

Of course, socialize the dog and solve the problem, the veterinarian was right. Yes, but that's what they attempted to do before and it failed! "Ah" thought I "the problem is not in the definition but in the application": it has been demonstrated in the laboratory that if the feared stimulus is too intense - as in a room full of strange dogs and people or a dog park - it is likely to trigger the fear response and continuous exposures will only increase the intensity of the undesirable response. If, on the other hand, the feared stimulus is presented below what is known as response threshold (small enough so that it barely triggers the emotion but not the external response), then other competing social responses can begin to take over and the approach/avoidance conflict in a dog like Rudy can be resolved or at least ameliorated in time with an observant eye, patience and lots of love. Our job was then so socialize Rudy but in small increments and to observe how she reacted.

Again, it would be impossible to solve these problems if the animal in question does not perceive friendliness and good intentions from the humans. So it is back to emphasizing the importance of establishing a relationship with the dog and interacting harmoniously. If during the exposures the dog becomes more emotional, we are in effect "anti-socializing" and reinforcing the fear. When we are observant of this fact, we become very sensitive and realize that the exposure can only be as intense as the dog can handle. We want to trigger curiosity and attraction to counter the fear and not increase it (systematic desensitization and counter-conditioning). If we slowly build up the intensity of that stimulation in accordance to the dog's behavior and what the dog has learned through its experiences, then socialization can take place.

I explained this to Rudy's people and we developed a systematic procedure for exposures to people and dogs, watching Rudy's reactions and increasing or decreasing the intensity of that exposure in order to let the pro-social tendencies surface and backing off when they did not. This did the trick: the therapy was long and tedious but after a few months of well thought out exposures, Rudy was capable of going out, interact with others and have a good time. She remained shy (the genetic component) and approached things slowly. The veterinarian could treat her now without traumatizing her as long as they too went slowly and lovingly. I believe that this kind of success is not only dependent on what I recommended from a scientific perspective but on the level of dedication and love that the owners put into it. The science and the caring had to come together, ergo the concept of harmony that is the ethos of this blog.

Theory and analysis:

Common wisdom has it that socialization is a method and after checking out the Web, magazine articles on the subject, speaking to dog trainers, veterinarians and so on, I gathered that the standard definition for socialization is that we should  take our shy animal to dog parks, enter it into some obedience classes and in general expose it to as many social situations as possible. This seems reasonable and makes intuitive sense. The missing part here is that it does not consider the emotional idiosyncrasies of the dog, the problem is not thought out deeply enough. As an analogy, this is like bending wood, all wood are capable of bending but if we do it too rapidly and intensely, it will break instead: "pay attention to  the wood" says the old artisan!

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