Understanding and Helping Your Anxious Dog.
Dog anxiety is one of the most common problems I encounter as a professional dog trainer. What does it look like? Why do dogs have anxiety? And what can you do to help your anxious dog?
Dog Anxiety Symptoms
A dog with anxiety might display a variety of behaviors with a range of intensity. You can better understand your dog’s anxiety if you can read their body language and how it changes in different situations. An axious dog might be crouching low to the ground, have their tail between their legs or pressed tightly against their rear, be panting heavily, licking their lips, scanning their environment, or pacing. Dog anxiety symptoms might include drooling, sweaty paws, shaking, whining, or looking frozen, like a “deer caught in headlights.” A lot of dog anxiety symptoms look like aggression—particularly barking on leash or behind a barrier. When an anxious dog feels like they can’t escape a stressful situation (because they are on leash or in crate), they may act aggressively in order to try and deter whatever is scaring them.
One way to evaluate the intensity of your dog’s anxiety is through the use of food. If your dog is normally a little piglet, but won’t take a piece of steak when they are on a walk or when someone comes to the door, it might indicate that their anxiety is high. If your dog doesn’t care much for food, using food to evaluate the intensity of their anxiety is less effective. When you are trying to evaluate the intensity of your dog’s anxiety, remember to start slow and give yourself plenty of space. For example, if you’re trying to understand how your anxious dog feels about other dogs, don’t just throw them into the dog park. Take them somewhere where they can have exposure to other dogs (where they can see other dogs), but where they are safe from having other dogs enter their space, and where you have plenty of space to move you and your dog farther away if they are showing signs of intense anxiety.
Why is Your Dog Anxious?
The cause of dog anxiety is a result of “nature and nurture”—or, the genetics of your dog and their lived experiences. A dog with really solid, confident genetics is likely to grow up as a confident dog, even if they have some bad experiences in their early life. A puppy with a genetic predisposition to anxiety can grow up to be a much more confident adult if they receive early intervention from a professional dog trainer. If you have an anxious puppy and they don’t receive the right early intervention, the anxiety they experience might be life-long to a certain extent, even with professional training. If you want to raise a confident dog, making sure you understand how to properly socialize them is essential—they need to have neutral and positive experiences in different environments, around people and dogs.
Never take your dog to the dog park for this reason! You won’t have control over the interactions they have with other dogs, and the chances of them having bad experiences with dogs is very high. If you want your dog to have positive experiences with other dogs, schedule a dog play-date with a friend or family member who you know has a respectful, social, safe dog.
Helping Your Anxious Dog
If you want to help your anxious dog, the first thing to do is to figure out what your dog is stressed by. Once you figure out what your dog is anxious about, you might try to minimize their exposure to it until you get the help you need. If your dog seems to have anxiety about the whole world, you can help build their confidence by doing short (think 5 minute) outings to new, low-stress environments and seeing if they can enjoy a simple game of chasing food that you toss. It’s important that your dog be hungry if you’re trying to use food to build their confidence, so skipping the meal before training is a great idea! If your dog isn’t hungry, then we can’t use food to help them have fun out in the world.
If your dog is nervous about people or dogs, it’s important that they feel safe with you, and trust you to protect their boundaries. This means not letting people come up and pet them, and not letting other dogs get into their space. Helping your anxious dog might require you to kindly tell your neighbors not to approach you and or not to let their dog approach you. If our dogs don’t feel safe with us and don’t trust us to protect their boundaries, they may start to become reactive on leash, or preemptively try and scare off other people or dogs with aggressive displays of behavior.
Lastly, if you think you might have an anxious dog, getting them professional help as soon as you see symptoms of anxiety is the best thing to do. If a puppy has early enough intervention with the right training, you can completely change the trajectory of your dog’s life! I have worked with many puppies who came to me absolutely terrified of the world, and with careful socialization and training, have grown up to be happy, confident dogs!
