#i don't know if she's a trainer a performer or a caretaker

[doberbutts]

So I've heard the term "fear-period" used by my agility instructor, and you and a few other people in reference to younger dogs. But it's something I don't know much about. Can you explain it in more detail or do you have articles that go over fear-periods? I'm really interested to learn more about them

Dogs typically have two fear periods, one when they are between 0 and 1 year old (typically in my experience goes along with teething) and another between 1 and 2. In some breeds, this is conflated by a teenage stage where the dog is less receptive to targeted training thanks to them also having to deal with hormones and other outside temptations.

Fear periods are a natural process of growing up. Anyone who’s taken care of a toddler has seen them spook seemingly at random in reaction to something they’ve seen multiple times before, or suddenly act like new yet harmless things are Big Scary Monsters (tm). These are fear periods that children experience as instinctual learning stages to show them how to deal with the possibility of danger and distress. Most children are able to overcome these fear periods by trusting their caretakers and investigating the Scary Thing (tm) when it is not actually dangerous, and imprint things they are afraid of that actually are dangerous when their caretakers reaffirm (accidentally or not) that that is a thing to be avoided. How you don’t teach a toddler right in the middle of a fear period that the thing is not scary is to force them to interact with it by dragging or pinning them close to the object- if something does go wrong, that child will likely develop a lifelong phobia due to the mishandling of their fear. This is why flooding is no longer used in most psychology research nowadays.

Dogs go through the same thing. The problem is that many people do not recognize the same behavior in these young dogs, and so they force the dog to interact or be near and end up making the problem far, far worse. Many new puppy owners, especially those who’ve never had a dog before, see their 4-6mo puppy freaking out about a loud noise or charge and bark at an incoming person and think this is what they’ll see forever from their dog. If they mishandle it, yes, their dog will struggle to get out of that cycle of fear and stress. If they handle it well, most dogs are able to recover and act as though it never happened in the first place, though the process does typically take months.

I have a GSD client who’s 5mo puppy suddenly began to charge and bark at incoming or passing strangers with her hackles raised and her tail tucked. This puppy is lashing out in fear- there is something about strangers that scares her and so her fear is clouding her judgement and resulting in seemingly aggressive behavior. Her owners really want her to be a “good, friendly” dog and so were forcing her to meet strangers in this terrified state. This can sometimes work out (just like throwing a bunch of spiders on someone with a phobia might help them see that spiders are not that scary) but frequently the pattern of “you’re scared so we’re going to make you MORE SCARED” makes the problem far worse than it needs to be (as most people with a spider phobia likely shuddered at the mention of flooding).

What’s helped the most is to teach this puppy how to exist around strangers and focus on her owner instead of on her fear. There’s been a lot of LAT, LAM, and clicker games to bring her back into a calm state. Soon we’ll see about reintroducing some calm greetings with friendly strangers, but in her current state she is still far too scared to try it.

This is a fear period. It does not need to be permanent if it’s handled correctly. She should be able to crawl her way out of that pit and be a mostly suitable family pet by the time she’s 2 or 3, but right now she’s a work in progress. She might not be my first pick for something like bitework (where they would view her as a shitter and a nervebag), but she should be able to be a nice pet for their family once she comes back to a healthy state of mind.

You want to, if you can, avoid situations that are overly scary or startling or distressing during fear periods. Things like falling off the catwalk in agility training- that is scary and also may be painful depending on how bad the fall was, and can make or break a dog’s ability to do well in the sport from then on. Similarly, most bitework trainers do not introduce defense or fight during a fear period or around that age, because they want the dog to perform from a place of confidence and not shatter their nerve.

#alouncara #asks #text post