Dogs, Emotions & Causes - Fear

So, I gave my one remaining class a few Homework Tasks over Christmas – one of which was to have a think about our dogs and emotions, and what emotions they might feel. While opinion differs on some (‘guilt’ for example is not one that I personally think they experience – what we read as a ‘guilty look’ is actually appeasement signals because they can tell from our tone or body language that something unpleasant is about to happen), I think opinion is unanimous about the definite occurrence of fear.

Anyway, I was sat at work the other day reading some of wonderful author Jean Donaldson's 'Oh Behave! Dogs from Pavlov to Premack to Pinker' book at lunchtime which is a brilliant collection of short essay type answers to common problems and wonderings, and the section that caught my attention was the essay entitled 'Better Safe Than Sorry - Fear' which looked very briefly at the suspected causes of 'shy' or 'fearful' dogs, and I thought 'how appropriate' given the Homework discussion and mine and mum's own dogs! Willow is a dog that is very fearful of strange people or dogs, and will often have a screaming fit at them (and there is no other word for it than ‘screaming’), and Finn’s anxieties are becoming ever more generalised to life as a whole.

So, whilst considering what emotions dogs experience, perhaps we could also be thinking about the causes of these. Is there a genetic component to what they feel and how much they feel it? Is it the new owners that 'create' these fearful dogs through inappropriate socialisation, or was it already there when that pup was picked up?

To summarise the article:
*Fear itself is an evolutionary advantage to a creature - the more 'jumpy' animal in the wild might waste a bit of energy jumping or running away from perfectly safe stimuli but it'll also likely out-survive and out-reproduce the more relaxed animal that doesn't startle and one day gets eaten by something big! So fear in itself is a naturally occurring trait. However constant fear over innocuous stimuli becomes a disadvantage as large amounts of energy are wasted and the constant activation of the ‘fight or flight’ response and the chemicals it releases into the animal’s system takes a long term toll on the body and health of the animal.

How does fear occur in an animal? There are five possible ways:

1) Genetics - Lots of evidence in rodents, dogs and people that a predisposition to be fearful can be inherited. Murphree in the 1970s bred several generations of the most fearful Pointers from a litter to the most fearful, and within a couple of generations noticed a marked increase in fearful behaviour despite normal rearing.

2) Via its Prenatal Environment - i.e, stress placed on the mother during pregnancy. It's been shown in rodents that stressing the mother during pregnancy results in offspring with reduced tolerance to stress.

3) Maternal Behaviour - An experiment was done with a genetically fearful bitch and a genetically normal bitch where their litters were swapped at birth. As expected the litter from the genetically fearful bitch displayed fearful behaviours even though they were raised by the 'normal' mum, but interestingly the pups from the 'normal' mum raised with the fearful mum also began to display fearful behaviour.

4) Classical Conditioning - where dogs learn that things in their environment predict scary things - i.e the sight of the nail clippers coming out the cupboard.

5) Impoverished Early Environment - this is the socialisation/habituation aspect. It has been shown that dogs raised to 12 weeks without human contact will be fearful of people. Opinion differs on whether, once made 'shy', a pup can be improved in later life.

And the conclusion of the article? Don’t breed from a fearful bitch! There are three ways she can make her pups fearful - genetic inheritance, stress during pregnancy, and fearful behaviour while rearing! Of the five ways fear can occur, only one of these is down to the new owners. Interesting food for thought.