Danger! My dog is afraid of people, and I don't know what to do about it.
You might hear someone say that their dog has “stranger danger,” which, if you recall your elementary school years, sounds like a good thing. This isn’t the case when it comes to our canine companions.
“Stranger danger” is a common label used to describe a dog who is standoffish, nervous, or even reactive towards people they are unfamiliar with. Not only can this type of behavior make it difficult to invite guests into your home, but this can make accomplishing grooming and veterinary care incredibly challenging to perform.
Fight or flight?
When faced with a conflict or perceived threat, our brain switches on the parasympathetic nervous system, or our “fight or flight” system. When a dog is afraid of a strange person, we can see a wide variety of behaviors:
Flight: backing away, cowering, flinching, fleeing, or hiding.
Fight: when I use the label “reactive,” I am talking about dogs who are reacting in a way that seems over the top given the context. This might look like barking, growling, lunging, snarling, snapping or even biting at strangers in the environment.
Freeze: this is something that is commonly misinterpreted as a dog who is “fine” or comfortable in the situation, when in fact, the opposite is true. These dogs are often very stiff, tense, and are not interacting with the person or environment around them. (See the image below.)
The top two sets of behaviors listed above can be described as “distance increasing behaviors,” with the difference being how the dog is gaining distance from the scary person.
A dog who is operating in “flight” mode is attempting to move away from the threat, whereas a dog in “fight” mode is trying to get the threat to move away, thus increasing the distance between them. In either scenario, the dog is trying to communicate to the stranger “Stop! You are too close! I am not comfortable with this!”
Training for the fearful Fido.
Instead of asking how we can “fix” a dog who is scared of strangers, I prefer to ask “how can we address this dog’s fear and turn it into confidence?” If your dog is no longer afraid of strangers in the environment, there is no longer a need to make them go away or avoid them. When we address the emotions that are the driving force behind the dog’s problematic (for us) behavior, we will see the unwanted behavior start to go away.
With any training plan, the first thing I want to implement is a management plan. The goal with management is to prevent the rehearsal of the unwanted behaviors, while managing our dog’s stress by limiting their exposure to triggers (stimuli that is prompting the unwanted behavioral reaction).
Each time that your dog encounters a stranger and has a negative or “scary” experience, it is solidifying their belief that strangers are scary/threatening to them. Not only is this going to result in elevated stress hormones, potentially leading to chronic stress, but it is going to make it that much more difficult to teach your dog to view strangers through a different lens.
We cannot expect our dogs to learn new skills or behaviors if they are feeling, stressed, or overwhelmed. This would be like me trying to teach you advanced calculus in the middle of a Hurricane - this environment is not one designed to promote your success.
Initial management with a dog who is nervous of strangers might look like:
putting your dog away in a different room, outside, or elsewhere when visitors come over,
suspending visitors coming to your home completely,
crossing the street or turning around if you encounter people on your walks,
changing your walking time or route to avoid encountering people altogether.
I appreciate that the above suggestions might require massive adjustments on your end. The goal is that our management practices can be relaxed as our dog makes progress through behavior modification training, however, it would be ignorant of me to claim that management is something that can be completely eliminated for all dogs who struggle with a fear of novel humans.
setting reasonable expectations for your dog.
With any dog training goals, it’s important that we set reasonable expectations for the dog in front of us. If our dog struggles with stranger danger, it would be unreasonable to expect this dog to thrive in a group environment and solicit attention from multiple new people with ease.
A more reasonable goal might be teaching our dog to investigate new visitors with more confidence, and improve their comfortability when a stranger is in the house - which may not include interacting with that person.
At the end of the day, we need to not only set goals based on what we want as an outcome, but ensure these goals are supportive of what our dog wants and needs as well.
enlist professional help.
While stranger danger is something trainers see on a regular basis, it is not a “black and white” issue and won’t have a black and white training approach from dog to dog.
Fear is an emotion that is easily learned, but can be a difficult one to push aside.
Hiring a certified, professional dog trainer can help eliminate the guess work from your training approach. It is important that throughout the training process we are doing our best to manage the dog’s exposure to strangers in a way that does not cause them excessive levels of stress, and that we are supporting that dog’s success every step of the way.
What these dogs do not need is to be forced into situations or interactions that they are uncomfortable. Ramping up exposure to strangers without any sort of pre-planning to ensure that the dog is comfortable, can cause more harm than it does good. Forcing these dogs to “face their fears,” can result in an escalation of their fearful behaviors, and can teach them that you are no longer someone they can trust.
Training will require time, commitment, and patience, but we can do so much to help these dogs live a happier, more confident life with the right guidance.
If you are seeing signs of fear when your dog is around strangers, such as avoidance, cowering/hiding, tense body language, barking, growling, or lack of social behaviors, I encourage you to speak with a trainer sooner than later.
Fear is an emotion that our dogs will rarely “outgrow,” and we can often find the issue progressively escalate as the dog matures.
“Trust takes years to build, seconds to break, and forever to repair.” - Dhar Mann
Stay awesome, my friend.
Vanessa
Vanessa Charbonneau, is the author of Dog Care for Puppies: A guide to Feeding, Playing, Grooming and Behavior. She owns Sit Pretty Pet Services, employing force-free training techniques to work with companion dogs and their owners. Charbonneau lives in Prince George, BC with her husband, two daughters, and one dog.