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The 5 Minute Dog by Personable Pets Dog Training
Practical dog training advice in under 5 minutes. 5 New episodes uploaded every Monday.
WIth over 20 years of Family Dog training experience, our podcast includes tips, tricks, and explanations, so you can better understand why your dog does what he does. We also provide dog training scenarios to help you curb any unwanted behaviors.
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The 5 Minute Dog by Personable Pets Dog Training
#129 Scared Pup or Worried Woofer? A Tale of Two Emotions
What's really going on when your dog tucks their tail or paces restlessly? These behaviors might look similar, but they can signal completely different emotional states that require distinct approaches to address.
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Fear and anxiety are two of the biggest emotions that can shape your dog's behavior, but they aren't the same thing. So today let's talk about how to tell if your dog is fearful or anxious and why recognizing the difference can completely change how you help them. First, let's define fear and anxiety clearly. Fear is a reaction to something specific. The dog sees, hears or smells something like a loud truck, a strange person, a sudden movement, and they immediately react. Fear is about a real, immediate trigger. Anxiety, on the other hand, is the anticipation that something might happen, even if nothing scary is happening right now. It's worry, it's unease without a clear cause. And knowing the difference matters because the way you support your dog changes depending on whether they're afraid of something in the moment or if they're living in a general state of stress.
Speaker 1:Signs of fear usually show up suddenly in response to a specific thing. You might see your dog's ears pinned back, his tail tucked under his belly. He might be crouching low to the ground, lick-lipping, yawning, panting, barking, lunging, trying to escape. But if you remove the scary thing, the trigger, like stepping away from the loud vacuum, the dog often calms down pretty quickly. But anxiety looks a little different because it's more about a persistent uneasiness. You might notice everything that we mentioned for the fearful dog, but you might also see pacing or restlessness, constantly scanning the environment, looking for something to go wrong and unable to settle down. Even in familiar places. There might be excessive licking or chewing, especially on the paws or objects. That's a lot of pent-up energy that they're trying to use up, trembling without a clear trigger and hypervigilance, as if they're just waiting for something bad to happen. As if they're just waiting for something bad to happen. And unlike fear, anxious dogs often stay tense even when nothing obviously scary is happening. So let's say you take a walk with your dog and a loud motorcycle zooms past and your dog suddenly crouches, tucks their tail. That's fear, specific, sudden, and tied to that motorcycle. But if your dog is restless, sniffing the air, obsessively, pulling toward home, can't seem to relax on the entire walk, even when it's quiet, that's more likely anxiety they're worried that something might happen.
Speaker 1:So when you can tell fear from anxiety, you can tailor your approach. For fear, we want to work on changing our dog's emotional response to a specific trigger through desensitization and counter conditioning, basically helping them see that the scary thing is not as scary as they think. For anxiety you often need to build overall confidence, create more predictability in your dog's environment and sometimes even involve your veterinarian if the anxiety is severe enough to impact their quality of life. But the wrong approach, like forcing a fearful dog to face their fears too soon, can actually make things worse. Our dog's body language is speaking volumes. We just have to know when and how to listen. Fear says I am scared of that right now. Anxiety says I'm worried something bad might happen at any time. Both emotions deserve compassion, patience and training tailored to what your dog is actually feeling.