dog aggression

How anxiety relates to dog aggression and why we need to treat it

While you may think your dog is aggressive because of the neighbour’s black dog or the guy wearing that crazy hat, it is now believed by the scientific community that anxiety or uncertainty underlies most dog aggression (1). That anxiety or uncertainty in dogs underlies dog aggression is not immediately obvious. As a result it is overlooked unless you are aware of it. In fact you might want to check that any of your dog’s odd personality quirks are not a result of anxiety. And can your anxious dog who has not been aggressive before, become aggressive? In a word, yes.

When anxiety is not treated, but the aggression is suppressed, the anxiety can manifest in a different problem behaviour

Dog aggression is a complex problem. Given that that is most is rooted in anxiety punishment, shock collars, electric containment systems, choke chains, etc. can actually make dog aggression worse.

One of the troubling things about using punishment to control dog aggression (if it works and it often doesn’t) or any behavior in fact, is that it only suppresses the behaviour. It hasn’t eliminated the underlying cause. If anything it’s probably only increased the problem, which result in a more dangerous dog that may only be just keeping themselves together.

anxious dog — Dog anxiety might not be obvious

This is a problem for aggressive dogs that suffer from an anxiety disorder. When dog aggression is suppressed, but the anxiety is not treated, the anxiety can manifest in a different dog behavior. For example, self-induced lesions from licking and biting or other obsessive-compulsive behaviors can start to occur. Sadly, you might never make the connection or you might even see this new problem behavior tolerable to live with.

Should Medicine be a Last Resort?

Ultimately, whether or not your dog needs medication should be determined by a veterinary behaviorist. Medicine is seen as a quick fix by many, and seen as a bandaid solution, a crutch or a last resort by others. Both views are incorrect.

Dogs will need behavior modification in order to make new positive associations with the conditions that have elicited the aggression. However, dogs that need medication will not progress very far without it even under the best behavior modification practices, because the anxiety takes priority over everything else.

Anxiety is not just a behavior: from your dog’s perspective it can affect everything in your dog’s life even if you don’t recognize it. Medication might make all the difference in giving your dog a chance to breathe. Otherwise it makes it very difficult to learn.

These dogs may be incapable of relaxing. They may see or anticipate threats everywhere. It is not a choice, it is simply how they are wired. If your dog is diagnosed with anxiety, this should be a first report, not a last. But it should never be prescribed without proper behavior modification.

How Behavior Modification Practices Can Make Anxiety Worse

Systematic behavior modification is really the only way to directly change the moods and attitudes that are associated with behavior problems. On the surface, behavior modification appears to be a relatively simply concept: associate positive experiences with the target of the dog’s aggression or reactivity.

Unfortunately without taking the underlying state into account, many dog owners and even dog trainers do not get very far. They either conclude that behavior modification doesn’t work, or the dog is beyond help.

A lack of aggression is not necessarily progress

It’s not enough to persuade a dog with a fear of people to take a treat for a stranger’s hand. Unfortunately people look at this willing to snatch at the cookie and run away as a sign of success because the dog did not bark or growl. Then we wonder why our dog reacts badly the next time. All we have done is created a situation for the dog where they are conflicted.

A key component in behavior modification is understanding that we come to be anxious about the fear or the anxiety itself. Exposure must start at the lowest levels of anxiety so they understand that at low levels, they can cope with the anxiety. This is the only way the dog can get used to both the “stimulus” (the thing that stimulates the anxiety) and the anxiety itself. This is the only way desensitization can occur.

Otherwise, if we expose them to the “stimulus” at higher levels, they don’t lose the dread of being anxious or fearful and the continue to associate those feelings with the stimulus. All we have done is created yet another highly anxious situation for the dog and further reinforced the the association between the anxiety and the stimulus making the situation worse.

What is it like for a dog to live with anxiety?

Dog anxiety might be difficult to understand. But we are all driven by the same ancient neurochemistries. Various disorders in dogs mimic human disorders. In The Trouble With Testosterone and Other Essays On The Biology Of The Human Predicament (1997) Robert M. Sapolsky wites,

“People with anxiety disorders can be thought of as persistently mobilizing coping responses that are disproportionately large. For them life is filled with threats around every corner, threats that demand constant hypervigilance and an endless search for safety, a sense that the rules are constantly changing.”

Most of us probably have not looked at anxiety like that before, and we certainly don’t want that for our dogs! And if that quote is not enough to help us understand, these 12 thought provoking pictures by photographer, John William Keedy, who has struggled with his own anxiety might shed some light on just how mentaly consuming anxiety disorders are. In some cases a picture represents a thousands words, right? Click through to see them all.

“Photos Reveal What It’s Like to Have Anxiety Issues”

anxiety_photos — What photos can reveal about the underlying cause of a lot of dog aggression

A more anxious dog is a dog with a lowered threshold to behave aggressively. If your dog is anxious or aggressive, you should consult a veterinary behaviorist. If you want to learn more about treating dog aggression, check out The Dog Aggression System Every Dog Owner Needs.

References

(1) McMillan,Franklin D, Mental Health and Well-Being in Animals,(p135) Blackwell Publishing, 2005,

(2) Overall, KL, Manual of Clinical Behavioral Medicine for Dogs and Cats, (p. 609), Elsevier, Mosby, 2013

5 Harsh Realities of Treating Dog Aggression

On the surface treating dog aggression – if not a simple fix – can at least appear to be relatively straightforward. Teach your dog to do something that is incompatible with aggressive behavior. How hard can that be?

Well, after the initial cycle of excitement and enthusiasm, there is the inevitable wake-up call to reality. This is going to be a little harder than you thought. It is at this critical moment when you start to wonder if you have got what it takes; if your dog is beyond help; if whether you even want to keep your dog.

When you know what to expect, it’s easier to hang in there. In fact, the more you learn, the more interested you will probably become. With that in mind, here goes…

1. Dog Aggression is not simply a “behavior”.

Aggression includes a whole internal set of emotional and physiological responses each time it occurs as well. Many of these responses are involuntary.

Aggression is not just a behavior but also a reaction; a coping response of sorts. In addition there are certain neurochemical payoffs to behaving aggressively, such as the release of a neurotransmitter called dopamine. This neurochemical is associated with pleasurable feelings, and the release of it probably offsets the sense of dread anxiety and fear produces. These complications are why punishment-based techniques are usually not effective long term (if not outright dangerous) and why simply trying to give treats to a dog usually doesn’t work too well either.

It is not enough to teach your dog to sit. You will need to have some understanding of what is going on underneath the behavior in order to adjust their attitude. You need to understand that the dread produced as a result of anxiety is not a choice and that the anxiety makes them feel they need to do something about it – urgently.

Ask yourself: why does understanding your dog’s anxiety help?

2. Too Few Of You Take Prevention And Management of Your Dog’s Aggression Seriously.

Well, besides the obvious stress as I mentioned above, the harsh reality is that most of you do not take the prevention of your dog’s anxiety seriously enough, let alone avoiding those situations that cause your dog to be aggressive. Sure, it’s great that you are feeding your dog treats every time your dog spots the target of his or her aggression. It’s far better than using a prong collar, shock collar or choke chain to manage the aggression, absolutely.

But any time your dog practices anything, the neurons in the brain – the very cells that communicate with one another – fire faster and become more efficient. It doesn’t matter if it is a behavior or an internal response. If your dog is getting anxious at these treat stuffing sessions, the neural network for that anxiety process is likely getting stronger and more efficient.

What is more concerning is that stronger neural networks dominate over other weaker neural networks in the brain. That’s right, stronger neural networks bully out those weaker ones. This is why it can be so hard to replace bad habits with alternative good behaviors!

The goal of management and prevention of anxiety and aggression is to weaken the neural network involved in the anxiety/aggression sequence. This is the only way other (practiced) alternative behaviors have a chance at becoming the dominant neural network in the brain.

Imagine there are less opportunities for your dog to behave aggressively. What would the positive outcomes be for you?

3. Most People Don’t Act on Their Dog’s Stress

If your dog is being aggressive, your dog is stressed out (regardless of what neurotransmitter is being released to cope with it). Think of aggression as a coping response to the experience of stress and anxiety. But all the physiological responses that have occurred in response to the stress do not disappear right away. Some changes last for hours, others for days, and even weeks. Chronic stress can makes us unable to regulate and respond to future stressors.

Aggression can be a vicious circle, then. But most dogs can become stressed for other reasons, too. Like when:

People pet your dog when they don’t want to be petted. Do the Consent test. Pet your dog (or have someone pet your dog) for a few seconds. Move away. What does your dog do? Any dog that wants to be petted makes it really obvious. If they stand there without approaching you, they are only tolerating it. If they turn their head away, move away from the petter, lick their lips, etc. then they may be actively stressed by it.
Your dog is unable to predict when things happen – good or bad. Unpredictable occurrences can cause stress. Build in signals that prepare your dog for when things are going to happen as long as it does not cause anticipatory anxiety for your dog.
Your dog is exposed to anything that makes them feel anxious – not just the things that they are aggressive towards. Like nail trims or thunderstorms. Does your dog have a fear of thunderstorms? Help them. Talk to a vet. Seriously. Does your dog hate nail trims? Desensitize and counter condition them to make it easier for them.

How would a less reactive dog impact your life?

4. Just Because Your Dog Has Learned To Sit and Relax Does Not Mean That it Has Become Automatic.

You may have got to the point where you are starting to work with your dog and their triggers. You may be asking them to sit and be calm in the presence of their triggers and are rewarding them for doing so. Excellent!

But there is a difference between something learned and something that has been overlearned. Overlearning is the process where something becomes habit. In other words, the behavior takes less conscious thought to perform and there for less self-control to accomplish. Sure, something new can be easily learned, and your dog can even perform it every time you ask. But it doesn’t mean that the behavior has become automatic. Just like when we have learned to tie our shoes or drive a car, we have to think about what we are doing at first. But in time we hardly need to think about it. That’s when it becomes automatic.

Why is this important? Because half the time when dog owners start trying to do desensitization and counter conditioning, their dog’s ability to sit calmly (calm being the key word here) is not even an automatic behavior in non-threatening situation.

Doing anything that requires conscious thought uses up resources in the brain. It uses up self-control. While self-control is like a muscle that can be developed, every time we do something that requires self-control or any kind of executive functioning in the brain, we use up brain resources. That means if your dog’s ability to sit calmly is learned but not yet automatic, they are using up resources processing what you want rather than using those resources toward keeping their cool instead.

So what would it mean to you if your dog automatically sat and looked to you calmly when you asked?

5. Fear is not Forgotten

Yes, this is unfortunate. Trainers are familiar with the term extinction. Extinction is the gradual weakening and disappearance of a learned response. When we work with our dog and their triggers, we are trying to make the aggression response extinct.

But extinction is not the same as forgetting. It is a relearning process – what is defined as inhibitory learning. Unfortunately it takes longer and is more fragile than fear learning. A fear response that has thought to become extinct can re-appear under stress, over time, or if the part of the brain that is involved in inhibiting the fear response is otherwise occupied on another mental task.

That is why we need to continue to monitor our dogs for stress and anxiety even after significant improvement has been made in our dog’s aggression problem.

If you understood that under the right conditions you dog may become anxious or fearful under the right conditions, what would that change for you?

It’s easier to treat dog aggression when we know what to expect

You don’t need to be a rocket scientist to improve dog aggression, but it does help if you know what is involved and where the traps can lie. Understanding these 5 realities about treating dog aggression can help you avoid some of the common mistakes people make with their dogs.

Training your aggressive dog to pay attention might help improve dog aggression

Training your aggressive dog to stop paying attention to something else and shift their to you will likely help to improve dog aggression.

People with generalized social-phobia that have been trained to pay attention to non-threatening positive material and ignore threatening material, showed significantly greater reductions in self-reported, behavioral, and physiological measures of anxiety than did participants from the attend to threat and control conditions.

Training your dog to shift their attention from a threat may help to improve aggression

However, according to the research, it appears that the real benefit is not in focusing on something non-threatening, so much as disengaging from the threat. This is where the deliberate shifting of attention becomes important.

It makes sense. Functional areas of the brain expand or shrink as a result of how frequently and how intensely they are used. Phobias and anxieties become worse the more a sufferer focuses on it. By telling the brain something is no longer important because thinking of something else helps make this shifting easier. Our economical brain repurposes the neurons to be used to work on what the brain is more regularly being used for.

There are often multiple things going on in our lives at the same time. But what we pay attention to, is what will become more developed in our minds. For example, a woman might be trying to solve a word puzzle, while there is jazz music in the background. The woman is focused, thinking about the music she hears and listens to the instruments and rhythms closely. Her neural networks are optimizing, making her better at understanding music and hearing subtleties within a melody. But if she is focusing on the puzzle, regardless if the music is playing, those neural networks are optimizing, making her a better puzzle solver. Or, she might actually be focusing on the pain her arthritic hands are causing her, making the pain more intense, easier to feel, and harder to ignore.

Attention training might improve emotional regulation in your dog

In research on humans, attention training to reduce vigilance and responsiveness to social threat showed decreased stress. This suggests that it’s possible to lower reactivity simply by manipulating attention prior to perceiving the threat. Because mammals brains are so similar, we can take borrow this practice of training our dog to shift their attention to help our aggressive dogs.

In addition, the benefits of training your dog to pay attention, could extend to greater emotional regulation of behavior because it is a form of practicing self-control. And this can only benefit us when we are re-training our aggressive dog to look at his or her triggers differently.

The World’s Worst Dog Aggression Advice

Everyone who has a dog seems to have an opinion on how to handle dog behavior problems and aggression is at the top of the list. Here is some of the worst advice for handing aggression in dogs that you should avoid.

Being dominant, being “pack leader”, “alpha”, “top dog”, etc..
Act like Cesar Milan and do “alpha rolls”.
Using an
1. E-collar, “stim” collar, or shock collar to control or correct your dog
2. Prong collar to control or correct your dog
3. Choke collar to control or correct your dog
Hitting, smacking a dog or “rubbing the dog’s nose in it”
“Correcting” growls with a leash pop, or spray bottle, or can of pennies.

How many people still give out this kind of advice for treating behavior problems in dogs? Answer? PLENTY. Why? Because most people learn from someone before them and they don’t stay up to date on current research.

Alpha rolls for example, are meant to dominant the dog. An influential training book written by the Monks of New Skete, originally recommended this technique back in the 70’s. Now they no longer recommend using alpha rolls and strongly discourage their clients from it.

Dogs do not become aggressive because they are dominant. In fact, dominance is not even a personality trait in dogs despite popular opinion. Dominance is really a word that has been used to predict a result between two animals during an antagonistic encounter. In other words, it describes is used to predict and where there is a conflict. So dominance is about the relationship and not about a personality trait. But the real focus should be, why is there a conflict? That is what you want to treat. Not behave like a dog when they are in one.

The word “alpha” was put into the dog trainer’s vocabulary as a result of studies on captive wolves. At that time there was no literature on how wild wolves actually structure themselves. Now there is.

Researchers learned that wolf packs are structured as families. The leaders of the pack; the so-called alpha’s, are the parents, while the rest of the pack is primarily made up of off spring. Aggression between wolves in a pack is relatively rare.

So why is being dominant or using methods to scare, hurt or otherwise intimidate a dog bad advice for handling dog aggression? Because it is dangerous. Alpha rolls are risky and can contribute to more dog bites. A dog that feels defensive in any circumstance can become more aggressive. The American Veterinary Society of Animal Behavior actually has a position statement on the use of dominance theory and there have been studies that alpha dog training can cause more harm than good.

All indications suggest that hierarchies are not maintained by dominance at all, but by the dogs that choose to defer. In other words, dogs don’t gain leadership over others by behaving dominantly, nor do they enforce their leadership by behaving dominantly. Leaders are chosen. So the real question is, what can you do to make your dog want to defer to you?

What about a growling dog? Isn’t that behavior problem something you should “correct”? We shouldn’t just accept a dog growling, should we? A growl is a warning. Plain and simple. If a dog growls at a child, get the child out of there. But “correcting” the dog by scolding them, jerking on his or her leash may only teach that dog to suppress his warning. It certain does nothing to convince the dog he or she has nothing to worry about. We need to separate the idea of “bad behavior”, as in, the dog is acting in a way we don’t like from the concept that there is an underlying problem we need to address.

There are better and more effective methods.

The importance of getting your dog’s attention at the earliest stage of aggressive arousal.

We and our dogs are unable to pay full attention to more than one thing at a time. Outside of dogs that are aggressive toward their owners, it means that if you can hold your dogs attention, they will not be attention to whatever else he is becoming aggressive towards.

Dogs that are not attending to the threats in the their environments are not going to become anxious, and therefor reactive or aggressive.

“But my dog doesn’t pay any attention to me.”

Owners of dogs that show some aggression often report how difficult it is to get their dog’s attention once they become fixated on the target of their aggression. This creates a common complaint that desensitization and counter conditioning doesn’t work and misleads people into thinking that they can’t really improve aggression in their dogs.

In reality there are two components to getting and keeping your dog’s attention:

Your dog has to be trained to believe there is something in it for them to pay attention to you
You timing in the behavioural sequence might be off

So what does this mean? First we need to understand the nature of attention.

Attention and Your Dog’s Priorities

The attention focus has an evolutionary value to it. This concentration helps animals focus on surviving. Animals can’t afford to be distracted if it means being attacked, starving, or being pushed out of a territory where they were safe and food is abundant. But not of all of these concerns have the same priority weight at the same time. Decision are governed moderated by emotion and motivation, with negative, unpleasant emotions being the first that take priority. The need to resolve anxiety has a greater priority over hunger provided the animal is not close to starving, and the anxiety is moderate.

So your dog is not just being stubborn when he is not listening to you. And the unpleasantness of being punished may not be outweighed by the unpleasantness of being anxious.

So where does that leave us when we are trying to prevent our dogs from behaving aggressively? We need to provide an adequate and immediate solution to the dog’s anxiety, and we need to do it before the dog’s anxieties levels are too high and it’s too difficult to get our dog’s attention. Part of that involves understanding predicting under which circumstances it’s likely to occur.

Although fear and anxiety can happen pretty quickly, aggressive arousal can be on a sliding scale in terms of intensity as it is a secondary response to the anxiety.

TIP:Dogs that have high stress loads or have had a lot of practice being aggressive will have much shorter response times.

Predicting dog aggression

Aggressive arousal starts before you see teeth being bared, or growls. It starts with the perception of a threat (as perceived by your dog, not you).

Being able to predict your dog’s behavior as well as divert your dog’s attention early enough in the anxiety/aggression sequence is critical in making a difference. The problem is that people don’t always predict very well, nor have they been taught (yet) how to read those clear signs that dogs give when they are not comfortable with a situation.

Predicting badly is sometimes the result of:

Avoiding feeling like your dog’s behavior must mean your dog is a very bad dog
Avoiding the feeling that you have done something very wrong for this to happen.
Not taking the dog’s behavior seriously.
Not having been taught what to look for.
Not paying attention to the subtle signs the dog is giving.
The dog has developed a habit of responding with aggression and is responding more quickly all the time

Predicting your dog’s aggressive behavior does not require you to understand why he is being aggressive at this point. Humans are not that good at it. We have a tendency to make up explanations as a way to predict, but ascribing motivations that may not be accurate or relevant.

How to predict better

Learn to read the signs of stress and anxiety
Watch and paying attention.
Note patterns of the conditions anxiety, reactivity and aggression occur in. you are in a better position to predict when it will happen. At this point you may be closer to understanding why it happens.

For example, if your dog growls at you when you put his collar on or growls when you push him off the bed will allow you to see that situations where there is an attempt to force your dog to do something is setting alarm bells off for them. This knowledge puts you in a position to do something about it before the aggression starts.

What Our Dogs Are Trying to Tell Us That We Ignore

Aggression is usually a response to an inability to cope with a situation. The underlying emotions usually pain, fear or frustration, or a combination. Your dog is not a “bad” dog. It is not evil. Dogs are far simpler than people. Your dog doing the only thing he or she can do to cope with the situation that causes them to feel anxious, frustrated or fearful. Most dog aggression is fear based. Dog aggression is risky to the dog, it is not a first choice (unless it has occurred several times, in which case, it is less a choice, or more a habit).

That means we need to look at the signs that indicate our dog is uncomfortable before things get to this point.

What is essential in this process is knowing how to read the clear signs. Most people who have not been taught how to read signs of anxiety in dogs simply have no idea their dog is uncomfortable. Your dog might feel trapped in a room room or a leash;, or, the target of their aggression might keep approaching or is behaving unpredictably. Then as your dog’s anxiety grows, his or her options to cope the anxiety become limited to a few responses which is to back the person or dog off, or stop the person or dog from causing harm.

Common Signs of Stress or Social Unease in Dogs

Licking lips
Turning their head away
Showing the whites of their eyes
Putting their ears back
Stiffening up
Moving slowly

We miss the signs and then we are surprised when our dog suddenly acts aggressively. When you know when your dog is starting to stress out, you can change what is going on, what you are doing, move your dog or the target away from each other, or at this point distract your dog.

There are many resources online that can help teach you these signals. They are also outlined in The Dog Aggression System Every Dog Owner Needs e-book which also teaches you about behavior modification as well as a number of other strategies you can put into place that will improve your dog’s behavior.

Timing and treatment of dog aggression

Timing is important for clicker training but it is even more important in both controlling a dog’s aggressive behavior and treating it.

The moment before or just when we start seeing a sequence of behaviors that tells us the dog is starting to become worried is the key moment. At that starting point in the behavioral sequence we can desensitize and counter condition (benefited by the dog learning some foundation exercises). If your dog cannot be calmed (and he or she should be taught to know how to do this when you ask), then you need to move away or back to where he or she can be calm.

The dog is not able to pay full attention to us if it’s too late in the behavioral sequence.

His or her nervous system has kicked the “fight or flight” response into gear, and it is very hard to change a dog’s mood and attitude once this happens. When your dog is this aggressively aroused is when your dog are most likely to cause harm, putting him or her at risk for euthanasia and you for a lawsuit.

Male dogs that have not been neutered yet will be even more difficult to distract because testosterone helps to enhance selective attention, and at the same reduces the distraction towards other things. So while neutering your male dog may not treat aggression directly it may help with control and management by making the dog little more easily distracted and there for making it more possible to redirect him towards an incompatible behavior.

Taking Dog Aggression, Anxiety and Reactivity More Seriously

Not all dog behavior can be truly defined as aggressive. But situations that cause anxiety and reactivity can develop into aggression.

It is common that people who love their dogs are often blinded from seeing just how much of a risk aggressive behavior is and how it gets worse. A reactive dog who is continually subjected to more anxiety provoking situations can develop into a aggressive dog. No one is ever prepared for the first time their dog’s problem escalates.

Not only can your dog’s aggression cause irreparable damage, but it can leave you vulnerable to a lawsuit years after. If your dog is showing any signs of aggression, make sure you treat it immediately. To start you could check out our The Dog Aggression System Every Dog Owner Needs e-book. It will give you immediate advice on how to manage it as well as give you an idea of what is involved in a treatment plan. It is the perfect addition to consulting a qualified expert or depending on your experience and the nature of your situation, can be used on it’s own in many cases. Serious cases of aggression should be seen by a veterinary behaviorist. The right trainer might be able to help you with less serious cases.