Dog Anxiety and What To Do About It

Over the years, an entire industry has evolved around psychoanalyzing your dog. Anxiety is responsible for an entire suite of specialized equipment, veterinary drugs, and specialists eager to take your money in exchange for assuaging your anxiety about your dog's anxiety.

Most of these workarounds have a similar feature - if you pay a lot of money, the problem will go away FAST with VERY LITTLE EFFORT.

Unfortunately, that's not really how dogs work.

Considering our basic principle that dogs do what works we also have to consider that anxiety and the expression of anxiety is actually a strategem. It can be subtle - for example, if a dog hides during a thunderstorm, the minor reduction in stimulus is enough for the hiding behavior to be effective at soothing the dog's overwrought nervous system.

But I have another perspective, brought about by a very interesting case study.

One of my puppies - the smallest and most subordinate of the bitches from Yasna's first litter, Ilex, was always a bit of a reticent pup. I washed her as a service dog candidate because her response to stress was to freeze up rather than to work through it smoothly, not something ideal in a service dog candidate. I placed her in what I thought was a decent pet home - somebody with experience with Australian Cattle Dogs who tended to bring their male along on field trips.

I don't know what happened there, but when they gave up on her because training just took too much time, they had installed a tendancy to submissively urinate that was indelible. She would urinate any time she became somewhat stressed, at the drop of a hat, in any situation. She didn't submissively urinate around me often, because I am very good at modulating the pressure I put on dogs.

I checked her for every veterinary issue under the sun, diabetes, Addison's, UTI, but it wasn't a physical problem.

She thought that urinating was working for her - likely because it caused the previous owner to give her space after putting too much pressure on her. In her insecurity, it was better to preemptively signal don't kill me! with pee, and avoid the conflict.

I was in despair about what to do with her, but I suspected what she really needed was to work. A lot. Steadily, five days a week of work that would bond her to her owner, increase her confidence, and remove the base thing causing the anxiety - her insecurity about what was really expected of her. Changing the pressure strange people put on her wasn't even going to work - instead, we had to build her up. The best way to do that is to work very closely with the dog, to take them out and about the environment and work them so clearly that she could understand entirely what was expected of her.

As I was preparing to start this work myself, a lovely client came along looking for a project. Ilex liked him immediately, and when I explained what kind of work was going to be necessary to resolve her issues, this client was quite amenable.

And he put in the work. Day after day, week after week, until by six months into working her, she had completely ceased submissively urinating.

An anxious dog is a dog without a foundation.

Call us and we'll help you build one.