®Dogs that display fear aggression towards people cause concern for their owners and the subject attracts a lot of interest from trainers, veterinary surgeons and specialists, such as members of the Association of Pet Behaviour Counsellors. However those dogs that merely show apprehension or shyness in the presence of strangers attract less interest despite the fact that this condition is normally seen long before fear aggression develops.
The most likely cause of shyness is insufficient social contact with people during the first weeks of life. This particularly applies to the first eight weeks, although exposure to a variety of people has to continue until maturity if a dog is to avoid becoming reclusive and unfriendly. Owners of dogs adopted at an older age, from a rescue society for example, frequently attribute any shyness of strangers to mistreatment in a previous household. Although it is possible that this is the case, a lack of early experience remains the most likely cause, particularly if the tendency to apprehension is shown to strangers generally, rather than to individuals of a specific type. From what I have just said it should be obvious that preventing the problem of shyness requires puppies to enjoy a wide range of positive experiences with a variety of people in early life, but what can do you do to improve the situation if you already have a cautious Collie, a shy Sheltie or an apprehensive Airedale?
Perhaps we should first consider what you should not do. The fatal mistake made by many owners is to try cajole their dog into making friends eg. by pushing it forwards with words of encouragement such as “Go and say “hello”. Unfortunately all too often this highlights the problem, resulting in their dog’s increased tendency to avoid the individual concerned and others with more determination than before.
The trick to curing people-shyness lies in teaching the dog to relax in the company of strangers and this can be achieved in several ways. One of the obvious approaches that owners can adopt is to stroke the dog and talk to it soothingly when it is in the presence of strangers. However, although this is intended to relax the dog, it is a technique that can be fraught with problems because the effect can be that the dog is unwittingly praised for being apprehensive, resulting in greater apprehension and a tendency to display it towards a widening range of people. In my opinion it is better to avoid the potential of this unwelcome development by encouraging your dog to develop a pleasant association with the people it encounters, how this is achieved is dependent upon whether your dog is more interested in food or toys.
Most owners are aware that giving visitors to their home and strangers encountered away from home tit-bits to feed their dog helps it see strangers as a potentially pleasant experience rather than a frightening one. However the beneficial effect of using food to win a dog’s trust is often reduced by the owners tendency to give just one or two pieces of food to each stranger on each occasion. This normally results in the dog momentarily forgetting its apprehension and accepting the food that is offered but as soon as the food has been eaten it reverts to shyness. You can get much better results by providing the people concerned with enough food to enable them to feed your dog intermittently throughout the time they are with it and still be in possession of some food when they walk away. This should ensure that your dog’s friendly interest in the person is retained throughout the time it is with them, and that ultimately it will be willing them to come back as they walk away, because they still have some of the food.
To avoid the possibility that your dog may be overfed by using this method, its daily food allocation should be reduced by a percentage which is kept for use in training during the day. If your dog is normally fed tinned or fresh meat some of its mixer biscuit should be used or at least that part of the diet used for training should be changed to a pelleted complete food, because attempts to get people to feed tripe or tinned food by hand not surprisingly tends to be unsuccessful.
A technique that is probably as successful as any other and perhaps easier to implement involves the use of a toy, of convenient size, that your dog likes. At home the toy should be kept where your dog can see it, but placed so that it is out of its reach. Whenever you come home, get up in the morning or otherwise find that yourself, family and friends are enthusiastically greeted by your dog, get the toy down from its resting place and use it to initiate play. At the end of each period of greeting, the toy should be replaced out of your dog’s reach. Over a period of time your dog should become obsessed with the toy and associate it with pleasant interaction. Once you think this has been achieved you can use the toy to help your dog greet strangers. Apart from continuing to use the toy as already described, you can carry it with you when you walk your dog and give it to people that you meet and have the opportunity to engage in conversation. They can then use it to invite your dog to play, which should quickly result in your dog enjoying their company rather than being anxious about it.
Dogs are, of course, very responsive to body language, and the stance adopted by an individual can make a lot of difference to a dog’s reaction to them; this is particularly true if the person is tall. If your dog is shy in the presence of strangers, it is better for it to be introduced to people whilst they are sitting down or squatting on their haunches so that they appear to be less threatening. In your home it can be advantageous to ensure that your dog is introduced to people for the first time when they are sitting in your lounge or another area where the dog is used to relaxed social contact. The combination of the environment and the passive body posture of the visitor should combine to produce a more positive response from the dog than if its first introduction to the person is when they are looming over them as they advance over the threshold. In addition when you give the visitor the food or the toy your dog has learnt to associate with greeting, it should greet them as if they are a long lost friend.
The long term effect of these approaches can be improved if you actively encourage people to become involved in the training, rather then just introducing the techniques on an ad-hock basis in the course of everyday events. This will also speed up the rate of progress and make the acceptance of people more general, the simple rule is; the more people a dog makes friends with the more able it will become to cope with the new people it subsequently meets.
©: David Appleby 1995
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Please note that the Pet Behaviour Centre and David Appleby cannot be held responsible for death or injury to people or animals, or damage to property caused by the correct or incorrect use of the techniques described in this article.