Preventing Fear, Anxiety, and Stress in Your Puppy

I've trained a lot of puppies recently who have had fear, anxiety, and stress at eight or 10 or 12 weeks old, and I've also worked with a lot of adult dogs recently, ages two to six years old, with severe fear, anxiety, and stress. Some dogs have also shown aggression, but haven't bitten anybody. These are problems that could have been prevented early on in the dog's life. 

What is Fear, Anxiety, and Stress (FAS)?

• Fear is the response to a real or perceived threat. 

• Anxiety is the anticipation of a threat that isn't present.

• Stress is the psychological or emotional strain caused by either.

Signs of FAS in puppies include tucked tail, cowering, growling, avoidance, whining, and excessive barking. FAS is often mistaken for bad behavior. When a puppy exhibits fear, anxiety, and stress, it does not listen to commands, take treats, or see hand signals because it is in its fight-or-flight mode. 

Often, owners will call me to fix their dog's behavior of not listening and not behaving well, when in reality, the dog has fear, anxiety, and stress, or just one of those. The puppy needs to work on FAS before it engages, listens, and obeys a behavior command such as down or stay. This is also related to a lack of confidence. 

How to prevent fear, anxiety, and stress in puppies 

1) Early socialization. This means safe, gradual exposure to new people, animals, sounds, and environments. Socialization is so important that my clients and I start socializing their puppies as early as possible. We get the puppy out to Home Depot, Lowe's, Tractor Supply, Hobby Lobby, Michaels, and Dicks Sporting Goods. These are just a few of the places where you can bring your puppy to help socialize them. I'm not talking about putting them in a shopping cart or, as they say here in the south, a buggy. You want to ensure that you're walking them on a leash with a harness or a collar so they learn to see the world from where they live, which is walking next to you in public, not being held, coddled, and babied. The only way to build confidence in your puppy is to teach them the loose-leash walking technique I recommend from my book, Leash Training Your Puppy, and build trust by being a good leader. 

2) Create a secure environment. This means putting your puppy on a predictable routine, one where they know precisely what will happen next, so they don't have to stress out, worry, or overthink because, just like humans, overthinking creates a lot of fear, anxiety, and stress in puppies. When they get up in the morning, they go potty, and then they eat their food, and then you do a little training with them, and they go back out again to go potty, and then they come in to do a little bit of play, and then they take a nap. You repeat this routine throughout the day and have a successful routine to raise a happy, healthy, and obedient puppy. 

You want to be a calm, confident leader. You don't want to yell at them, scold them, or nag them all the time because that won't help the puppy relax and build confidence. You also need to teach independence, which means crate training and periodically leaving them in a room without you so they don't get separation anxiety. They must realize that the world will still revolve when you leave the room or the house. This is very important for preventing separation anxiety. 

3) Reading body language. You want to ensure that your puppy's tail is not tucked under all the time because that's a sign of fear. Watch their mouth, ears, and eyes, and see if there's any stress there. If the puppy starts to snarl, growl, or bark a lot, these are signs of stress, anxiety, and fear. You don't want to ignore those signals. 

4) Build confidence in your puppy. The other day, I worked with a 12-week-old golden retriever puppy. It was our first lesson. The puppy went from the back deck downstairs into the backyard to go potty, and the owner picked it up, brought it down there, and set it in the grass. It would walk up the stairs, but the puppy didn't know how to walk down the stairs.

Through building confidence in the puppy, I showed him that he doesn't have to pick the puppy up. Let's teach the puppy to walk downstairs to help build their confidence. This will help the puppy reduce stress, anxiety, and fear. I took the leash, walked down several steps, and pulled the leash gently. The puppy's front paw went on the step below, and then the other paw went down on the step below. I pulled the leash a little more, and the puppy started running down the stairs. We went back up the stairs; we went back down the stairs. We did this about six or seven times, and the owner was flabbergasted because he thought his puppy could not walk down the stairs this early due to its size and age.

When I got Dixie, she walked up and down stairs at 10 weeks old and was only 4.8 pounds. I started this on the first day I had her, because I lived on the fifth floor and knew the elevator could break at any time. If I needed to take her potty, I had to walk down five flights of stairs, so she was learning to walk downstairs immediately, no matter what.  Dixie is by far the most confident dog you've ever seen. This dog is very secure and confident because I started early on with her. 

One way to build confidence in your puppy is to use reward-based training methods. This means no force, no harsh corrections, and rewarding them when they do something right. Set the communication channels very clearly with your puppy. This is what you're going to get rewarded for, and they're not going to get rewarded for. One of the things I see owners do to destroy a puppy's confidence is correct them all the time. It sounds something like this: “No, no, stop. No, Dixie, no Dixie, stop. Dixie, leave it. Dixie, what are you doing?” That type of communication in an 8, 10, 12, or 14-week-old puppy will lower their confidence, and they'll always walk on eggshells. This is not what you want. 

5) Avoid common mistakes that cause FAS. This includes yelling or physical punishment. You never want to hit your dog. You never want to yell harshly at your puppy. They've only learned what you've taught them. They've never been to school. They know nothing. There's no reason to get frustrated and upset at a puppy that hasn't learned anything yet. 

Forcing social interactions is also not a good idea. My dog, Dixie, is not great with children. She's a little scared of them because many years ago, a high-energy, very loud child came up to her on a skateboard, and she thought all children were evil. If a young child comes running at her, like what happened the other day when we were doing a social outing at a strip mall, she goes the other direction. This kid was screaming at her in some Latin language. I don't even know what it was, and he was saying all these words and screaming, and Dixie got scared. This is a situation where I'm not going to force that on her because the kid needed to go away and Dixie required to decompress and calm down, which she did. 

The next thing you don't want to do is ignore signs of stress, thinking he'll get over it or she'll get over it. You need to desensitize your puppy to stimuli that cause fear, anxiety, or stress, which is what I teach in my programs. This may be the vacuum cleaner or the big trash can you pull out front of your house once a week on the big wheels that the trash guy will pick up.

I suggest taking them to Home Depot and desensitizing them to a forklift, a pallet jack, shopping carts, and the circular saw when cutting wood for somebody. These are the things that puppies need to be desensitized to. Over time, you'll find many things that initially freak out your puppy, and then you have to desensitize them gently one at a time. This is very important. 

Unfortunately, sometimes the fear, anxiety, and stress are so bad in an adult dog, especially dogs that have been rescued from the shelter, that it is irreversible. This is a big problem, especially if the dog is over three years old. They've learned to adapt to this fear, anxiety, and stress lifestyle and to growl and snarl at things and push them away because they're scared. They've rehearsed that behavior over and over again. Once the dog reaches a certain age, it is tough to reverse the FAS. 

I recently trained a Golden Doodle that was six years old. It was a great dog, but it had snapped at people in the house several times and at me twice. When we took it out in public, I instantly realized that this dog was suffering from severe fear, anxiety, and stress. Even when the dog was on medication such as Trazodone to help reduce the anxiety, it didn't work. Also, the dog did not enjoy riding in the car. It never did anything but stand up, pant a lot, and look out the window in anticipation that something bad would happen.

This dog was undersocialized from an early age, and the owner admitted to that, which is why they hired me. For example, they did not want something bad to happen to this dog, such as biting somebody. This was what they wanted to prevent. We ended the training. The dog did better with everything except for that FAS in public, and I educated the owner on how to avoid dog bites. When people enter the house, they are instructed to relax the dog, keep them stress-free as they enter, and not allow them to get so excited and overstimulated. This worked well for them, so they were pleased with the outcome. 

In Review

• Socialize your puppy early, when they are between 8 and 16 weeks old, by exposing them to certain stimuli to prevent fear, anxiety, and stress in your puppy. 

• Put them on a structured routine. 

• Start obedience training as early as possible.

• Build their confidence through calm, confident leadership and not a lot of corrections.

• No yelling and no physical abuse to the puppy. That will destroy them for life.

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