Why Are Some Dogs Shy and Nervous?
Is your dog shy or nervous? Afraid of new things? Find out why.
Many dogs are lucky enough to be cheerful, gregarious types. They make friends easily with new people and they approach new experiences with happy curiosity. But for shy dogs and nervous dogs, life can be quite a trial. “Oh no, the stranger wants to pet me!” “Yikes–somebody moved the garbage bin!” This week, I’ll discuss the reasons why some dogs are shy or nervous, and next week’s article will explain how to help your shy dog.
Why Are Some Dogs Shy?
Nature or nurture? In general, both. Behavior of all kinds can be genetically inflected. For instance, Border Collies are predisposed to a sequence of behaviors that makes it relatively easy to teach them to herd sheep. Nervous dogs and shy dogs can be deliberately bred. A famous experiment at the University of Arkansas produced two genetic strains of pointers. One strain is friendly and sociable; the other strain is fearful. The fearful dogs don’t explore or even move around much and they freeze up when people come near. You won’t be surprised to learn that they’re also hard to train. (1)
The nervous pointers are an extreme case, because their condition has been purposely accentuated. They remind us, though, that dogs–like us–have a genetic predisposition somewhere in the range between super shy and super outgoing. We should also remember that “has a genetic basis” is generally not code for “can’t be changed.”
Your Shy Dog May Have Had a Stressed Mother
If a mother dog is under stress, her puppies may be anxious or shy.
Nurture, the other piece of the puzzle, includes your dog’s life experience and also her mother’s. Do a web search on “maternal stress” plus “effects on offspring” and you’ll uncover hundreds of studies on rats, mice, rhesus monkeys, and humans. The human studies are retrospective, of course, meaning that women are asked about what their lives were like when they were pregnant. But many stressors have been inflicted on pregnant nonhuman animals, from unpredictable noise to random temperature changes. (2) To oversimplify the findings of a huge body of research that I have no hope of mastering, if your mother experienced significant stress during pregnancy then you are likely to grow up more anxious and reactive than the average bear. Or rat, or human, or dog.
Dogs May Be Less Anxious If They Have Affectionate Mothers
It’s also been found that rats whose mothers lick and groom them a lot are less fearful and release lower levels of stress hormones in novel situations than rats whose mothers aren’t so big on the licking and grooming. (3) And rat pups who are handled grow up to behave less fearfully, even if their pregnant mother was stressed. (4)
So your dog has better odds of growing up confident and sociable if he had an affectionate mother who didn’t suffer too much stress during pregnancy, and if neither parent’s genetics predisposed them to be shy or anxious.
Many Shy Dogs Weren’t Well Socialized as Puppies
Finally, a dog’s own early experience of the world–or lack of experience–has lasting effects. I’m betting you don’t want to know the details of the isolation experiments done in the middle decades of the last century. Let’s just say that puppies reared in isolation grew into shy, anxious adolescents and adults. Various studies find them avoiding human touch, freezing up in new situations and when subjected to frustration and stress, and ignoring or avoiding other dogs. (5) A lot of the dogs did improve after their release from isolation; it’s not clear how much. Unfortunately, the experiments were not only cruel but badly done; many details are left vague and the researchers seem rarely to have done any long-term follow-up.
My own experience suggests that poor early socialization has lasting effects. It’s true that since I work mostly with behavior problems, I don’t see a whole lot of happy, confident dogs, and that means I don’t learn as much about the life histories of those dogs. I do learn plenty about the life histories of shy, fearful, anxious, and aggressive dogs, and I can’t think of a single case where I looked at a client dog’s socialization history and said to myself, “Hmm, everything looks peachy keen here.” (6)
Does Abuse Make a Dog Shy?
Abuse or other trauma, such as pain from being hit by a car, can surely affect a dog’s behavior as well. I’ve had clients tell me they suspect their shy dog was abused by, say, a man with a beard, because she hides behind the client’s leg whenever bearded men appear. But trainers and behavior specialists generally believe that undersocialization is the likelier villain. In Amish, Hasidic, and hipster communities, you see a lot of beards; elsewhere, not so much. It’s not that a puppy has to be exposed to men with beards, or else she grows up scared of them. Rather, a fearful response to encountering sights and sounds that are relatively uncommon suggests a puppyhood with limited experience of the wide range of perfectly fine things in the world.
Shyness and fearfulness have many possible causes. Next week, I’ll discuss how you can help your shy or anxious dog gain confidence as he navigates the world. Even if you can’t turn your dog around completely, the right strategy can make a big difference in how much he enjoys his life.
Send your questions and comments to dogtrainer@quickanddirtytips.comcreate new email, and I may use them in a future article. I Twitter as Dogalini, and you can also find me on Facebook, where I post links to articles and videos and respond to your questions. Thanks for reading!
Notes
1. Houpt, K.A. 2007. Review article: genetics of canine behavior. Acta Vet. Brno 76:431-444. The “nervous pointers” are described on p. 433; there’s an extensive literature about these dogs.
2. Tazumi, T., et al. 2005. Effects of prenatal maternal stress by repeated cold environment on behavioral and emotional development in the rat offspring. Behavioral Brain Research 162(1):153-60 (abstract here); Clarke, A.S., and M. L. Schneider. 1993. Prenatal stress [removal from home cage plus brief unpredictable nois has long-term effects on behavioral responses to stress in juvenile rhesus monkeys. Developmental Psychobiology 26(5): 293-304 (abstract here); Vallée, Monique, et al. 1997. Prenatal stress induces high anxiety and postnatal handling induces low anxiety in adult offspring: correlation with stress-induced corticosterone secretion. Journal of Neuroscience 17(7): 2626-2636 (full text here).
3. Shekhar, A., et al. 2001. Summary of a National Institute of Mental Health workshop: developing animal models of anxiety disorders. Psychopharmacology 157:327-339. Since researchers seem to be perfectly happy using rats as a model for humans, there doesn’t seem to be any reason not to use them as a model for dogs. Anyway, the research on maternal stress and maternal behavior seems to point in the same direction whatever species happens to be subjected to experiment.
4. Vallée et al., cited in note 2.
5. A sampling of articles: Clarke, R. S., et al. 1951. Individual differences in dogs: preliminary report on the effects of early experience. Canadian Journal of Psychology: 5(4), 150-56; Thompson, William R., and Woodburn Heron. 1954. The effects of early restriction on activity in dogs. Journal of Comparative and Physiological Psychiatry: 47(1), 77-82; Melzack, Ronald. 1954. The genesis of emotional behavior: an experimental study of the dog. Journal of Comparative and Physiological Psychiatry: 47(2), 166-68; Melzack, Ronald, and William R. Thompson. 1956. Effects of early experience on social behavior. Canadian Journal of Psychology: 10(2), 82-90. Most or all are available in full text on the Internet; the easiest way to find them is to head for Google Scholar and search on the title.
The seminal work on puppy development and behavior is John Paul Scott and John L. Fuller, Dog Behavior: The Genetic Basis (originally published as Genetics and the Social Behavior of the Dog) (University of Chicago Press, 1965), which reports a long-term study that included various degrees of isolation and social interaction, and which also describes the work of other researchers. The discussion on pp. 175-82 is especially relevant.
6. Now, not all of my client dogs’ humans know what the dogs’ early life was like. Maybe some of the shy and anxious adult dogs did get appropriate early experiences. And as I said, my pool of information about joyful, confident dogs is relatively small. At least some of them have overcome limited and unpleasant early lives; occasionally I meet a dog who’s doing well even after being sprung from puppymill hell or long-term incarceration in a so-called “no-kill” shelter.
Image courtesy of Shutterstock
About the Author
Jolanta holds professional certifications in both training and behavior counseling and belongs to the Association of Professional Dog Trainers and the International Association of Animal Behavior Consultants. She also volunteered with Pet Help Partners, a program of the Humane Society of the United States that works to prevent pet relinquishment. Her approach is generally behaviorist (Pavlovian, Skinnerian and post-Skinnerian learning theory) with a big helping of ethology (animal behavior as observed in non-experimental settings).
