Kyia's World

Kyia's World Love, Companionship, helping one another with their rescue buddies. Sharing stories, asking questions and giving advice.

25/10/2022

I NEED TO FEEL SAFE
Feeling safe is a basic need for most living creatures, including us.
When we think about feeling safe it’s natural to just think about not being harmed or being in danger, but it’s not just about the physical aspect – feeling safe emotionally and psychologically is just as relevant. While physical safety may be obvious and perhaps somewhat simpler to address, emotional safety is far more complex and not always that easy to identify. The same applies to our dogs – they are sentient beings whose behaviour is very often driven by an emotion.
Many behaviour problems that we see in dogs stem from the basic need to feel safe. A dog that lunges and barks or behaves aggressively with another dog or person is likely doing so because they feel unsafe and want the scary thing to go away. A dog that is guarding resources is doing so because they are afraid that the resource will be taken away – they don’t feel safe when another animal or person approaches that resource. A dog that is reacting to fireworks or thunderstorms or other noises is doing so because they don’t feel safe. The same can be said for separation anxiety, certain types of aggression and other behaviours.
We can help our dogs feel safe by acknowledging their fear even if that fear doesn’t make sense to us. We can be a source of comfort, predictability, allow them to make choices where we can, never force them to face a fear, never use punishment but positively reinforce their good choices, all while doing what we can through management, desensitisation or counter conditioning to help them improve. Some dogs may not improve, but doing what we can to help dogs feel safer in our world is the least we can do.

19/10/2022

WHYS AND WHEREFORES
As humans we are driven to needing answers. We need and want to know why to understand the reason that certain things happen so we can give it a “label”. We have an innate need for things to make sense and knowing why something happens is the first step in meeting that need. This is also true when we need to know why our dogs behave the way they do.
Behaviour is complex and finding the reason for a behaviour often involves taking many different factors into account, many of which may not be apparent on the surface. Some behaviour is simple to understand and address while more complex behaviours like fear, reactivity, aggression, separation anxiety etc. is far more complex and sometimes we may never know all the factors that point to the “why”.
One of my dogs is really “different”. If I were to “label” her, she is really introverted, a loner, reactive, very sensitive, doesn’t like people and other dogs, doesn’t like to be touched, slow to trust and doesn’t play with toys. Many years ago, when I knew nothing about dog behaviour, I had her assessed by a behaviourist. The behaviourists conclusion was - to put it simply “She’s odd!”. I was both disappointed and relieved with this answer. Disappointed because I desperately needed an answer or a label for the way she was and relieved because I began to understand that sometimes there are no answers and we have to accept and work with the dog we have.
Not knowing why should never prevent us from working on improving our dog’s behaviour and finding ways to help them cope in our world. Sometimes we have to let go of finding the "why" and just accept our dogs for the unique individuals they are.

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