RES·IL·I·ENCE : the ability to become healthy, happy or strong again after a setback, illness or other problem; the capacity to recover from difficulties.

No matter how we try to keep our dogs safe, life often has other plans.

Only a few months ago, for example, another volunteer and I were the first cars on site at a motorway crash, having watched it all happen in surreal slow motion. The worst was watching two dogs come stumbling out of the back of the van and into the path of speeding wagons. The van they were in had rolled, and during the impact, the back door had broken. Luckily, despite the speeds involved and the damage, both the dogs and the driver were okay.

Physically, at least.

A fractured skull, but no other broken bones. It could have been so much worse.

Resilience is how we cope with the crap that life throws at us. Like car crashes in the driving rain on a Friday night.

It’s about how quickly we bounce back. It’s how we cope and how we respond to things. Resilience, from a biological perspective, is how quickly we move back from fight-flight modes into homeostasis. You know… how quickly we go from fight or flight to rest and digest, feed and breed. Resilience, as far as your body is concerned, is how quickly you go from “Incoming!!!!” to “When’s lunch again?”

You can see resilience in action.

This is Lidy. Lidy, when I first met her, was a hot pink mess of 11-month old whirling dervish snaggle-toothed dragon. Her resilience was poor and she was permanently in fight-or-flight mode. She was super-sensitive to flooding her sink and trigger stacked to the max. She never really recovered from each and every episode.

She was on a “Bite First – Ask Questions Later” protocol.

We’ve come a long way, Lidy and I. To the point where, when an off-lead mental, barky over-aroused spaniel ran full pelt at us and Lidy coped. Within 30 seconds, she was rooting in the bushes.

It did NOT take me 30 seconds to recover, let me tell you. I still have flashbacks and nightmares.

Or when the shelter director’s chi-chi, Kiki (formerly known as ‘Killer’) ran up to us to tell us in his best Mexican that he didn’t appreciate her, Lidy recovered in less than 30 seconds. Kiki still had a barking head attached to his snack-sized body.

So resilience has a physiological timer we can watch for that manifests in behaviours. How long does it take us to go from Tarantino Film Extra to Normal Services Are Resumed – Nothing To See – Here?

But it’s not about being 100% laidback 100% of the time. There are ‘bombproof’ dogs – I’m sure you know one or two – that can cope with every single thing that happens. I’ve seen dogs thrown from windows, thrown out of cars, hit by cars, shot… dogs who cope with things you and I would find ourselves a quivering wreck over. Resilience doesn’t have to be this. You meet a dog called Lucky and I bet you’re looking at a resilience role-model. In fact, I’d largely argue that if you don’t have a bomb-proofer to start with, you’ll probably never get one. You’re born Lucky or you’re not so Lucky.

What you may get is a dog whose reactions are milder, less frequent or shorter – a dog who takes 30 seconds to bounce back rather than 3 days – when they’ve learned to be more resilient.

But I don’t think anyone would promise you a bombproof dog if that’s not what you’ve got already.

Resilience can be preventative. It can be built. We can build it in young puppies to inoculate them against stuff happening in life. We call that socialisation and habituation. We can build on the genes that we get, or those we don’t, to help our puppies prepare for the world.

There are lots of really great Puppy Culture groups that will help you with that. There are plenty of great books, like Steve Mann’s Easy Peasy Puppy Squeezy, Puppy Start Right by Kenneth and Debbie Martin, or Life Skills for Puppies by Daniel Mills and Helen Zulch. There are online courses too. You can also find great puppy classes, but be careful it’s not just a puppy maul – you could end up killing off your young dog’s resilience before you can blink.

You can – and I’d argue that you should – continue to build on resilience through life. Make novelty fun, build in routines to cope with life’s unexpected spaniels and chihuahuas, bicycles and car horns. Once, I walked with Heston through a Venetian carnival by accident. Capes, masks, flappy things, music, feathers, costumes and instead of having flashbacks about the time a guy with a plague doctor mask bent to pet him, it just became one of those things in life that contribute to your resilience in the future. When novelty is safe and dogs have choice whether to engage or not, life’s scary stuff can be a learning experience. To steal from Ken Ramirez, instead of it being a tornado, the animals in your life will just be thinking, “hmmm…. now what are the naked apes up to today?”

Whilst resilience can be preventative, it can also be well and truly buggered up by some of the things in the big old jigsaw puzzle that contributes to the adult.

As you can tell from this amazing “soup” of factors, there are so many things that influence the adult our dogs become and their resilience to stress that it can be difficult to pull one from another.

The toughest cases for me are those dogs who live in a semi-permanent state of stress. Bad genetics, lack of resilience in both the maternal & paternal line, exposure to in utero cortisol, birth order, even things like the mother’s feeding position all contribute to a lack of resilience.

Animal behaviourist Patricia McConnell says resilience is on a scale, like 1 – 10. Some dogs are born in life with the potential to only ever be a 3 or a 4. They are never going to be cadaver dogs, bomb detection dogs, SAR dogs, sniffer dogs, take-down dogs. Breed, heritage, maternal and paternal lines, in utero experiences and early socialisation up to 7-10 weeks or so means that their capacity to bounce back is going to be pretty low.

Some dogs, like Mabelle, may only ever be a 1 or a 2. She’s a 1 now. I never saw a dog as shut down as she was in a number of supposedly therapeutic events. Traditional methods to reassure dogs and build resilience are slow and hard work. You can put hours and hours in with her only to see the smallest progress.

Still, that’s not to say you shouldn’t try.

It’s not all about what they’re born with, or those first few weeks in a dog’s life. Resilience can be damaged by life. You can’t tell when you’ll run out. I have had three car accidents in my life. The first was fairly serious: I was shunted into a junction by a lorry going 40mph when I was stationary. I bounced back. The second was a fender bender. The third was relatively minor on the scale of things but it left me unwilling to drive my car for months. I still don’t drive in towns if I can absolutely help it. My resilience took a beating that it has not recovered from.

The same is true of dogs, too. I think that’s especially true of working dogs who are surrounded by stressful events. You don’t know what will be the one event that will mark the end of the career of an explosives dog.

It’s not just a lifetime thing, it’s a day-to-day thing too. Resilience runs out and we need rest and recuperation to rebuild. It’s why some days, we run out of spoons and find we need some time to recuperate. I know my resilience globally is pretty good (she says, having experienced lengthy periods of depression!) but my daily resilience can be depleted and then I end up ranting at politicians on Twitter.

The problem is that how humans build resilience is often through talking therapies, through cognitive discussion, through yoga, through mindfulness training, through tai chi and lunch with our friends.

Not so easy to work with a dog on those.

Maslow, good old Maslow, had his wonderful hierarchy of needs

You can even find animal versions of those out there. Some are wonderfully complex and detailed.

But we forget that there’s a big old need in the first layer that will interfere with all the others. Here, it says ‘shelter’, but I would replace that with ‘safety and security’. Safety, for me, is an emotional state. Security is a physical one. I can be secure, lock my doors and buckle up, but still not feel safe.

When we don’t feel safe in acute stress periods, we can’t drink, eat or sleep. When we don’t feel safe in chronic stress periods, our eating, drinking and sleeping get messed up out of whack. Feeling safe, for me, underpins all physiological needs.

That’s why we can’t use food with dogs who are panicking. It’s just not that important to eat a tiny piece of ham when you literally think you are going to die. But it’s also why we need to be careful with using food with dogs in chronic stress… it can form part of a coping mechanism.

Now I love using food. It’s how I turned Shouty Snaggle Toothed Dragon into a fairly polite dog who doesn’t over-react to as many things as she once did. We’re only beginning to understand the effects of food on our emotional wellbeing, investigating things like serotonin diets. Food is my friend. It’s how I work with all the anxious dogs and help them feel safe around me.

It’s also how we know a dog isn’t suffering acute stress. This moment is often the beginning of our relationship with traumatised dogs and it can be really powerful when it’s the dog’s choice. I am a firm believer that dogs who’ve suffered traumatic experiences or who are anxious need regularity and peace to eat, not having to overcome a great big fear of humans just to have something to eat.

But I also know that sometimes it’s an absolutely necessary step because a dog who can’t cope with anything in life is a dog who is utterly, totally and completely miserable. Sometimes, it’s an ethical choice we make to use additional food in ways that we know aren’t particularly comfortable for a dog just so that we can help them make the first steps to a future resilience.

If you aren’t thinking about the ethics of using food in your work with fearful dogs, you should be. There’s no ‘no’ or ‘yes’ in my opinion, but I think we should always be conscious of what we are doing instead of mindlessly proposing gradual desensitisation protocols using additional food that are a tacit way of forcing the dog and removing their choice. Go into it with your eyes open.

Like with Lidy. She didn’t like people and wasn’t resilient around them. I didn’t mindlessly engage in a counter-conditioning programme with her. I knew that the training I was doing, super-mild as it was, was changing her in ways that would not have been her choice. I think we owe it to animals to recognise we compromise their choices and to weigh up the benefits of doing so.

So, safety is a big factor in resilience. And that means providing a safe, regular, routine. It means minimising sensory stress, especially odours and sounds. It means sometimes providing other dogs. Social support is a big factor in resilience and in feeling safe.

We rehome a lot of hounds at Mornac. Many go to specialist associations who understand these dogs very well. The problem for dogs like Leyla (in the photo above) is that they only feel safe in groups. BUT… they then use the group to protect themselves from human caregivers, finding anonymity in the group. That means, again, sometimes being mindful that a dog’s choice of safety will sometimes impede their pathway to more resilient behaviour. It’s not a ‘don’t’ or a ‘do’, more, “just be mindful of…”

The benefits of a canine friend should not be overlooked for less resilient dogs (like the setter here) and having wonderfully chilled out dogs like Habby (the anglo in front) can really help many dogs build resilience.

Play is enormously useful in building resilience – either dog-human or dog-dog. Play encourages you to keep going, to keep trying. Play is also not a possible thing to do when you are in fight-flight mode. I’m hugely interested in how chiens référents (sorry – I don’t have a good translation for that, but I’d say ‘anchor dogs’ or ‘mentor dogs’) can help aid a dog’s recovery and build resilience. Social support is not just about the human caregiver or human companion: dogs learn so much about resilience from other dogs. Lidy, by the way, is a different dog with some male friends.

I call them her bodyguard dogs. Confident, laid-back dogs who model behaviours. I work quite often in kennels with the dogs, and it’s amazing how much watching and learning is happening.

You can see Leyla here with her much more confident boyfriend who is approaching an unfamiliar volunteer. Leyla, bolstered by her familiar humans and a mentor dog can take her time to make up her mind. Curiosity is fertiliser for resilience. Choice is a super-strength booster as well.

That is absolutely crucial. Choice. I’ve become more and more convinced of this as time has passed. The more autonomy an animal has (even the feeling that you have a choice, not necessarily the fact that you do) the more resilient they are. When you realise you can control the universe that’s pretty cool. Of course, dogs also may feel they are controlling the universe by negative emotional actions, the ‘Bite First – Ask Questions Later’ or the flight that Leyla so desperately would have chosen when she first arrived. But controlling the world in positive, mindful, controlled ways is a cornerstone of resilience. People with OCD aren’t resilient. It doesn’t feel good. It’s dysfunctional and yet it leaves them feeling strangely in control. When you have true autonomy, it feels good. It’s a field I’m exploring more and more with dogs I work with.

And of course, none of this would be possible without complementary therapies or pharmaceutical support. For some dogs, the road to resilience is never going to be possible without these. In France, vets rarely prescribe psychological pharmaceuticals without also prescribing a course of behaviour modification. I’ve only known a medical prescription for an older dog that didn’t come with a prescription for behaviour modification. The two work effectively together to rebuild a little resilience. Other therapies can also help. From Ttouch to groundwork, diet and dietary supplements, acupuncture and medicine for health issues, herbal supplements to massage, there are so many things that can help a dog on their journey. Flika had a bad day yesterday. It was 41°C and she was having both arthritis flare-ups and Tenor lady moments. She was uncomfortable, fidgety and stressed. An anxitane pill, an anti-inflammatory, some reggae and a half-hour of massage turned my girl who’d run out of spoons into a girl who was able to rest. No rest and you’ll find resilience disappears. Heston’s soothing is grooming and chewing. 30 minutes of brushing and a good half-hour with a bit of tendon to chew on and it was like he’d done an hour of yoga. We carry stress in our muscles: make sure you give your dogs time to recharge their batteries and discharge their muscular as well as their mental stress.

In all, if you’ve got a 5 or a 6 out of 10 kind of a dog, rather than a bombproof 10 out of 10, make sure you keep those resilience banks topped up with intervals between stressful events (both positive stress like fun walks and negative stress like things they don’t like). Give your dog plenty of proper rest – I know lots of homes where the TV is on right next to the dog bed for 14 hours a day or more! Build in physical contact and care protocols from massage or gentle grooming to Ttouch and acupuncture. Treat underlying aches and pains. Ensure your dog has security and feels safe. Seek out your vet or a behaviourist if necessary. Always factor in social support – both human and canine. Give choices and build your dog’s ability to say both no and yes. Plan for the future and keep that resilience going in careful ways, or you’ll watch it ebb away just as your dog needs it most for vets and medicines and their own life changes.

After all, resilience is like a muscle. You may have been born with the genes of Arnold Schwarzenegger or the ability to bench-press three times your body weight, or you may have biceps like Twiglets, but you can work at it always. Then, when your world turns upside down one Friday evening in the driving rain, it won’t zap your resilience for good.

When we discuss behaviour, we so often talk about the behavioural triggers, the ‘on’ buttons that say, ‘Go! Go! Go!’

Without those ‘on’ buttons, those behaviours would just be spilling out willy-hilly, hither and thither. Our dogs would bark for no reason. Growls really would come from nowhere. Bouncy labradors would bounce with the random whimsy of a cartoon puppet. Those ‘on’ buttons, sometimes known as triggers, put the edges in. They are the fanfare that announce that the performance of the behaviour is about to start. It’s the MGM lion that says, “Show’s about to start, people!”

That’s what I love about behaviour: the buttons. The triggers. The antecedents. The environmental cues that say, ‘Now would be a REALLY good time to do that thing you do!’. Behaviourists are in the business of finding the fanfare. We’re looking for the MGM lions that announce a behaviour will be required.

That’s logical. Behaviour doesn’t just spill out of us randomly.

As behaviourists, we’re obsessed by the starter guns, the triggers. The cars that lead to arousal. The appearance of a squirrel that leads to chasing. The presentation of a toy that leads to play sessions. The appearance of another dog that leads to barking and lunges. Find the trigger, you can desensitise. You can counter-condition. You can work out the emotional drivers behind the behaviour. You could, if you wanted, arrange the environment so that the MGM lion never appears ever again to say that a behaviour is required.

Our dogs are obsessed by our starter cues and fanfares as well. The way you brush your teeth immediately before a walk. The way you get bowls out right around 5pm. The sound of a van that means the post lady is in town. Boots on, walkies. Doorbells and knockers that announce visitors. Standing up and moving near the refrigerator.

We talk all the time about those triggers, those fanfares that announce the performance of the behaviour is imminent. Pavlov was obsessed with them. Metronomes. People in white coats. Footsteps …. he gave us a very nice phrase for them: conditioned and unconditioned stimuli. Nicer than fanfares and MGM lions and triggers and cues and antecedents and signals and a whole dictionary of confusing metaphors.

Cialdini in his book Influence said these stimuli, antecedents, cues or triggers tell the brain ‘do this now’ and set off an automatic chain of events leading to a behaviour or biological change. He called the stimuli the ‘click’ and the behaviour the ‘whirr’ as if the environment presses a button and behaviour clicks into play mode. We chimps love our metaphors.

I think that notion is pretty well dissected and described in the animal training world. There are lots of metaphors we use for the stimuli that create the ideal stage for a behaviour to be performed upon, that announce performance is about to start.

But what tells behaviour to stop? What says, ‘No point…. pack it in.’ What brings the curtains down? What says “That’s all, folks!”

Usually that is when the function of the behaviour has been met or we see it is unlikely to be met. The behaviour met its goal: success. The behaviour was ineffective: failure.

This is what I care about. Triggers and stimuli are all well and good but I care about what turns the behaviour off again. The fact is if behaviour exists, by and large it exists because once upon a time it was useful. It may even be useful even now. It may be so very successful that it’s the immediate go-to behaviour to achieve that result. Where behaviour fails to achieve that result, it tends to die out. No point.

So I want to know when the behaviour stops, as that tells me what is keeping it alive. What are the consequences that lead to repeat performances?

For me, what makes me stop running for a departing bus? (Apart from a mild heart attack?)

There are only two real-life consequences. I either catch the bus or know that catching the bus is impossible. Success or failure. If I succeed, I’m more likely to choose that behaviour in the same circumstances in the future. If it fails, I’m less likely.

But success or failure is an immediate thing.

What makes the running stop? I mean I’m not Forrest Gump. I don’t keep running. Or I’m not running on the bus when I get it. At some point, I quit. What makes that behaviour say, ‘That’s all, folks!’

That’s what I care about. When does the behaviour stop? Because when it does, that’s highly probable to be your reinforcer – the result that keeps the behaviour alive and makes it a reliable choice for success.

What makes Flika bark?

The increasing noise of planes in the sky.

What makes it stop? At what point does it actually stop?

The plane either goes away, or she realises her barking is not influencing the noise. Usually the former. Success (in her eyes anyway). Today, she very effectively (in her eyes anyway) told a low-flying plane to sod off. She barked, and as the plane sound got less loud, she stopped. The thing keeping the behaviour alive is that barking clearly makes airborne noises go away. Success.

What makes Heston bark?

The sound of the post lady’s van slowing down outside our gate.

What makes him increase that barking? Her getting out of the van.

What makes the barking decrease? The post lady going away. Success.

What is the moment at which it stops? When the post lady drives off.

We don’t talk about those off-switches enough, in my opinion. Success fuels the continuation of that behaviour. It marks it as a potentially useful action to get success in the future. It makes it more likely to happen again.

Those off-switches or consequences tell us what the function of the behaviour is. Why it’s necessary. They tell us what the dog wants. They tell us when the dog thinks it’s being effective. What did the behaviour succeed at doing? What happened as a result? What were the consequences?

I love this. It’s so non-invasive and observational. It tells us all about motivation. I don’t need MRI scanners to see that. I don’t need to make up fictional reasons to explain their motivation. I can see really clearly what’s fuelling the behaviour.

If the behaviour increases in the future, the function of the behaviour was met the last time, and it’s more likely to happen again in order to bring about the same result.

The cue, stimulus or trigger simply says WHEN. It says ‘DO THAT THING NOW!’

That’s all.

When the behaviour stops or decreases is the important bit, as it tells you the WHY. It says, ‘Success!’ or ‘Failure!’

This is why I like working aggression cases with dogs. Dogs don’t go around with aggression spilling out of them all the time, unless they’ve got something crazy going on. Aggression doesn’t usually happen in a trigger vacuum. Heston is not out barking at crows all day every day. Flika is sleeping. They’re not doing the target behaviour all the time just for random. Aggression – be that barking, growling, lunges, snaps or bites – has pretty clear-cut on and off signals.

My job is then easy. Extinction schedule for the aggression. I’ve got to show the dog that they’re going to miss the bus every time, so there’s no point. Desensitisation to take the sting out of the cue, so that every time the bus passes, they don’t think they have to run for it. Counterconditioning so the bus doesn’t bring out the same emotional response. Trust-building so the dog doesn’t think it has to fend for itself. Breaking the magical thinking that connects X behaviour to Y result. Dealing with superstitions and helping dogs ‘see’ more clearly to choose another behaviour for the same result.

Aggression cases are fairly ‘clean’ in identifying on and off switches, triggers and functions, antecedents and consequences.

This is not always the case for fear and anxiety. Just to be clear, there is no agreed definition of the difference between these two states. I’m going to talk about the two as if there’s a distinction that is absolutely not agreed by the psychological sciences, or the world at large. You may think of them as scales on a spectrum, with anxiety being a milder state of fear. I don’t define them in that way. This is all my own artificial, crazy dichotomy between the two. Bear with me and I hope you’ll see why.

For me, anxiety has less clear-cut functions. Fear has a biological function and clear-cut on/off switches. The MGM lion appears to say a spider is about to skitter across the floor. I feel afraid. I scream. I don’t keep screaming for the rest of my natural life thankfully as the spider skitters off and my brain says, “That’s all, folks!”

For example: see a snake, feel fear, run away. Fear stops when the threat stops. That’s all folks! You’re safe.

See postlady. Feel fear. Bark. Make threat go away. Job done; nothing to see here.

Fear, for me, is right there on the fight-flight response. It has clear, well-defined on and off switches. It serves a purpose to help us avoid inconvenient things like being attacked or dying. Fear may very well underly aggression and aggressive behavioural choices, just as anger may. But anxiety is something else altogether, and it’s why I find it tough to work with anxious dogs.

Here’s why.

Anxiety often develops through rumination on the absence of the ‘on’ button for fear. There’s not often an MGM lion that appears to tell you to start feeling anxious. You’re actually living in anticipation of the lion, which – and this is the horrible kicker – may never, ever appear. You expect a life-threatening or stressful event, but it hasn’t happened yet. You’re waiting for the bell to ring, the spider to appear, the snake to slither, the buzzer to sound. Anxiety for me is the state of anticipating a fear-inducing event. In fact, instead of the MGM lion, the fear-inducing stimuli, marking the beginning of the behaviour, some nasty messed-up circuitry makes it the ‘That’s all, folks!’

We can actually feel a sense of relief when the crappy thing eventually happens! It puts us out of our anxious misery.

Unlike fear, which comes AFTER the stimuli, and ends when safety has been secured, anxiety doesn’t always have a clear ‘on’ switch. And it doesn’t always have an off-switch. Sometimes the on-switch for fear is the off-switch for anxiety. No more anticipation and waiting with dread.

Take for instance the following example. Heston has epilepsy. He’s on a 3 week-ish predictable cycle. The last time that cycle happened, I was away. My dad was looking after Heston. Because I was ruminating on the anticipation of a fit, I became anxious. No MGM lion appeared to tell me to start feeling fearful or anxious: I just expected that it was imminent for no good reason. The fit hadn’t happened but I was afraid it would happen. Then, as rumination does, it snowballs. I texted my dad to put an end to my anxiety and I had no response. Give me 30 minutes and I was in a full-blown panic that Heston had somehow come out of his fit, been startled by my dad, attacked him and left him for dead. Or Heston had had a fit and had died and my dad didn’t want to say. I went straight to constant messages and phone calls. The only time it ended was when my dad texted me back to say things were fine.

That’s why I hate anxiety. And that’s anxiety that has clear-cut on/off switches. Thought about something predictably unpleasant happening, Click-whirr for anxiety. Reassurance that the predictably unpleasant thing has not happened. Whirr-click for calm.

But most anxiety is not so on-off. I worry about my car. I worry that there will be some unfortunate mechanical problem. It wakes me up in the night. This anxiety has no beginning – there’s no reason to think like this. My car isn’t making noises and doesn’t have lights flicking on. My car is in good mechanical health. And there’s nothing I can do to switch the anxiety off – not even stopping by at the garage. If I stop and they say nothing is wrong, I distrust them. If I stop and something was wrong, then my anxiety was fruitful and it is ruminations were successful and useful.

The same with my dogs. I worry about Flika. She’s old. I worry she has some undiagnosed thing. It keeps me awake at night. There’s no reason for my worry other than her age. She’s in good health for an old bird. But nothing can switch that anxiety off. If I see the vet and he gives her a blood test, I suspect it’s something blood tests can’t pick up, and if I’m right, then my worrying behaviour is reinforced.

Usually it’s history that’s made us like this. I had 6 months of problems on my last car and now I drive thinking all cars will break at any moment. I’ve had 5 old dogs in 4 years and I spend all my life fussing over them.

But anxiety is a largely cognitive process built off anticipation of the likelihood of bad stuff happening. That’s why Cognitive Behavioural Therapy is so effective with it. Breathing properly, yoga, meditation and mindfulness are our ways to reset our fight-flight nervous system response. We’re working off the probability that something bad will happen and it’s largely cognitive without any specific ‘on’ stimuli or trigger.

Anxiety, unlike fear and aggression, DOES spill out all the time, cue or no cue. No on-switch, no off-switch. The more you sensitise your system to it, the more you become anxious.

You may argue that since it’s a cognitive process, dogs don’t feel anxiety. Dogs, you may argue, in light of lack of evidence, do not think. As always absence of evidence is not evidence of absence. And there’s plenty of evidence that dogs do anticipate things anyway. If they can anticipate things like walks and become excited, there’s no reason they can’t anticipate bad stuff happening. Maybe, by my own definition, you’d prefer to say anxiety is fearfulness without a clearly-defined on-button and off-button.

But I work with dogs who live in a state of panic that bad stuff will happen. They are constantly anticipating threat where none is present. Anxiety happens in a stimulus vacuum. I watch videos of dogs who are on edge because they are expecting something to happen, and until it does, that feeling will just grow and grow and grow. We maybe call this something else: nervousness, fearfulness. We think of it as a personality trait. I never watch videos of dogs in yards who just become randomly aggressive – there’s always a trigger. But I watch videos of dogs in yards who are constantly anxious – no trigger necessary.

Anxiety doesn’t work on Success or Failure criterion. My anxiety about my car is on the leanest reinforcement schedule. My worries have paid off 1 day out of 365. Compulsive behaviours don’t always work on success or failure criteria, either. In fact, I’d say a behaviour is compulsive when it too has no “That’s all, folks!” signal to say “Stop doing this now!” and compulsions also seem to have weak or undefined triggers that can be hard to pin down.

The trouble is, when I see an anxious dog on video, no aural, visual or odorant ‘start’ buttons, what I’m watching is a dog whose emotions are spilling out everywhere at random. I’m watching a dog engaged in cognitive processes that I can’t put an off-switch on. It’s a cognitive process that I can train humans to override (or medicate as well) but I can’t use CBT on dogs. It’s exactly the same with compulsions.

That’s what I hate. Fear and anger have such clear on and off switches with such clear functions that it’s easy to work with them. Empowering dogs so they understand the universe and can learn to operate it better is crucial, as is trusting the guardian to behave in a way that has the same function. I’ll never forget the look of relief on one dog’s face when I yelled at a person hurtling towards us. It was a look of understanding that I dealt with the threat for her. I told the MGM lion, ‘Not Today!’

But I can’t teach a dog so easily to rationalise the things that make them anxious. Sure, breathing is crucial. But teaching a panicking dog to breathe is no easy task. There ARE things I can do – lowering stress levels is huge, and empowering the dog through desensitisation to environmental stimuli is another. I can do all kinds of things to help them understand that they are safe. But it’s not as easy. Anxiety doesn’t have a function as such. It just puts you in a heightened state of arousal just in case. That’s pretty crappy, to be wired on a hair trigger ‘just in case’ something bad happens. As the saying goes, “Worrying is as effective as trying to solve an algebra equation by chewing bubble gum.”

But you can’t tell that to a dog who thinks that their anxiety and high-alert behaviour is saving them from who knows what harms. You can’t tell that to a dog engaging in compulsive behaviours that seem to have no function.

So be kind to your anxious dogs and do as much as you can to help them understand that the world is a safe place. Understand that it is a curse that there are no easy cures for, and that if dogs could deal with it, they would. Nobody likes feeling anxious. However, understanding that there may be no clear on and off switches can help – as well as helping your dog become more resilient. Work hard at identifying those MGM lions and “That’s all, folks!” signs. They do exist for anxiety and compulsions. There may be lots of them, or ones we’ve not worked out yet, but they do exist.

And don’t think that just because aggression and fear are sometimes ‘cleaner’ and ‘clearer’ than anxiety that they are easier to work with. The stakes are higher when extremes of the fight-flight pathway is involved, that’s for sure. But just because you’ve found the things that make the MGM lion appear, or the reinforcers that tell the behaviour “That’s all, folks!” to end it, doesn’t mean it’s an easy job to overcome them. Theoretically, they are nice, neat learning processes, but real life is messy. Those MGM lions can pop up without warning. Still, it’s not quite so difficult to work them out.

I think we should spend a little less time, though, thinking about the signals that say ‘Now!’ and focus on the things that tell the behaviour that its job has been achieved. Once you work out that, it’s so much easier to work on those unproductive behaviours.

More on resilience, I promise!

EDIT: if you’re interested in more information about fear and anxiety, there’s a great podcast with Hannah Branigan and her guest Dr Chris Pachel, who talks in the same distinctions I do and has some answers and ideas about anxiety too. Listen to it here