Fearfulness

One of the biggest challenges I hear about and experience myself on a daily basis is fearfulness. A wolfdogs instinctual timidness of new people and new places can be one of the hardest things to manage and one of the hardest things to overcome. Their natural fearfulness of anything new and different can create many obstacles. It makes what should be somewhat simple things like wearing a collar and leash, or being embraced in a hug, or coming indoors a complicated task. Then there are the hard tasks like transporting your wolfdog, vet visits, walking them down a busy street, a group of people coming inside your home, into something that requires a lot of planning and specific execution. Not all wolfdogs are fearful, and some are just really specific about what they are scared of. So why is that?

This is one of those areas where it can be really hard to generalize as wolfdogs can be so different in this regard. As always, the type of fearfulness you will see and the intensity of it is a function of nature and nurture. It depends on how much wolf content is in your wolfdog, their specific lineages, how well they were socialized and any specific background experiences they may have had. It’s honestly a really complicated and complex subject, but I will do my best to provide some hopefully useful generalizations.

Kiba, one of our most fearful rescues. She came from a hoarding situation where over 200 dogs were seized from a property. She received very little socialization to humans and as such has many limitations in terms of her interactions with the human world.

Typically, low content wolfdogs show much less intense fear than high content wolfdogs. If you think about it, that makes a lot of sense. Wolves in the wild have had to survive by avoiding things that they are unsure of or that they don’t have experience with. Their entire life is a series of decisions based on a risk-benefit analysis. From a survival standpoint it’s best to just completely avoid anything that is potentially dangerous, and humans happen to be at the top of that list. I won’t go into what happens when wolves are food conditioned to humans, as that complicates things, but generally speaking wolves avoid people in order to survive. They have also been extensively hunted by humans and therefore evolved to have that fear of humans. This is why many of the Arctic wolves in Ellesmere Island aren’t very fearful of humans as they just haven’t been exposed to all the bad aspects of humans.

The more wolf that is bred into a wolfdog, the more of this natural fear of anything new and different exists, and of course at a much higher intensity level. I will put in a disclaimer that nowadays there are definitely a good number of high content wolfdog bloodlines that produce puppies with a lower inclination for that intense fear; meaning that if they are socialized really well they may not have that same intense fear of new people and new places. Those are still the exception, not the norm. So going forward I will talk in generalities and off of my experiences with the average wolfdog, not the exceptions.

So back to degree of fearfulness. Domestic dogs were bred to work with us humans and be a part of evert aspect of our lives. This is why domestic dogs generally love people, most don’t have issues being transported or being able to walk down a street, etc. Again, there are exceptions, but your average well bred and well socialized dog enjoys living amongst humans. Wearing a collar and leash is normal. Living inside a home is normal. Being in urban environments is normal. Being crated trained and left alone inside at home for 8 hours is normal.

Nova being socialized to being in the transport kennel of the truck. We practiced a lot with just him hanging out in there with his toys and treats, without the truck ever going anywhere! This helped create positive associations to the transport kennel.

Wolfdogs fall somewhere in the middle between dog behaviour and wolf behaviour. Depending on how much wolf content is bred into them will dictate how much fear they display as well as the intensity level of that fear. As an example, there is still a big difference dealing with the type of fear a feral dog displays versus the type of fear a wolf displays. That fear stems from two very different places. For the feral dog it is usually a learnt behaviour that comes from a lack of socialization and bad experiences. With a wolf it comes from instinct, meaning it’s wired into them for survival. Let me reword this. A feral dog still has the underlying blueprint of domestication (and therefore an affinity towards humans) but due to their lack of experience with humans or going through bad experiences, feral dogs develop a fear of humans. Often, through rehabilitation, we can make great progress in these dogs learning to trust people. The normal state for a dog is to like people, and when bad things happen to them, like abuse or neglect, they learn to be afraid of people. For wolves it’s the opposite. Wolves are innately afraid of people. However, when we get high content wolfdog puppies and we do our utmost best to socialize them to people, we are taking them out of their normal thinking framework. We are essentially “brainwashing” them into thinking their natural instinct that people are scary and bad, is wrong. It can be an uphill battle, but it can be done to a certain degree with a lot of patience, time and consistency. You have to remember they are very susceptible to regressing to their old thinking patterns. That is why it is critical for your wolfdog not to have any major negative human experiences. Their natural state of being is to be afraid of people, we do all this work to build trust and convince them people are good. All it takes is one negative, impactful experience and all your hardwork can be un-done, or at least significantly damaged.

Okay, that was a long winded explanation on why fearfulness exists and how it can present in some wolfdogs. Now onto the point of it all… what can we do about it? I have already done a post on socialization and why it’s important so if you haven’t read that yet, I encourage you to do so. Socialization is your best chance at reducing and eliminating certain fears. Ideally, socialization to everything in our human world begins when the puppy opens its eyes, well into their adolescence. We have to start handling them as soon as possible and begin that rewiring process. I recommend doing some research on socializing puppies. Ian Dunbar’s book, After You Get Your Puppy is a great resource to learn all about raising and socializing a puppy. There is a fine balance between socializing a puppy and overloading it, so you do have to be careful. The more positive human experiences you can expose your wolfdog puppy to at a young age the better. The term positive is really important here. In order to convince wolfdogs that their fear of a small enclosed space like a crate is wrong, you would make the crate the best place ever. Same thing with wearing a collar and leash, or going in a vehicle, going to a dog park, saying hi to strangers. You need to make all these experiences really positive so that you can rewire their thinking. This takes A LOT of consistency and repetition, and remember certain fears you may never be able to overcome. With a real honest effort, you can likely minimize a lot of these fears. To what extent will be a combination of the genetic predisposition of your wolfdog as well as the socialization process itself.

One thing I have learnt over the years as well is, use it or lose it! As an example, Kuna used to wear a collar, be put on leash and transported in a vehicle on a fairly regular basis. This was to go out for walks in the forest, and as a result she was well socialized to it. It was a positive thing for her and essentially the leash and the truck ride became normalized in her mind. The collar and leash became easy, and the truck ride became doable (she would still become quite stressed and impatient in the vehicle, but she would readily load up into it). Then when we moved and had enough land where we didn’t have to go someplace else for a walk, she no longer needed to be leashed for our walks or travel in the truck. Well years went by without her wearing a collar and leash or going in a vehicle, she then tore her cruciate ligament in both her knees and needed to wear a collar and leash, go into a vehicle and go to the vet. Well when I tried to put that collar and leash on her, she was not a happy camper and was scared of it. Asking her to tolerate being in the truck was difficult! She lost the skill of wearing that collar and leash and readily loading up and travelling in a vehicle. After quite some practice we got that skill back, but it reminded me that unless you keep up that socialization, they may revert back to some of those old fearful thinking patterns. It’s a great example of the fact that her lack of fear of the collar and leash was a learnt behaviour, but once she hadn’t experienced it for a long time, her innate instinctual fear of it was lying under the surface all this time. Fascinating stuff!

Kuna and Zeus knew that getting in the truck meant we were going for a forest walk so they were conditioned to accept riding in the truck and were even happy to jump into the box! Once the truck started moving they would become nervous but would tolerate the experience.

So what happens when there are certain fears you can’t socialize out of a wolfdog? Because if all it took was a lot of socialization and your wolfdog would behave like a dog and not be scared of anything, I wouldn’t be receiving email after email of people wanting to surrender their wolfdogs, and you likely wouldn’t be reading this! Well the best thing we can do is to manage our own expectations. When you decided to get a wolfdog, you should have known there were going to be challenges, and your wolfdog being fearful of things should have been near the top of your list. It’s up to us as their guardians to adapt our lives to suite theirs. If your wolfdog is terrified of being in a public place, don’t take your wolfdog to public places. You are responsible for their quality of life and if they are deathly afraid of something, it isn’t fair for you to continually subject your wolfdog to that fear. I’m not saying you can’t work on that fear and try to make positive associations to that scary thing. What I am saying is you need to put your ego and your expectations aside and realize some animals have very specific limitations that you have to respect. It is up to you to truly understand your wolfdog and do what is right and fair to them.

Here at the Sanctuary for example, we have some wolfdogs that came to us extremely under socialized and are very fearful of people. They have come to somewhat trust myself and the other staff at the Sanctuary, but being open to the public and having new people around all the time can be very overwhelming to some of these wolfdogs. One of the things we have done to make those animals comfortable is to put them in private enclosures where there is absolutely no access to the public. On a daily basis we will work with them to gain their trust and try to teach them humans aren’t scary, but realistically speaking we know some of these animals will never be okay being around people. That’s perfectly okay! We have to respect their limitations and ensure that we are providing them with an environment that is comfortable for them. If that means a visitor will never see a particular wolfdog (even if they really really want to) that’s just how it is. It’s our job to do what is right by them, not the other way around.

So to recap, fearfulness in wolfdogs is NORMAL. We have to put in the work to try to rewire their brains to not be so fearful of certain things, but expect certain fears to always be there. As much as it is our job to put in that socialization work, we also have to manage our own expectations of what a certain wolfdog will be capable of.