My dog is afraid of the car: 10 steps for change!

Why is my dog afraid of the car?

This is a tough one! You’re dying to take your dog out on lovely walks with the family - and she quakes and quivers at the sight of the car.

This is usually only found in rehomed dogs who have had a bad experience in a vehicle. But it can happen also with the family dog who used to enjoy car journeys till there was a motor accident.

The most carefully-nurtured puppy may be afraid of the car because it means carsickness. Some pups are carsick, some never are. Travel your puppy in the front seat of the car - between the wheels - where there is less movement, take corners slowly, and have a bucket ready. You can strap in his crate with the seatbelt. This phase will gradually pass.

If your dog’s reaction is extreme, with shaking, scrabbling to get away, drooling, and evident misery, you may need to talk to your vet about a mild sedative to calm the dog enough to start on a protocol to readjust her attitude to the car.

There are some very good herbal remedies which do not require a prescription which may help - they are often marketed as a calmer for firework nights.

The last thing to do is try to force the dog into the car!

This will only increase the fear and anxiety. What you can do is slowly and gradually change her view of the car as somewhere safe and pleasant to be.

Jet the young black Labrador had to be lifted into the car as he was fearful of getting in by himself. I suggested to his owners that they shut the garden gates, prepare his food as usual, walk out to the car, open the boot and place the bowl in the car as far back as possible from the edge. Then leave the dog to figure out how to get this food all by himself.

I hinted it could take a few days.

Next morning they reported back to me: they’d placed the food in the car, and started to walk away only to hear Jet leaping into the back of the car and scarfing down his dinner! One happy owner.

Here are 10 steps to change your dog’s approach to the car

1. For some dogs, it’s the vibration and noise of the car engine that is the problem. So take your dog out to the car, sit in the car yourself without the engine running, leave ALL the doors open, and toss top-class treats (sausage, raw steak) to her outside the car. Let her decide when she’d like to get closer to you. She can climb in beside you if she likes, have some more food, then you can both get out and leave it for the day.

2. Repeat this a few times and your dog will be keen to get in with you. Once you’ve achieved that stage, you can start to close the doors for a moment, then get out.

3. If your dog loves playing fetch, a great game of tossing her favourite toy into the back of the car, or right through it (all doors open) can work wonders.

4. Next step is, with doors and windows closed, turn the engine on for a short while, ensuring the exhaust isn’t blowing back into the vehicle. Do NOT drive the car! But keep up the flow of treats. These steps will take as long as they take. Don’t be in a hurry to push forward till your dog is really happy about the previous step.

5. After a few times doing this step, you may notice that your dog is calmer and exhibiting less anxiety (tension in face and ears, wide darting eyes, paddling the feet, etc). Now you can actually roll the car forward or back a little way, and that’s it for the day.

6. When you first pull out of your drive and actually move along the road, make it a very short journey ending in something spectacular - a run in the park, a visit to granny, or just straight back home for a great game.

7. Another thing that can help: ensure that there is a door or window open when you shut the boot. The shockwave from the boot-slam can be very distressing for a dog. Sit in the car yourself with doors and windows closed while someone else slams the boot shut and you’ll see what I mean.

8. For some dogs, travelling in a cage they can’t see out of is very effective. It could be to do with carsickness, fear of cars approaching behind your car, or just that they want to bark at everything that moves as they pass.

9. If your dog is happy in the car but hesitant to get in, you may need a vet check to rule out a physical issue. It can be an advanced warning of hip trouble. Meanwhile, a ramp or sturdy step can help.

10. And never let your dog - especially a young dog - jump out of the car onto a hard surface (road, dry or frozen ground)! This can seriously damage his shoulders.

Barking in the car can be completely solved by either covering the crate or using blackout material to cover the inside of the windows. Never was there an easier solution to a common and aggravating problem!

Experiment and see what works for your dog. And once you’ve worked out how to get him into the car, check out this post to find the best way to keep secure.

Now you can head off on some of those great country walks!

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My dog’s NOT afraid of fireworks! But why?

Fears have been high up in doggy discussions recently. It’s the Fireworks season in the UK and this is what’s brought them bubbling to the surface again.

Remember, remember, the 5th of November - gunpowder, treason, and plot!

And one thing common to a lot of these discussion threads was the surprise registered by owners of reactive dogs who were not upset at all by the noise. Some of these new owners had got prepared for the onslaught and were expecting the worst - then were utterly astonished that their dog couldn’t care less about it all.

So perhaps a little look at the subject of fear would be helpful here. 

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Is all fear the same?

Humans are born with only two fears: fear of falling and fear of loud noises. And these fears are stimulated in the Apgar tests for newborns, to elicit the startle reflex and check that all is well neurologically with the baby. All other fears are learned.

So fear of ghosts, planes, spiders, heights, and so on, are acquired on our journey through life. Many of these fears are developed early on, and can be heavily influenced by our family's response. A mother who is afraid of spiders can quickly transfer this fear to her children, while the mother who is happy to pick up an insect and take it to a place of safety is likely to have children who are curious about the other species in their environment and not fearful of them. It’s also true that a natural predisposition to be cautious around predators means that people are more likely to be afraid of creatures than of … bicycles, or trees.

Now the jury is out on whether dogs are born with any fears. Certainly there will be a predisposition to fear certain things, and the social influence of the mother and the environment in which the pups are reared are definitely going to have a big effect. Hence the supreme importance of early and proper socialisation for puppies up to the age of 12-15 weeks (jury is out on the timescale too).  

But we can certainly influence this fear by showing extreme fear ourselves. 

Will I make my dog worse if I cuddle her?

Fear is an emotion. And you cannot reinforce an emotion. It’s either there or it isn’t. You can only reinforce a chosen behaviour. While it is not possible to reinforce the emotion of fear - that is, to reward it and encourage it and make it stronger and more likely to occur - by giving comfort to a frightened person or dog, it’s certainly possible to plant the idea that fear is the correct response to something. Hence the general firework advice to mask the noises and flashes as much as possible (loud tv, curtains drawn, prepare a den) and carry on as normal yourself.  

You can't make your dog more afraid by comforting her.

And this advice also extends to not making your dog afraid of other dogs by being afraid yourself! So many people anticipate a bad outcome at the sight of another dog - maybe because their dog is reactive and has barked and lunged in the past - that they will tense up, breathe quickly, panic, tighten their grip on the lead, winding it six times round their hand to shorten it. This is telling your dog that you are afraid of the incoming dog, and that strange dogs are inherently dangerous. As you’ll see in the Growly posts on this site, your first response at sight of an incoming dog should always be

• Relax hands

• Relax shoulders

• Breathe out

• Relax lead

This will be telling your dog that you are ok with the incomer. (Whether you are or not is beside the point!)

What’s conditioning? And what’s counter-conditioning?

So fears grow in people and in dogs through experience, through social learning, and from a pre-disposition - self-preservation is all-important, so being afraid of things about to pounce on you is sensible. There’s also genetics to factor in. Some dog breeds are more alert to strange things in their environment than others, and are going to be faster to develop fears - unless that careful socialisation, familiarisation, and habituation, is done.

So your puppy is being conditioned to certain fears through his life experience. A snake appears and mum runs away from it: noted - snakes are dangerous.

Counter-conditioning is when we weigh in to lessen a fear, or lessen the impact the fear will have, by changing the association in the dog’s mind to something good. If every time that pup sees a snake you stuff pork pie in his mouth - his emotional response is going to change, over time! No, we don’t want him getting curious about the snake and approaching it - but we equally don’t want him to panic and run off - into the path of our modern-day killer, a car.

Your dog is going to be afraid of things he’s learnt to be afraid of. It follows that without that experience he’s not going to have the fear in place. Of course there are dogs who are so psychologically damaged that they have a generalised fear of everything. But even these can be brought to a level of comfort with patience and dedication, and possibly medication.

So being afraid of snakes is not going to make your dog also afraid of cars. And being afraid of other dogs is not going to make him afraid of horses, or sheep, … or fireworks. 

Cricket will sleep through a thunderstorm!

Cricket the Whippet will sleep through almost anything!

In my own household I have two (Lacy and Coco) who will ignore most fireworks, but bark at a very loud bang - it’s an “alert bark” not a panic attack - one (Cricket the Whippet, the professional sleeper) who is not at all bothered, and Rollo the usually independent Border Collie who gets very unhappy and worried.

During the firework season Rollo sticks to me like a limpet, wedging himself under my legs and following me pathetically wherever I go. It’s at least reassuring that I am considered a place of safety. The situation is manageable without medication, as he doesn’t panic and damage himself trying to escape - as some dogs do.

The interesting part - for the purposes of this discussion - is that Rollo is not what is commonly termed “reactive”, while Lacy and Coco most definitely are.

Border Collies are a sensitive breed with superb hearing. So if they’re going to be worried about anything it’s understandable that loud and sharp noises would be up there. But it’s not automatic that a Collie would be noise-sensitive, any more than the dog who is afraid of men in hats, for instance, should also fear children. 

So what you can take away from this is that fears will exist in your dog; you can minimise those fears with appropriate socialisation at the correct age; you can help make those fears manageable with careful training; and that a fear of one thing does not automatically imply a fear of anything else. 

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