May issue

May issue
May issue

Monday 13 May 2013

Of dogs and men


Hey Dogs Today magazine, 

I was wondering if you could do a article on dogs who are nervous of men? My two-year-old Labrador Jayde is nervous of strangers but its mainly men. From about eight months old, for some reason our happy and sociable little puppy was gone  and was terrified of men. We think that maybe someone came to our house, be it the postman or delivery man while we were working, and it scared her a lot.

We've worked with her a lot over two years by taking her to work with me and dog shows, trying to build her confidence, and she's slowly starting to get better. She still has her bad days where she will run, hide, cower and growl to get away from men and unfortunately because she is a Labrador, people don't see this breed as having any problems and they will often just stroke her without asking which sets her back. However, when she first had this problem their wasn't a lot of information out there about how to deal with it and I was scared that she might have had to be put down in the future for gowling and scaring someone.

Thank you.

Laura Bicknell, by email

3 comments:

  1. Working with a dog who is fearful of men is pretty much the same as working with a dog who is fearful of anything, and - as far as my experience goes - dogs tend to be scared of the male 'half' of the population well before they're scared of the female 'half'.


    I would suggest looking into getting Jayde a hi-vis vest asking for space/to not be petted/to be left alone etc while you're still working through her anxieties.

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  2. Yes it can take just one scarey incident to set off a long term pattern of behaviour like that. The answer will not come quickly. You need to make opportunities for constant positive reinforcement as many times as you can. See a scary man in the distance, then the 'watch me' command, then dog gets big reward. You have to get the dog to unlearn the previous pattern of behaviour and learn a new one. Be patient, it will take time.

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  3. Weird how common this seems to be in dogs that have not suffered any form of abuse in their lives. Women tend to be smaller, have softer voices and maybe more likely to express themselves with body language than men.. I wonder that some dogs simply find men harder to read and coupled with deeper voices, it all becomes too much.

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