WHY DOGS EXPERIENCE FEAR?

Good day colleagues and friends, about a few days ago a good friend of mine asked me if dogs actually felt fear and how does fear work in dogs. 

It is an undisputed fact that emotions drive behavior, moving the dogs towards comfort and pleasure, or away from discomfort and pain. 
Behavior is influenced by physiological processes including the activity of neurotransmitters and hormones. Neurotransmitters, such as serotonin and dopamine, transmit chemical messages in the brains and bodies of dogs and humans and as a result both have the same physiological reactions to behavioral states such as joy, fear, excitement and pain.

Fear often helps dogs (and pretty much any living being), with self-preservation. We feel fear, as well as related emotions, in order to protect ourselves from danger and to heighten our awareness.

Serotonin, for example, has a profound affect over emotions and is responsible for regulating mood, enhancing a positive feeling and inhibiting aggressive response. 
Dopamine helps to focus attention, promoting feelings of satisfaction. A lack of these neurotransmitters causes irritability, limited impulse control, over reactivity, anxiety and greater sensitivity to pain.

A dog’s nose dominates his brain; in fact the part of the brain dedicated to scent is forty times greater in a dog than in a human. The dog’s brain is literally built around the information it gets from scent and as smell is so closely linked to emotions(hippocampus), this provides even more evidence that the dog’s emotional experience might be even greater than we could ever imagine. 

The dog’s brain is literally built around the information it gets from scent and as smell is so closely linked to emotions.

When a dog is fearful, a number of changes happen in the body. The heart beats faster, blood pressure rises and blood flow is diverted to muscles that prepare for fight or flight. 

Stress from threat causes the dog to ‘shut down,’ effectively freezing him until the threat goes away. In this state of anxiety the dog ceases to learn and becomes more insecure, frightened and/or angry. If he cannot practice avoidance, the only other option left is to bite.

This awareness is thought to be controlled by a section of the brain known as the amygdale.

The amygdale is a section of the dog's brain's limbic system that is responsible for detecting fear and preparing for emergency events. It is surrounded by the pineal gland (gland that produces melatonin so the dog knows when it's time to sleep), and the hippocampus (part of the limbic system that stores memories).

The amygdale is an almond-shaped section of the nervous tissue located in the temporal(side) lobe of the brain. There are two amygdale per dog, one on each side of the brain. They are thought to be a part of the limbic system within the brain, which is responsible for emotions, survival instincts, and memory. However it has been debated with evidence that the amygdale functions independently of the limbic system. 

The hippocampus and the amygdale work in unison with the hypothalamic pituitary adrenal axis (HPA), which is responsible for the release of epinephrine (adrenalin), which provides the necessary fuel an animal needs to flee or fight. 

The amygdale is responsible for the perception of emotions such as anger, fear, and sadness, as well as the controlling of aggression.

The Amygdale is not really a thinking part of the brain, but it's actual job is to become alert from bad memories and just react, triggering the dog's hypothalamus to initiate the fight and flight response.

Sometimes the amygdale can also be an area for seizure activity. This is because a seizure focuses in the amygdale because it produces inexplicable and intense fear.

Also, one of the parts of the brain involved in this higher-order cognition is the prefrontal cortex (PFC). This region of the brain has direct connections to both the hippocampus and the amygdale and appears able to mediate some of the signals coming from those two regions. Functional MRI studies tell us that while fear acquisition involves the amygdala, fear extinction (learning to let go of a fear) involves the PFC as well. We also know that people who have thicker PFCs are better at extinguishing fear associations. This mediation by the PFC is what lets us take a deep breath and choose not to give in to our fears.

Despite of how bad we might think fear is, we ought to remember that fear can be good as well, because fear is important as it protects dogs (and other living being) allowing self-preservation and protection of the species.  So therefore being fearful is not always a bad thing, it's actually good if the dog is fearful of things that can actually pose a threat to his and wellbeing. 

So in a few words and to answer my friend's question, dogs can feel fear, and it works in the same physiological and chemical way as it does in humans.

I hope this post could get you out of doubt, or at least give you an idea of how fear works like in dogs. 

MVZ Carolina Pruneda