Fear of Dogs

Why dog fear is hard to count and avoid

Timothy O. Rentz, of the Laboratory for the Study of Anxiety Disorders at the University of Texas, is quoted in that article for the proportion that matters most here: among people who seek treatment for an animal phobia, thirty-six per cent report a fear of dogs or of cats. That is a clinic figure and not a population one, and the difference is worth holding onto, because the same article notes from DSM-IV-TR that only twelve to thirty per cent of people with any specific phobia ever present for treatment. Whatever the true frequency of dog fear is, four fifths of it never reaches a clinician who could count it.

The second difficulty is social rather than epidemiological. Dog owners tend to treat their animal as a known quantity and the fear as a misunderstanding to be corrected by introduction, which is the opposite of what a person avoiding the animal is trying to achieve. Avoidance in this phobia is therefore visible: crossing a road, declining an invitation to a house, giving up a park.

Why an encyclopedia defines cynophobia as fear of rabies

The word is built from the Greek kyon, a dog, and phobos, fear, and the alternative spelling kynophobia preserves the vowel the Latin route flattened.

The definition drifts, and the drift is documented. The 2008 edition of Doctor, Kahn and Adamec's encyclopedia of phobias defines cynophobia as fear of dogs or fear of rabies, treating the animal and the disease it can carry as one heading. That is a nineteenth-century inheritance surviving into a twenty-first-century reference book. The two fears come apart cleanly in practice, since a person frightened of rabies is frightened of an infection with a vector, and a person frightened of dogs is frightened of the animal whether or not it is healthy.

Whether being bitten explains a dog phobia

S. Rachman proposed in 1977 that a fear can be acquired in three ways, and each has a plain form here:

• by direct experience, which is being bitten
• by watching it happen to somebody else, which is seeing a friend bitten
• by being told, which is growing up beside a parent who crosses the road

A study at the State University of New York tested whether the first route explains the outcome. Thirty-seven women aged eighteen to twenty-one were sorted into a dog-fearing group and a non-fearing one, then asked whether they had ever had a frightening or painful encounter with a dog and what they expected to happen when they met one. Painful encounters turned out to be common in both groups. What separated them was the expectation, not the history. Being bitten, on that evidence, is neither necessary nor sufficient.

Arne Öhman argued at the twenty-fifth annual meeting of the Society for Psychophysiological Research that animal fears are a remnant of the pressure to avoid becoming prey, which would make some of the reaction older than any of the three routes. Martin Antony, in Overcoming Animal and Insect Phobias, allows a fourth possibility for cases where none of Rachman's conditions applies and the patient's memory is sound: that the disposition is inherited. None of these positions is settled, and the honest summary is that a fear this common has no single documented origin.

What the cynophobia age and sex figures actually count

Jeanette M. Bruce and William C. Sanderson, in Specific Phobias, place the usual onset of an animal phobia in early childhood, between five and nine. Willem A. Hoffmann and Lourens H. Human, working in South Africa, found the same pattern for dog fear specifically and also recorded onset as late as twenty. B. K. Wiederhold reports that between seventy-five and ninety per cent of patients presenting with an animal-type specific phobia are women.

Every one of those numbers describes people who arrived at a clinic. Given that only a minority of phobias ever produce a consultation, and that willingness to consult is itself unevenly distributed, the sex ratio in particular should be read as a fact about treatment-seeking rather than a fact about fear.

How long it takes to treat cynophobia

Joseph Wolpe introduced systematic desensitisation in 1958, pairing relaxation with imagined encounters. Hoffmann and Human used it on twelve students at the Arcadia campus of Technikon Pretoria, one hour a week for five to seven weeks, and found three quarters of them improved when they were contacted again eight months later. Wiederhold's objection to the method is that its intensity depends on how vividly the patient imagines, which makes the dose unmeasurable.

The figure that has travelled furthest belongs to Lars-Göran Öst. In a 1988 study of twenty women aged sixteen to forty-four with various specific phobias, he combined prolonged exposure with modelling, someone else demonstrating contact with the animal first, and ended each session when the patient's fear had halved or gone. Collecting results across seven years, he reported:

90% of the patients were much improved or completely recovered after a mean of 2.1 hours of therapy.

A follow-up in 1996 found the improvement held.

What nobody has counted about cynophobia

No population survey has measured fear of dogs on its own. Every figure in the record above is drawn from clinic samples, treatment trials or the broader animal-phobia category, and any percentage of the general public attached to cynophobia is an extrapolation rather than a measurement.