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Health & Fitness

Terry Flanagan: Pet Phobias in Geneva, IL

Are we driving ourselves and our pets crazy?

Friday is garbage pickup day in our neck of the woods, which means our one cat, Harp, will be in a state of near panic most of the morning. He’s deathly afraid of garbage trucks. He loves to be outside, even if it is on a stupid leash. But as soon as he hears the distant rumblings of a garbage truck he bolts for the door, usually getting tangled up in the bushes in his mad dash for safety.

Our other cat, Guinness, isn’t bothered in the least by garbage trucks, but he seems a little schizophrenic about being outside. He thinks he wants to go outside, but once he we take him out, he wants to go back in. If he’s out longer than a few seconds, he starts acting like a soldier in enemy territory, crawling on his belly and looking around as if he were advancing on an enemy position. And he doesn’t seem to recognize us. I know cats can’t get post war stress syndrome, but he looks like he’s having flashbacks to combat days.

Our dog Ginger had a strange phobia, too. She was afraid of a small, wooden Indian we picked up years ago at a souvenir shop in the Dells. She was a great watchdog, but we were always worried about a burglar breaking into the house armed with a small, wooden Indian.

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I’m reasonably certain that Ginger's fear of little wooden Indians was not an inherited trait from her wild ancestors. So how do we account for this and other strange animal behavior one reads about? One theory is that the long association domestic pets have had with humans has modified their behavior to some extent. People certainly do exhibit some strange behavior and phobias at times as do our pets. In fact, the parallels between certain canine and human behavior have made dogs the preferred choice over chimpanzees in scientific studies on human social behavior.

Another theory that might explain odd behavior has been advanced by animal rights activists over the years. They claim that animals go crazy in captivity and they cite examples to prove this claim. Following the death of the trainer at Sea World in February of 2010, experts said that killer whales become neurotic in captivity. Maybe our pets still have some vestige of their wild ancestry that rebels at being in captivity, however comfortable that captivity may be, and that’s what causes them to go a little nutty once in a while. I know that cats act as if they were being held prisoner even if dogs seem to be pretty content with their lot. But dogs don’t like being chained up either.

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Freedom is the natural state for both people and animals. People don’t like to feel trapped any more than animals do. Just being stuck in traffic for an hour is enough for some people to go off the deep end.

Often, though, our captivity is of our own making. We may feel trapped in situations at work or in personal relationships that we feel powerless to do anything about. Rather than fixing the problem we get prescriptions for happy pills like Prozac and Paxil that only mask the problem and further ensnare us into dependency on artificial happiness. Like Marley's ghost we forge the chains that bind us.

As a society, we have also managed to create a complex web of rules and procedures that entrap us rather than guide us. Who hasn’t been frustrated by bureaucratic red tape and the seemingly endless paperwork that has to be filled out to do the simplest things? Why can’t we even talk to a real person in customer service any more without going through a gauntlet of automated questions that seemed designed to thwart us? Even our social interactions have been made more cumbersome by the politically correct protocol that must be observed whether one is aware of it or not, leaving many of us agnozing over whether we've said or done the wrong thing in a situation.

It’s no wonder we are driving ourselves crazy and possibly our dogs and cats crazy along with us. Our pets are probably wondering if they bonded with the wrong species. Maybe we should have let the dogs make up the rules instead. Life would be a lot simpler.   

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