My Dog Teaches … About Fear
 We
tend to be naturally wary or nervous of the unknown. In fact,
that may be all that fear is – uncertainty of what might occur
mixed with the dread that the worst will happen.
Fear can be a useful survival tool to keep us out of dangerous
situations. It can keep us from irrational actions like jumping
off rooftops or jumping into the shark tank.
But fear itself can become irrational, at which point it becomes
detrimental. To someone in fear, actual danger or risk is
irrelevant. It does no good whatsoever to tell a person with a
morbid fear of sharks that there have never been any spotted at
this particular beach; no matter how rational the argument, his
fear tells him that the moment he enters the water, one will
appear and want him for lunch.
The 1975 movie Jaws was notable for the fact that seaside
resorts around the world experienced a dramatic decline in the
two years following its release. Many people were even afraid to
go swimming in freshwater lakes; for these people, the knowledge
that sharks don’t inhabit these waters provided no antidote to
their fear.
A few years ago, Toronto suffered a similar decline in tourism
because of the SARS "epidemic", which infected only a handful of
people. In fact, tourism across this huge expanse of Canada fell
significantly as the risks were blown out of all proportion.
Even the fact that 4,000 kilometers separates Vancouver from
Toronto did not deter many foreigners from canceling their trips
to the west coast.
To a person with a dread of something, odds of a million to one
against any harm coming to him somehow don’t seem to be in his
favor; to him, a million doesn’t seem like the huge number it
is. The motto of the fearful might be, "My fear or nervousness
is palpable and real; I don’t care a whit about facts or
statistics or truth."
Nervousness and fear around dogs are certainly not uncommon
emotions. Especially as we become more urbanized as a society,
opportunities to interact with dogs and other animals diminishes
for a large segment of the population. The news media and others
can then exploit this unfamiliarity; nervousness can be honed
into irrational fear – fear can be sharpened into absolute
dread. One of the reasons news can be so unreliable as a source
of information is that the rare occurrence is sensationalized
while the commonplace is ignored. We become anaesthetized to the
thousands and thousands of people killed every year in
automobile accidents. But throw in a fatality from a shark or
dog attack, and the press have a field day playing up the
dangers of these exceptionally rare occurrences.
Under this deluge of bad news, is it any wonder then that the
world seems to be getting to be a more dangerous place? News is
taking on an aura of Ripley’s Believe it or Not – the
more weird and freaky the story, the more newsworthy it becomes.
Especially in this age of immediate communications, one insane
or bizarrely brutal incident can be used to create fear all
around the world.
In recent years the danger of dogs has been highly exaggerated
by politicians and the press. In 2005, the Ontario government
passed the badly flawed "Dog Owners’ Liability Act",
deliberately using the motivating forces of ignorance and fear.
(As an aside: our governments should not be in the business of
promoting ignorance and inciting hysteria; the media do that job
quite well enough, thank you.)
Yet the fact remains, for anyone who cares to look and as Janis
Bradley so thoroughly demonstrates in her book Dogs Bite: But
Balloons and Slippers are More Dangerous, "… dogs almost
never kill people, and they don’t actually bite very often, and
when they do, we’re seldom injured, and when we are, it’s seldom
serious."
Individually, fear can be overcome. It might take a bit of work
and we will no doubt have to approach it gradually. We can
research to find out correct data. We can observe and gain more
familiarity. We can practice to increase our confidence in our
ability to control. And as we become more and more familiar with
things of which we were afraid, our fear tends to dissipate as
we find out that it was mostly based on the unknown.
All risk cannot be taken out of life. In fact, many would say
that you aren’t living at all if you desire to live in a
protected cocoon free of all potential hazards. It would be much
better to subjugate our fears to a sense of adventure and zest
for life.
Previous "Petitorial"
articles by David McKague:
Editor’s note:
I would like to encourage dog lovers everywhere
to start a PETITION to have this law thrown out or revised to such
a form where justice prevails. SFR.
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