Episode 30 - Is It A Fear Period? Recognizing and Navigating Fear Periods in Puppies

3/17/2025

This episode’s question is about fear periods.

“What are the critical fear stages in puppies from 8 weeks on? Is it best to keep up their socialization during these periods or back off for a few days and then resume?”

In this episode I discuss:

How to recognize fear periods as opposed to general fearfulness.
The evolutionary reasons that puppies have fear periods
Navigating fear periods in puppies and dogs

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To read the transcript for this episode, click the link below.

Transcript - Episode 30

I'm Jane Messineo Lindquist., and this is a Puppy Culture Potluck podcast. You bring the topics, we bring the conversation.

This week's question is about fear periods in puppies. Specifically later fear periods. And here's the question.

What are the critical fear stages in puppies from eight weeks on? Is it best to keep up their socialization during these periods, or back off for a few days and then resume?

Okay, me again, I'm going to get right to the point and answer her question directly and say that if my puppy is truly in a fear imprint period, I do back off of socialization.

I am very cautious with puppies that are in a true fear period, and I will keep them at home until they've cleared that fear period. Now that having been said, I think we need to talk a little bit about fear periods, what they are and are not, and how to recognize them, because it's a persistent theme that comes up that people confuse general, possibly genetic or environmentally induced fear with fear periods. And there can be negative effects for the puppies by this misclassification.

Before I jump in, I want to say this is not going to be a course level treatment of this topic. I do treat this topic in our breeders course which is Newborn to New Home in Madcap University, but I want to give a global sort of overview of fear periods and their significance to you as a puppy owner or as a breeder.

Because, as I said, there's a lot of misconceptions about this, which I believe leads to taking the incorrect actions under the circumstances. I also am going to preface this by saying that most of what I'm going to be telling you is based on my own observation and experience. There just is not a lot of scientific study specifically on fear periods in puppies. Anecdotal evidence is good evidence, but it is anecdotal evidence. So take that for what it's worth.

So let's talk about the developmental aspects of the emotion of fear. Puppies are born without a true fear response. They have reflexive responses, but it's doubtful that any of that feeds to the brain in the sense of a fear response. Makes sense if you think about it, because fear is a metabolically expensive emotion, the cortisol that has to be raised when you have fear in order to allow you to fight or flight, it's metabolically expensive, and nature and evolution are economical, and they're not going to instill fear in an organism that can't act on it. So a newborn puppy cannot act on fear. Fear would be a useless emotion. They don't have fear.

Now this can vary, but somewhere around five weeks old, puppies have their initial fear response. I've talked about this a lot in my podcasts, but at the risk of being boring, I'm going to give you two studies on this.

One, they did a study of Cavalier King Charles Spaniels, German Shepherds and Yorkshire Terriers. They found that the average per breed onset of initial fear, so that fear right around five weeks old, varied by 16 days between breeds, with the German Shepherds having a fear response on average 16 days before the Cavalier King Charles Spaniels. The other study is a study that was done of German Shepherds and Labrador Retrievers.

They found that 95% of German Shepherd puppies had an initial fear response by five weeks old, and only 5% of Labrador Retriever puppies had an initial fear response at five weeks old.

Now let's talk about the second fear imprint period, which is what people refer to often as the eight week fear period. Let's distinguish what a fear period is. So a fear imprint period from generalized fear.

A fear period, you may see generalized fear during the fear period, but it has certain hallmark characteristics. And these are just things that I have observed over the years. A fear imprint period is going to have three things. It's going to be acute meaning to say it comes out of nowhere. One day the puppies are happy little campers, and the next day they're afraid of something.

The something that they're afraid of is something familiar. So it's not that you took them to a garden center, and they'd never been to a garden center, and they're crawling on the floor because the HVAC is booming and there are people around and no, that's not a fear period. Or I mean, it could be a fear period, but that wouldn't be information that tells you the puppies are in a fear period.

A fear period is they've walked past that sculpture of a pig every day of their little lives, and one day they see it and freak out and say, what? Who let that creature into what is that thing? Is it does. Is it going to kill me? Classic fear period. Would be noises like an oven fan. I had a puppy suddenly be afraid of an oven fan.

That that puppy had been out every day of its life, and one day it was afraid of an oven fan coming on. That was my tell that puppy was in the fear period. So it's something familiar that the puppies had experience with, never been afraid of, and suddenly is afraid of. And the third characteristic of a fear period, which is functionally the most important one to you as a breeder or puppy owner, is that it's transitory.

That means that if you do nothing else except keep things calm, quiet, and on the down low for your puppies during that fear period, and don't push it or ruin it by trying to flood your puppy and wind up sensitizing your puppy to the fear it will pass on its own. No further action from you required. So now that we've defined how we know what a fear period is, let's talk about the function of fear periods.

As I mentioned in the beginning of the podcast. Fear is metabolically very expensive. It's not something that nature is going to instill in a puppy unless the puppy can act on it. So when do we see these early, these first two fear periods normally? They normally do correspond with a time when the puppies have a big jump in mobility.

So up until five weeks old, what are the puppies ever going to see? Their mother, their aunties and uncles. They're there. They don't have the wherewithal to get out and toddle out into the world and get into trouble. Fear is a useless emotion for them. They're never going to see anything they should be afraid of. And frankly, if something gets into their nest that they should be afraid of, it's just not going to do them any good to be afraid because they can't defend themselves or run away.

But then, at five weeks old, again speaking on very broad averages, this is when puppies first get their legs under them. They can wander away. It is possible for the first time that they could run into some kind of trouble without a protective adult around. So fear becomes a useful emotion for them.

And not to take too deep dive into it, but let's just say at eight weeks old on average, we do see another jump in mobility. So once again, the puppy has new opportunities to get into trouble and it is helpful for that puppy to have a heightened sense of fear at that time.

I just want to clarify something. This correlation between increase in mobility and increase in fear, and spikes in increase in mobility, and spikes in increases of fear are on a population level. What do I mean by that? It means that as a breeder, it's not diagnostic information for you that you have a puppy that's a little more mobile, a little earlier that maybe that puppy's going to be in in an earlier fear period.

No, it doesn't track that way, at least not that I have ever observed. But what I'm trying to do is give you an idea of what these fear periods are, and why they happen. Because 99% of the times when someone's writing in and saying that their dog is in a fear period after those first two fear periods, they're mislabeling the phenomenon.

They're not understanding what's going on. There are other kinds of fear that are genetically mediated that appear later in life, but they are persistent and will not pass without some kind of learning. The fact that they appear suddenly and later is not a fear period. It's the fact that that particular gene is now expressing itself, or their latent reactions to earlier experiences.

Remember that fearful experiences in the first year of life will almost never express themselves behaviorally in the puppy at the time. So the puppy will appear to recover from an aversive or scary event, but either fear or aggression will seemingly spontaneously emerge when the dog gets older. And even if there were true fear periods when the dog has a heightened sensitivity to frightening events, after that eight week old period. They're not predictable in terms of an age window, after that second fear imprint period.

Let's think about this. At birth breeds are different behaviorally, but very, very little in the neonatal period other than puppies of small size being more subject to hypoglycemia and and chilling. Behaviorally, puppies are pretty much identical in the neonatal period.

By the time they reach their initial fear period, there's much more difference. Okay, remember 95% of German Shepherds at five weeks with the fear period, only 5% of Labradors with the fear period at five weeks. So you see the trajectories are starting to go in different directions.

Now take that and extrapolate that out to six months or a year old. Plus add in all the environmental input, all the experiences. What's happened to that puppy, what socialization was or wasn't done, whether it was done well, whether it was desensitization or habituation, or whether the owner flooded the puppy, every bit of input or lack of input that the puppy had. And you see those trajectories spreading further and further. And this is why when you read the internet stuff on later fear periods, they appear to almost overlap and form a continuous net of possible times that your puppy could be in a fear year period.

It's really true. You don't know, and you also don't really know if it's a fear period or some other genetic or latent environmental response. So that's a long way of saying that in my observation. Maybe there could be a fear period after eight weeks, but they're all over the place and they most often are not true fear periods. They're something else.

The reason why I think this is so significant and important for people to understand, is that you have to do work with these puppies, okay? It is true, as I said in the beginning, when I have a puppy that is in a true fear period. So either around that five week age or around that eight week age, for me, when I see that acute, transitory fear of the familiar, when it's those three things.

Yes, I do hold back those puppies. Yes, I do keep them from having any new socialization or new experiences until I'm sure that they've cleared that fear period, As they age that strategy's not going to work for you, okay? As they age, even if it comes on suddenly and seems to you like, oh my gosh, it must be a fear period because it came out of nowhere.

Chances are it didn't come out of nowhere. Chances are that your puppy or dog is having genetics that are coming on online later in life, which is normal. They're black boxes. You don't know what you get. It's a box of chocolates. They're coming online now, and now you're seeing what you have. And what you may have is a fearful dog.

For sure, young animals can be socially uncertain. They can have heightened senses of fear. They can be more sensitive to fear. And just in the the balance of treading the line between habituation, socialization and sensitization, where you want to be counter conditioning fears and also creating positive associations. But you don't want to be flooding your puppies where you're you're sensitizing them to things.

When you're treading that line If you are seeing increased fear in your puppy. Yeah. I mean, you want to err on the side of caution, but that's always true. It's not that specific thing that is a fear period where the puppy is going to get over it if you just don't mess it up, you have to work with it. So you do have to get those puppies out. You do have to softly work on the edges of desensitizing, counter conditioning, fear in older puppies.

It's a little bit of a pet peeve for me about these so-called later fear periods, because. I have certainly seen things that look to me like fear periods in young adult dogs. It's rare, and there's usually another explanation that does require action on the part of the puppy owner.

I have a concern that once something is labeled as a fear period, puppy owners will say, oh, you know, it's a fear period. Instead of dealing with whatever is being expressed behaviorally at these later stages in in puppy hood and young adulthood, because a fear period will pass with protection. But if you're dealing with a genetic or behavioral issue, you need to address it with training and counter conditioning.

So to sum it all up, fear period is acute, transitory fear of the familiar, will pass if you just protect the puppy during that time. Yes, in direct answer to the question, I do hold my puppies back during fear periods, but the fear periods, so-called fear periods after that second fear in print period, I treat that as I would treat generalized fear.

And I do get those puppies out and I do work with them. But again, always being careful to be on the positive side of counter conditioning and creating positive associations and not flooding the puppy. So that fear is guiding me where that line is. But it's not changing my operating procedure with those puppies in the way that my operating procedure is actually different. If I think it's a fear period.

If you liked this podcast, you'll love our course for puppy owners, available at puppyculture.com. Breeders, we have courses for you too at puppyculture.com. Breeders, do you want to get your puppy owners started on the right foot with Puppy Culture? You can give your puppy owners the gift of our puppy course at a nice discount when you buy four or more copies available at puppyculture.com.

Well, that's it for this time. Thanks for listening. Bye bye.