This post is not about the Life and Love with the World’s Worst Dog but its about me and how I overcame fear of dogs (and pets). To clarify few things, I do not hate dogs as few people have misinterpreted, I am just scared of all the pets. Whenever I encounter some pets, they try to jump over and lick, I always take that as an attempt to bite me and I run away. It’s not the big sized dogs, it can be a small puppy too. I am even scared of small puppies. There have been cases where I was scared of Mr. Townes (picture below) and in attempt to get away from them I have hurt myself.

Townes Van Zandt

The incident that lessened the fear of dogs happened during Spring Break when I visited Wisconsin. When we started out trip, I was told that I would be meeting St. Bernard. I had no clue about them and I thought of them a just a big sized dogs. Just a quick query on Wikipedia revealed that they are very large dogs which were originally bred as rescue dogs. Still, I could not imagine how large they could be. My first (and only) encountered when we entered the farm, and four of St. Bernard came jumping towards us. I was very scared and did not even come out of the car. When my friend got out, I could compare their size with a human and decided against getting out of car. And then I saw something amazing, one of the dogs pushed the front door of house open. This scared me to limit and magnitude of this can be understood from fact that when I friend returned, she found that I have locked the car from inside.

St. Bernards with my friend

Things changed when I stayed with a family who owned a Bichon named Popcorn. He was very active when I first met but soon realized he was not very active. He would sit in the corner and won’t move for long. One evening I was sitting on couch and I did not realize that Popcorn had climbed the couch and was sitting very close to me. Since I was working on laptop I did not realize how close he was, he kept moving closer inch by inch and in sometime he was almost on my lap. He was so slow and silent that I did not think of him more than a pillow. He stayed in that position for around 15-20 minutes and this helped me gain some confidence around him.

Next day we were in Chicago and the family I stayed with had a Bichon named Marley. When I had stayed previously, they had to put Marley in a separate room because of me. This time I didn’t want to trouble them and wanted to ‘face my fear’, so asked them to keep Marley out. He was trying to “pounce” on me as usual, but they told me, it would be best if I let him familiarize with myself. This dog had a peculiarity that to familiarize he would have to smell your breath. It was pretty hard for me to allow that as it has to come close to my face. I sat down and owner held the dog and brought him close to my face. It took me 5 minutes but he understood me and my fear has reduced. Next two hours, we were sitting and talking but Marley kept coming to me. I had to keep petting him or else he would try to smell my breath again. I had to constantly pet him and he was sitting on my lap also few times.

This helped me make “friends” with at least one dog, but I am sure next time I meet a dog I won’t be as scared. Definitely I cannot handle a dog like Marley from the movie but some dogs like Top Gear Dog (labradoodle), which is introvert as well as intelligent can be easy to handle.