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Puppy Push and Pull: How A Subcortical Pathway Influences Fear Learning

July 23, 2025

I feel the bracing in his body as if it were a wave travelling down through the nylon leash, hitting my hand like a tsunami. His breathing shortens, he becomes hyper-focused, and there is an unsettling stillness about him that is not calm, but rather fixated and alert, rigid and vigilant. But, at the same time, I am also very aware that he is also beginning to have an inner pull to go towards the very dog that he is focused on, for there is a conflict in there, and one that is almost hard to discern, one that is just underneath of this whole-body brace that is just starting to build, but that I need to intervene on. This is the moment before what happens happens, and the space in which I have a brief moment to intervene, right before bark and snarl comes, a Dorsal Periaqueductal Gray (D-PAG) response.

A mere nine months old, my Australian Cobberdog, Griffyn, is still in a crucial time of learning; his adolescence is well upon us, and his bouncy, effervescent, joyous demeanor is, 99% of the time, what presents itself across all situations. He plays with other dogs well, he is a quick study, enjoys outings, and can attune to me relatively well in many surroundings. He still has the nine-month-old developing puppy brain, but is learning, and in leaps and bounds. Nevertheless, in the last two weeks or so, this new response of “on leash + new environment + unexpected dog in the area = fear” has started to surface. This is the alligator closest to the boat for us, and it is time to address it before he starts to build a pattern of fear that becomes a low road pathway (Kragel et al., 2021) to his emotional response. I need, instead, to build a contrasting high road that allows for an alternative response.

Right now, as I see it, his brain is on a subcortical pathway, i.e., his optic tectum (the superior colliculus in we humans) orients to the unexpected dog(s) as external stimuli, and then through the pulvinar, to the amygdala where the conditioning and learning occur. Subsequently, the “unexpected dog” stimuli are still in the early days of being conditioned as potential triggers for the fear response. My job is to intercede now before this becomes a fear-based learning, i.e., we don’t want to lock in a conditioning, a habit, or a pattern that has the potential to become a bigger problem.

Instead, I need to help the visual stimuli of the “unexpected dog” that he has registered to become a cue for “good things,” in other words, to pair the stimulus in a way that supports it becoming positively valenced. So, right now, our work is “On Leash + Meet Unexpected Dog = an immediate treat. In other words, helping him to identify that the stimulus brings “good things,” and to condition him as such. This week, every morning, to support this process, I have been taking him to the dog park and “watching” from afar. There are plenty of dogs to watch and he gets treats for them “being out there” while he is calm, cool, and collected, “out here.” We will get closer, and closer, and approach retreat, so as to not build fear and create a fear learning situation that we don’t want, and to focus on the calm, cool, and collected response that we do want. Instead, we discover that unexpected dogs can bring tail wags, and engagement, instead of bracing. Now that he hears or sees “that dog out there,” he sits, looks up at me, and is starting to learn that he can settle.

Kragel et al., 2021, Neuron 109, 2404–2412, August 4, 2021 ª 2021 Elsevier Inc. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.neuron.2021.06.001

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