CONFIDENT CUDDLY COOPER!

This very special boy has been a joy to work with and has come a long way since we first met him. Cooper came to us with noise phobia, which can be a tough one to overcome.

His days were filled with the sound of air craft, which resulted in panic. Ideally, we need to remove the source of the phobia when we're working with phobic dogs, but we couldn't do that in Cooper's case. He was terrified of air craft noise and The results his family have seen have been much more than that. He has gone from hiding behind the dining room table for most of each day to being able to move happily around the whole house. He couldn’t go in the garden during the day, but now he happily takes himself out there and, on some days, he can go on short walks around the air base.

His mum and dad have worked incredibly hard with him. They understand that phobias in dogs are rarely fully overcome and Cooper is always likely to be sensitive to airplane sounds. But, as you can see from his dad’s words below, he’s a much happier, calmer boy and our ongoing work is gently getting him to a place where he can be a lot more settled around aircraft noise.

Thank you to his dad for giving us such a lovely, detailed insight into Cooper’s world:

“Cooper is a mixed breed rescue from Cyprus, taken off the streets at around 9 months old. We adopted him early 2021 at around 15 months old. Out of curiosity we had a DNA test done which shows major breeds of Husky, GSD & Samoyed. His early days with us were pretty uneventful, just a curious (a little bit destructive) fun-loving dog.

In 2022 he had an ear infection which was treated by the vet and seemed to clear up fine, very soon afterwards we went on a camping trip into Norfolk and this is where we noticed a change in his behaviour. Whenever a jet airplane from the nearby airbases flew overhead (not low flying, just transiting over) Cooper would try and crawl under the car or caravan, but would soon be ok.

This behaviour continued when we got home but not to any extreme, until in 2023 the red arrows moved into the air base near where we live. Suddenly we couldn't get Cooper out of the house even into the garden for a toilet. We adjusted his walk times to very early in the morning and later in the evening to avoid flying but if we got caught out with an aircraft he went into full flight mode to get home. Cooper seemed to have made a connection between the famous smoke of the red arrows and the vapour trails left by passenger planes so that now everywhere we went he would be looking in the sky with anxiety and we realised we needed help.

We contacted Fern earlier this year explaining the situation and after a 90 minute consultation she gave us some strategies to firstly calm Cooper and engage his brain with scents etc and also to keep him engaged with us while out walking. The change has been quite dramatic to be honest, although Cooper is still terrified of low flying aircraft he seems to be able to cope with the higher flying passenger aircraft now. We are currently in the Lake District, within an hour of our arrival we had 3 very low very loud military aircraft virtually flying over the top of the caravan. Cooper panicked and shot inside. Previously we wouldn't have been able to get him outside again in the same day, however only a few hours later we had him on the lead for a short walk where he was taking in all the new smells and seemingly quite happy.

We've encountered another aircraft flying low since then, we went into the nearest pub for an hour or so and Cooper was absolutely fine to come back out, he spent the rest of that day into the evening sat outside watching some rabbits playing.

In summary, Cooper isn't cured, we know we've got a long way to go with him, but thanks to Fern's understanding of dog behaviour and the strategies she gave us we all have a positive outlook for our future with Cooper.”