Animals can be adorable or terrifying; The diversity of life forms on our planet is also a diversity of emotional reactions to them.
Now, when they make us feel afraid, this emotion does not always correspond to reality; It is common to assume that the panda bear is a friendly animal that one could even play with and, on the other hand, avoid insects at all costs, although most of the latter are harmless to us and the panda has one of the strongest bites. of the world.
What are these differences due to? AND What are the most common forms of fear of animals? ? Let’s see it.
It is important to distinguish between fear of animals in general, on the one hand, and animal phobia, on the other. It is clear that fearing certain animals is not necessarily problematic; Although humans have extinct many of the species capable of posing a threat to them, there are still several that even regularly attack adults today, such as the polar bear or the common hippopotamus.
Therefore, when we talk about phobias we are not referring to an anxiety disorder that generates an anxious reaction disproportionately intense to the degree to which a situation is dangerous. That is, people with zoophobia suffer from a problem that affects their quality of life and limits their autonomy, leading them to avoid certain situations in which there is no objective danger.
Now, fear (not even when it is “normal” and non-phobic fear) is not based on a rational analysis of what is happening around us; It is biased and has certain predispositions, generated from a process of natural selection that has developed over hundreds of thousands of years in the generations of our ancestors. In other words, our brain has evolved, in part, to make us tend to avoid certain animals without having to reflect on whether they can really harm us or not. This phenomenon has shaped the way in which structures in our brain such as the amygdala and the cingulate cortex are associated with other parts of our nervous system.
And what are those animals capable of making us feel more distressed? It seems that there are two in particular: spiders, first, and snakes, on the other. In fact, several studies show that we are especially good at detecting snakes, a group of animals characterized by trying to go unnoticed.
If we stop to think about it, it makes sense; Our lineage has evolved especially in tropical or sub-tropical regions, where poisonous animals abound and where we have them, we get a greater benefit if we detect them in time (because due to their size it is easy to avoid them once we have seen them).
What are the most common types of zoophobia?
Zoophobia is one of the three subclasses of phobic disorders most common among the population ; and these, in turn, are among the most common anxiety disorders in Western societies. But not all animals are equally likely to activate a phobic response in people exposed to their presence; There are some with a special predisposition to make us enter a state of panic, at least among people who have developed an anxiety problem. Thus, it has been seen that the most common variants of zoophobia are the following:
As we can see, snakes and spiders also appear in this list, which indicates that, at least in part, many cases of phobias are based on neural circuits for processing fear that are present in most people and that have been useful for survival for hundreds of thousands of years. However, beyond this “instinctive” facet of phobias, there is also another factor that influences which are the most common types of zoophobia: the degree to which animals are present on urbanized surfaces.
Both dogs and mice are characterized by being animals that have spread around the planet due to the fact of living alongside humans; in one case as a pet, and in the other cases (that of rats, mice and wasps) as commensal species, accustomed to living in cities eating organic waste. Furthermore, all of them are associated with a certain degree of danger, either in the form of very painful wounds or in the form of disease transmission. And by the way, pigeons, which are also a very common commensal species, are not very low on the list of common animal phobias, even though they are totally harmless.
Treatment of animal phobias
Zoophobia is relatively easy to treat in psychotherapy and in a matter of a few months, the most common thing is for the person to leave the psychologist’s office being able to live without being paralyzed by fear every time they see the animal they were afraid of (or every time they sense that they may be close by). ).
To do this, psychotherapy professionals use resources such as controlled exposure or controlled desensitization, which have proven to be very effective in all types of phobic disorders and create an appropriate context in which the patient can face his fear and not treat it. to constantly avoid it.
