What are the most frequent Fears of Animals?

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 cute animal that one could even play with and, instead, avoid at all costs insects, although most of the latter are harmless to us and the panda has one of the strongest bites in the world.

What are these differences due to? AND What are the most frequent forms of fear of animals?? Let's see it.

What are the animals we fear the most?

It is important to distinguish between fear of animals in general, on the one hand, and phobia of animals, on the other. It is clear that the fact of fearing certain animals is not necessarily something problematic; Despite the fact that the human being has extinguished a good part of the species capable of posing a threat to it, they continue to There are 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 a anxiety disorder that generates an anxious reaction that is disproportionately intense to the degree to which a situation is dangerous. In other words, people with zoophobia suffer from a problem that affects their quality of life and limits their autonomy, by leading them to avoid certain situations in which there is no objective danger.

Now, fear (even when it is "normal" fear and not phobic) 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 brains have evolved, in part, to make us tend to avoid certain animals without having to reflect on whether or not they can really harm us. This phenomenon has shaped the way in which structures in our brain such as the tonsils or 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, in the first place, and snakes, on the other.. In fact, several studies show that we are especially good at spotting snakes, a group of animals characterized by trying to go undetected.

If we stop to think about it, it makes sense; our lineage has evolved above all in tropical or sub-tropical regions, where poisonous animals abound and where we have, we obtain a greater benefit if we detect them in time (due to the fact that due to their size it is easy to avoid them once we have seen).

• Related article: "What is fear for?"

What are the most common types of zoophobia?

Zoophobia is one of the three sub-classes 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 trigger 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:

• phobia of snakes
• phobia of spiders
• Wasp phobia
• phobia of dogs
• Phobia of mice and rats

As we can see, snakes and spiders also repeat in this list, which indicates that, at least in part, many of the cases of phobias are based on fear-processing neural circuits that are present in most people and have been useful for survival for hundreds of thousands of years years. However, beyond this "instinctive" facet of phobias, there is also another factor that influences which are the most frequent types of zoophobia: the degree to which animals are present on built-up surfaces.

Both dogs and mice are characterized by being animals that have spread around the planet due to the fact that they live together with humans; in one case as a pet, and in the other cases (rats, mice and wasps) as commensal species, accustomed to living in cities eating organic waste. Furthermore, they are all associated with some degree of danger, either in the form of very painful injuries 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 completely harmless.

• You may be interested in: "Neurotic people: the 8 characteristics that distinguish them"

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 that the person leaves the psychologist's office being able to live without fear paralyzing her every time she sees the animal she feared (or every time she senses that she can walk near).

For this, psychotherapy professionals use resources such as controlled exposure or controlled desensitization, which have proven to be very effective against all kinds of phobic disorder and provide an adequate context in which the patient can face the fear of it and not try to avoid it constantly.

If you are interested in participating in a psychotherapy process designed to achieve these types of goals, please contact me.