Devin Brugman built Monday Swimwear from a $30,000 loan into a multimillion-dollar brand, which makes her, by most measures, a fairly unflappable person. Her rescue dog Walter is cut from similar cloth. He rode home from a downtown Los Angeles foster handoff sprawled on his back, unbothered, and he isn’t rattled by much of anything.
Except two things. He is terrified of the pool. And, in a story Brugman clearly enjoys telling, he once came completely undone in a Home Depot aisle, cowering away from a display of animatronic Halloween decorations while the whole store watched a small dog decide the fake skeletons were going to get him.
That combination, brave dog, oddly specific fears, isn’t a quirk of one animal. It’s how fear works in dogs, and understanding it changes how you respond to it.
Bravery and fear aren’t opposites in a dog
We tend to think of a dog as either “confident” or “nervous,” a single dial. But dogs don’t experience fear as a general trait so much as a set of specific associations. A dog can be genuinely bold about strangers, traffic, and thunderstorms and still lose his composure over one particular category of thing, because fear attaches to particulars: this sound, this movement, this looming shape that doesn’t behave like anything else in his world.
That’s why Walter’s profile makes perfect sense. Water and giant lurching, noise-making figures have almost nothing in common except that both are hard for a dog to file under anything familiar. A pool is a surface that isn’t solid. An animatronic skeleton is roughly human-shaped, moves wrong, and emits sounds no living creature makes. To a dog, those are genuinely strange, and strangeness, not danger, is often what triggers the alarm.
Why Halloween, specifically, spooks so many dogs
Halloween is almost engineered to unsettle dogs, and the Home Depot skeleton is a perfect case study. The decorations are large, they loom, they move in jerky, unpredictable ways, and many of them make sudden noises. Each of those features on its own can put a dog on alert. Stacked together, on an object that resembles a person but isn’t one, they land squarely in the uncanny zone for a dog’s threat-detection system.
Add the human side of the holiday, costumes that transform familiar people into unfamiliar silhouettes, doorbells going off all night, strangers at the door, and you have a stretch of the calendar tailor-made to stress a lot of dogs out. A dog who sails through fireworks can still find Halloween genuinely hard, and that’s not a failure of nerve. It’s a reasonable reaction to a reasonable amount of weird.
What to actually do about it
The instinct when a dog is scared is to comfort and coax, or to march him up to the scary thing to “show him it’s fine.” Both can backfire. Dragging a frightened dog toward a talking skeleton doesn’t teach him it’s safe; it teaches him that being near it feels awful and that you’ll make him do it anyway.
“The move people miss is that you don’t have to fix the fear, you just have to change the math,” says Dr. Amara Solis. “Every time the scary thing appears and something wonderful happens at a comfortable distance, the dog’s brain quietly re-sorts it from threat to predictor of good stuff. You go at the dog’s pace, keep him far enough away that he can still eat and think, and let the treats do the teaching. Force never gets you there.”
In practice, that means noticing the distance at which your dog can still take a treat and stay loose, working at that distance, and pairing the scary thing, the decoration, the costume, the doorbell, with something he loves. Over sessions, the comfortable distance shrinks on its own. And on the night itself, there’s no shame in simple management: a quiet room away from the door, background noise, a good chew, and a break from the parade of costumed strangers. Avoiding a fear you’re not actively working on is not “giving in.” It’s kindness.
The bigger point Walter makes
Brugman’s approach to Walter, and it’s a good one, was to take his personality seriously rather than fight it. She turned into, by her own cheerful admission, a person who watched every dog-training video she could find, and it paid off in a dog who’s easy to live with. That same respect is what a fearful moment calls for. Walter isn’t broken because a skeleton scared him. He’s a normal dog telling you, clearly, where his limits are.
The dogs who seem “scared of nothing” usually just haven’t met their nothing yet. When they do, the response that helps isn’t proving them wrong. It’s believing them, and then gently, patiently, showing them the world is a little safer than it looked.
What’s new since this was written
The behavior science here has moved steadily toward the low-stress, dog-led approach, and away from “flooding” a dog with the scary thing until he stops reacting. Current guidance from veterinary behavior groups emphasizes desensitization and counterconditioning, the distance-plus-treats method, precisely because flooding so often makes fear worse or drives it underground, where it resurfaces as a bigger reaction later.
There’s also growing recognition that some seasonal and noise fears have a medical dimension. Veterinarians increasingly screen anxious dogs for pain, since chronic discomfort can lower a dog’s tolerance for stress, and for dogs whose fear is severe, short-term anti-anxiety medication is now viewed as a legitimate, humane tool to use alongside training rather than a last resort. If your dog’s Halloween panic looks like genuine distress rather than a passing startle, that’s a conversation worth having with your vet, not something to white-knuckle through every October.
