A cartoon, sunlit woodland scene, displaying a myriad animals that Creature Courage help to overcome the fear of

About Animal Phobias: Zoophobia

Please be aware, that animal images are displayed within the profiles of Common Animal Phobias or, more specifically, on external links within the articles. However, we have taken care to provide artistic illustrations instead of real pictures to help minimise any stress and allow you to navigate Creature Courage without worry.

What Defines a Phobia?

We’ll discuss phobias and what effect treatment of phobias can have on your quality of life, but we’ll also address:

Why it’s important to overcome your fears
How the strategies you learn can help you in your day-to-day life
What forms of treatment will give you the very best chance of overcoming your fears quickly and forever.

Further, by clicking on any of the animal phobias listed you can find out more specific information on that animal, not only about how to overcome that particular animal phobia but, also, fascinating facts about each animal that might give you a better appreciation for, well, why they exist!

So, What Is A Phobia?

The NHS describes a phobia as: an overwhelming and debilitating fear of an object, place, situation, feeling or animal.

People suffer stress, fear and anxiety over a great many different things, and neither is better or worse than the next, but whatever the reason, phobias are considered more extreme than a general fear and are listed as a type of anxiety disorder. This is why it’s so important to find out how you can overcome your phobia, especially so it doesn’t find it’s way into other parts of your life.

The NHS further explains that phobias are an exaggerated or unrealistic sense of danger about a situation or object. Hence, if a phobia becomes very severe, a person may organise their life around avoiding the thing that’s causing them anxiety. As well as restricting their day-to-day life, it can also cause a lot of distress, and interfere with their friends, family and work relationships.

You can perhaps begin to appreciate how a phobia can cause a big problem to how someone lives their life. However, many people do not experience any symptoms until coming into contact with a trigger for the phobia – you might be an arachnophobe, yet, it never crosses your mind at all until you see a spider acuttling across the kitchen floor. Your reaction could be to just freeze and let it continue it’s journey back under the washing machine, but it could casue your heart rate to leap, your body temperature to drop and cold sweat to cover your skin, leaving you incapable of entering the kitchen knowing the spider could reemerge at any moment. That sounds extreme but many people suffer this kind of extreme phobia, being unable to rid the thought from their minds. Even thinking about the source of a phobia can be enough to cause anxiety or panic – this is known as anticipatory anxiety.

Symptoms Triggered By Animal Phobia

As we just touched upon, many people can feel physical symptoms coming on, along side the feelings of stress, anxiety and panic. These can include:

Unsteadiness, dizziness and light-headedness
Nausea
Sweating
Increased heart rate or palpitations
Shortness of breath
Trembling or shaking

What, specifically, are Animal Phobias?

Any fear of animals is called termed as zoophobia. Zoophobia usually refers to a person afraid of many or all animals, as you can see from the list of animal phobias on this page, each animal has it’s own ‘phobia name’. Most people are not afraid of all animals but, rather, have specific phobias around one or a few types of animals.

For example, you could have a general fear of insects – called entomophobia – or you could have a fear of just a single insect, such as a bee – apiphobia. However, all animal phobias are is still housed under the umbrella term ‘zoophobia’.

Of course, knowing the exact name of the animal phobia can be a little complicated, please use the list to check but when you contact us, saying: ‘a fear of bees’ is all the detail we need.

Most animal phobias are rooted in a deeper fear of being out of control. It is usually the movement and unpredictability of an animal that is the most triggering.

Where Do Animal Phobias Come From?

So, why do you have a fear of animals? For many who love animals, it can be hard to relate to but for those of you who develop fear and anxiety around animals and it can severely limit many of life’s enjoyments, as many animals are unpredictable and hard to avoid.

I use the word develop because though some might think that people are simply born with a fear of animals, (with spiders and snakes coming immediately to mind), its actually not true.

There are only two fears we are born with, the fear of loud noises (phonophobia) and the fear of falling (basophobia). Everything else is learnt. We quickly learn signs of danger and our brains sometimes register things as dangerous by accident – after all, better safe than sorry.

Our instincts are to keep us safe first and if we encounter something we’re not sure of we subconsciously reduce the risk by usually some form of avoidance. The more we avoid, the more we reaffirm our survival instinct’s threat assessment as valid, making the fear stronger and stronger.

Even though the trigger might not be a real threat at all, it becomes a monster in our minds. By avoiding it over and over again, we have trained ourselves to believe it is a real threat. This is how animal phobias develop.

Animal Phobias Are Learned:

We usually learn fear during childhood from one or two sources:

1. If we have a parent, sibling, or other close relative that has a phobia it can be easily learnt through our interactions with that person. As children, we are incredibly absorbent in the first years of our lives and, unwittingly, our parents and other relatives pass on their understanding of the world around them – the good and the bad. If a family member acts afraid of an animal, we learn that to be a source of danger.

2. The second way we learn phobias is to have an experience that frightens us. This could be as simple as walking through a spider’s web or having a mouse scurry across our path that makes us jump. It can be more obvious in the case of someone falling off a horse and now can’t stand to be around them.

Traumatic events or those perceived as traumatic can create a subconscious trigger in our brain telling us to avoid the thing or the situation in the future. This trigger can become so embedded that many people can’t remember what happened to make them afraid in the first place. However, the fear is now engrained, having become an automated conditioned behaviour.

The Bigger Picture

In my work with people who have zoophobia, I notice that most have more than one phobia. It might not be a specific animal-related phobia, but it appears that a person with a phobic mindset can often suffer from anxiety in multiple areas of their lives. Very often, people with one sort of animal fear also have another.

For instance, when I was advertising for our Dog Courage Workshop many of those who signed up also had a fear of spiders and a few other animals, too.

Additionally, many people with animal phobias also struggle with situations that are unpredictable or not in their control. Perfectionism and over responsibility can also be other areas of struggle. This is because all anxiety habits are tied together. Many people with animal phobia problems are people who have unknowingly created bad habits with even lower level anxiety triggers.

Their survival part of their brains sounds the alarms at any sign of ‘danger,’ This causes a continual loop of avoidance to stop the discomfort of taking any perceived ‘risks’. The problem is that most of these ‘risks’ are not really risk at all, but opportunities for growth and happiness.

How We Can Help You

The good news is that we find attending just one Creature Courage animal phobia therapy session is sufficient for treating multiple phobias. We have a very holistic approach, combining several different types of proven phobia fighting techniques. These techniques can be used for any anxiety or phobia.

Most importantly we give our clients to face their fears and have gentle but effective exposure therapy to the trigger animal. We design our exposure therapy to also address the deeper fear of uncertainty and feeling out of control.

Creature Courage is the UK’s leading animal phobia specialist, helping people overcome their animal fears. We run powerful one-on-one therapy to equip you with the skills to tame your fear of animals for good. We have spent years specialising specifically in treating animal phobias. Using the power of neuroscience, we enable our clients to get over the fear of animals in just one day! Click HERE to learn more about our therapy.

We, also, offer you the opportunity to do one animal phobia therapy session and then arrange to do the immersive side of a different animal at a later date. Its fully possible to regain your freedom and live your life the way you want: Courageously, peacefully and without fear!

Call us on 0800 970 4417 or message us for more details and we’ll help put your mind at ease.