Zoophobia: Phobia Of Animals

Disorders Cure

oi-Anwesha Barari

By Anwesha Barari

Wednesday, August 3, 2011, 16:13

Zoophobia, also called animal phobias in day to day language, is unrelenting fear of animals that either do not pose any threat to you or pose little if any danger. It is the most commonly occurring psychological disorder among children but adults too suffer from zoophobia.

Animal Phobias Versus Fear of Animals:
Phobia of animals is not the same as fear of animals. A phobia by definition is an 'unnatural and persistent' fear. Fear, an emotion like any other, is perfectly normal in a situation that provokes fear. However, people suffering from zoophobia experience unprovoked fear in the presence of the animals they fear.
Example: A huge mastiff charging wildly will knock anybody up. But to scream in fright looking at a puppy is sign of animal phobia.

Types of Animal Phobias:
Zoophobia includes different types of phobias which by definition are all related to some animal or the other. It has been observed that a majority of people have phobias of common animals as opposed to really dangerous ones. You will rarely find a person with a phobia of a wild bear although it is a heinous animal.

• Arachnophobia: or fear of spiders, is one of the commonest phobias seen among people. A spider can hardly do much damage but still it is a raging fear among many.
• Ophidiophobia: is a phobia of snakes. Now you say that snakes are indeed venomous creatures so why not. But the interesting part is that this phobia is seen primarily among urban people who might never have encountered a real snake in their lives! People from remote areas who live with the threat of snake-bites don't exhibit this fear.
• Mottephobia: is a fear of butterflies or moths. Yes, there are people who fear beautiful and totally harmless creatures like butterflies!
• Orinthophobia: is an unusual fear of birds, not birds of prey like eagles or hawks, but even the most mundane birds like pigeons or sparrows.

Treatment of Zoophobia: Cognitive Therapy
Every fear in our mind is a cognitive connection. Phobias of animals is a part of our sub conscious or sometimes our unconscious mind.

• Subconscious: When we have had an unpleasant experience with a particular animal in our childhood or heard about fatal accidents involving that animal, it stays in our subconscious . We are not explicitly aware of it but the seeds of the phobia have been sown.
• Unconscious: Sigmund Freud defined the concept of 'collective unconscious', every single human experience is stored and transmitted through it. Some phobias like Arachnophobia are ancient and come to us from the collective unconscious. Spiders were associatied with plagues during the time of the Roman Empire. We may have no first hand fear of spiders but that historic fear is a part of our collective human memory.

Cognitive theory goes to the core of such fears and cures them by talking about them. You then exposed to the object of your fear one step at at time until the fear is eradicated.