Animals are often the object of phobia. There are specific phobias towards a specific animal and there is also a more general phobia towards all kinds of animals such as zoophobia. In the case of agrizoophobia, the stimulus is wild animals, which is still a rare disorder due to the scarce presence of these animals in our daily lives. If you want to know more about agrizoophobia or fear of wild animals, we will tell you about it in our dictionary.
What is agrizoophobia?
Agrizoophobia is the irrational fear of wild animals. We emphasize “irrational” and add “excessive” because actually having some fear of a tiger, a lion or an elephant, for example, are an adaptive fear that responds to a normal response from our body. But the situation of meeting a wild animal is unusual, right?
We are not talking about the phobia or even cats. We are talking about a phobic disorder whose stimulation is not the order of the day. It is not often you come across a crocodile on the street; however you can see it in a documentary television and suffer all the symptoms of phobias.
Symptoms of agrizoophobia
The symptoms of this phobia are the same as those of anxiety. At the mere mention of, your mind and body go on guard to react to danger. A danger that would be motivated in real life, but that becomes irrational when what you have in front of you is an image in a magazine or on a television.
Anyway, the reaction is the same as with any other phobia. First is avoidance behavior, something that in the case of wild animals can be easily achieved. But if you can’t avoid that vision of the stimulus, of the wild animal, that’s when your body reacts with dizziness, excessive sweating, tachycardia, difficulty breathing and you can even suffer a panic attack.
Causes of agrizoophobia
As you can see, it is a rather curious phobia. It is normal to be afraid of a wild animal, but have you ever come across one in real life? Maybe yes, maybe in the past you had a run-in with a wolf or some wild animal in the woods and you lived it with a great negative emotional charge. It is a situation that could explain the development of the phobia by traumatic.
But in the case of agrizoophobia it is rather a fear that arises in your mind and not in your reality. Suffering from an anxiety disorder causes fears to multiply and arise from the most unexpected stimuli. Here we find another common cause of phobic disorders.
Treatment of agrizoophobia
And we ask ourselves, is a treatment for agrizoophobia necessary? After all, the stimulus that triggers the fear is unusual, and you can spend your entire life with this phobia of wild animals without finding it limiting or disabling. At best, you will have to avoid visiting a zoo.
But even so, even if agrizoophobia does not limit your life, you should seek treatment since suffering from a phobia is itself a symptom that something is not right. Cognitive behavioral therapy is the most effective to overcome a phobia, with its previous work to transform the thoughts that will lead you to be able to modify that behavior that you perform out of fear.
All phobias can be overcome and all need psychological treatment to do sowing is usually recommended with the aim of reducing the high degree of anxiety with which phobic people live.