Fear of being eaten alive. If this thought rushed into your mind when you first became anxious, it might be the root fear. However, this root fear associated with dogs is a false negative thought.
Almost all carnivores kill their prey first. They do this because they do not want to prey to get up and run away.
This also means that your fear may not be about dogs. Narrow down when you first had this fear. Did you see any movies showing people being eaten alive?
This is a universal theme in horror movies because it is so scary. JAWS is an example. Jurassic Park is another. If you can connect a specific movie to when you developed this fear, you may be on your way to recovery. It also means that this is not a primordial fear. This would be from manipulation.
Is your fear associated with being killed by a Dog? There are very few cases where a dog killed a person. They are scarce, on the order of one in a million. The chance of dying by an asteroid is five times greater at 1 in 200,000. This is another false negative thought out of proportion with the real world.
The fear is probably caused by media manipulation from watching news stories on the subject. Whenever a dog attacks a person, the media repeats that same story repeatedly. They repeatedly display the same picture or video to make you feel worse. Then they plaster a “not suitable for children” sign before the pictures to give you the added urge to look at them.
Other television stations pick it up, and they republish the story. None of these networks report how rare it is or that people have a greater chance of dying from an asteroid.
The premise that news media attempts to verify the information’s accuracy is propaganda, not fact. If one news story reports something emotional regardless of accuracy, then a flood of news stories jump on board saying, “Others have reported that ….”.
Is your fear associated with a Pack of Dogs? The chance of being killed by a pack of dogs is essentially zero. There are no documented cases where this has happened in the United States. When you have this thought, say to yourself, “it is not true. It has never happened.”
This is another example of fear caused by manipulation. There are many movies about killer dog packs. The Pack was a popular movie in 1977 and redone in 2015. There are many similar movies such as Dogs of Hell, Cujo, Dracula’s dogs, Wilderness, Road Kill, and many others.