Hello Everyone,
I always assumed (yeah yeah, an ass out of you and me) that all animals had a natural fear of fire. Bieber, we are sitting around a bond fire right now and none of our animals seem to mind the fire at all. In fact Gunner the Great Dane will enter the fire pit to get closer to the great and our mini donkeys get in close too. I realize they life the heat, but I thought for the most part animals wouldn’t go near a flame. Are my animals really cold or really dumb?
guess you have never heard the old saying “Like a moth to a flame” ?
i also monkey bond fire
I’d guess that your animals, like thee and me, are just really domesticated and accustomed to being around an open fire.
Me and my typos, sorry guys
My golden retriever was never afraid of fire, and that worried me. My brother’s beagle/dalmation/mutt is a skiddish sort and she wasn’t afraid either.
Is there a reason they SHOULD be afraid? They don’t inherently know that it could hurt them. When it’s in your fire pit it’s not loud and it doesn’t go anywhere. Sounds less scary than a toddler 
My riding instructor told me (while I was freaking out over an approaching storm - we were inside at the time) that animals will balk at three things. The two that I remember are the smell of smoke and the smell of death. I can vouch for both of them. There was a stretch of days when there were wildfires in Canada and the smell of the smoke was being blown south; all the animals were uneasy. I had a horse euthanized and its body lay for a day before it was picked up. I had to physically drag my goats past that spot for quite a while.
Dogs and cats likely see a small fire as a source or warmth, not a threat. A forest or barn fire is something else entirely.
It’s an old wive’s tail. Animals have no particular fear of fire at all. And I don’t just mean domestic animals. No animals are known to be particularly afraid of fire. Animals are aware that fire can cause pain, and are cautious of it, jut a they are cautious of thorn bushes. But there is no evidence at all that any animal is actually afraid of fire beyond the caution that it deserves. Deer or kangaroos will happily graze just a few metres from a fire front. Hawks or jackals will literally dive into flames to snatch out wounded insects or lizards.
There’s just no fear of fire in any animals that I can think of.
Unless they’ve experienced the pain of being burnt, I don’t see why they’d think fire was a dangerous thing.
Once burnt, of course, then maybe an animal with such an experience would be permanently fire-phobic. But even then such a fear probably wouldn’t be transmitted down to the next generation of offspring.
hehe
From my limited personal experience, I would tend to agree with you that animals aren’t particularly scared of fires absent other factors which make it dangerous.
What I think does freak them out a bit is if they can smell or hear a fire but not see it, or if they are feel themselves confined in their ability to move away from a fire. E.g. riding through dense forest while people nearby are burning off dead grass the horses start getting twitchy. However that could just be because people get twitchy in those situations too, and most animals are pretty good at detecting when humans are nervous.