Dog behavior solutions: Barking

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No one would think of putting a shock collar on a canary, squirting lemon juice into a baby's mouth or beating a husband with a rolled-up newspaper and having his vocal cords cut for 'singing' in the shower. However, people think nothing of doing all of these and more to barking dogs. Barking poses particular problems because owners are consistently inconsistent. Sometimes the dog is allowed to bark. Sometimes it is encouraged to bark, yet other times it is severely punished for barking. It is all so confusing and stressful for the poor dog. No wonder the dog lets rip when the owner is away from home.

If your dog barks when you are away from home, for goodness sake do not confine it outdoors. In fact, outdoor confinement likely precipitated the problem in the first place. Sound carries. If confined outside, your dog will more easily hear outside disturbances, and your neighbors will be more easily disturbed by the dog's barking. Until the barking problem has been resolved, restrict barking by confining your dog indoors, preferably to a single room (to reduce activity), away from the street (to reduce the effect of outside disturbances) and on the opposite side of the house from complaining neighbors (to reduce complaints). Draw the curtains in the confinement area and otherwise insulate for sound. Leave a radio playing fairly loudly to reassure the dog and to provide white noise, which will help muffle sounds from outdoors and disguise the dog's barking.

When at home, it is easier and less confusing to start with a single rule: barking is OK until the dog is instructed to "Shush," whereupon it is expected to be quiet for a specified time - say one or two minutes - after which, most dogs will have forgotten what sparked them off in the first place. The first step in training your dog to decrease the frequency of barking is to teach it to bark on command. This may sound a little silly; however, it is important to realize that barking is a temporal problem, i.e., the dog barks excessively, or it barks at inappropriate times. By training your dog to bark on command, at least you establish partial temporal control over the behavior. Also, once barking is under stimulus control, it becomes possible to instruct your dog to bark at times when it may not feel like barking, which greatly facilitates teaching the more important "Shush" command.

Training your dog to bark on command

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