“My dog is barking - how do I stop him?” is a frequent request.
And while I’d love to say, “Do this, and your dog will be quiet,” it’s actually not possible without a lot more investigation. A diagnostic report is needed! To decode your dog, we need to find the error code!
So the first thing you need to do is note WHEN she’s barking. You need to keep a barking diary for a few days.
When you’ve got this down (and it may surprise you when you look into it) you can now note WHY she’s barking.
What triggers the barking?
Excitement?
Pleasure?
Distress?
“Aggression”?
Fear?
Intruders
Loneliness?
Boredom?
Alarm?
“Attention-seeking”? (See my recent post on this!)
Until you can work out WHY your dog is barking, there is no quick recipe for changing this.
Find some answers
Once you’ve found out WHEN your dog is barking, WHY she’s barking, and WHAT triggers the barking, now you’re in a position to find out how to change this barking into something you’d prefer. And that’s not necessarily silence!
If your dog is alarm-barking because they can hear an intruder, you don’t want to extinguish this practice! You probably want to be able to acknowledge it, thank your dog, and then for her to hand responsibility over to you, i.e. by shutting her mouth.
Keep in mind that some barking is very useful. I can ask my dogs to bark on cue, which may be just what’s needed to attract someone’s attention, or to communicate to my old, hard-of-hearing, dog.
I can tell you that Lacy, pictured at the top, loves barking. So when we go to an empty beach or forest, she can fly about barking to her heart’s content. It’s how she expresses excitement and pleasure.
Barking isn’t RIGHT or WRONG. If a particular aspect of your dog’s barking does not please you, it may help to see it like we see weeds, as a flower growing in the wrong place!
And if your dog has been practicing this (annoying) barking for years - then you’re going to have to find the cause, and focus on eliminating either the cause, or the response. This may take time - it all depends on how much you want the change!
So, over to you: Find out what’s going on, then we can look at remedies together.
