One of the main reasons that dogs are re-homed is due to unwanted behaviors. An example of this sort of detrimental behaviors is barking. Dogs bark for many different reasons; to alert, to greet, to communicate, and to simply show excitement. It is when dogs start to bark too much that it can become a problem to apartment owners and just a general headache.
What can we do to stop a dog from barking when we don’t want them to bark? One of my favorite Youtubers Kikopup made a wonderful video to demonstrate how to teach your dog not to bark incessantly.
“Stop your dog barking at the door” features a chihuahua who barks at the door and even at the word hello. Kikopup walks viewers through all of the steps to recondition the dog to not bark at people coming in. These steps include presenting the dog with stimulus that would make them bark and rewarding them for not barking.
The trick is to make sure the stimulus is not exciting enough to make the dog bark. So you wouldn’t start with just having someone come over and knock on the door and just stand there and wait for the dog to stop barking to get a reward. You would start smaller. You could start by knocking on the wall and rewarding the dog for not barking, or by standing in the middle of the kitchen and acting like you are greeting someone at the door and rewarding the dog for not barking at your excited tone of voice. By slowly increasing the stimulus while still keeping it under what would make the dog bark you can teach the dog to not get so excited that they bark when someone comes to the door.
Something to remember when teaching your dog to no longer do an unwanted behavior is to control your dog’s environment so that they do not have the opportunity to practice the behavior. In an ideal world no one would knock on the door for 3 weeks until Fido is reconditioned to go to his bed when he hears a door knock instead of barking and carrying on.
If Fido is prone to bark at dogs passing outside the window, then Fido can’t go near the window until his reconditioning is complete or when it is controlled by his owner and being used for training. A baby gate or crate would be a great option to keep a dog away from whatever makes them bark until they are desensitized to the stimulus that causes them to react.
When we are teaching our dogs using positive reinforcement we are teaching them what we want them to do. This process can take a number of weeks. Before long though, the dog has learned what it is expected to do and the owner can be proud that their dog has conquered another bad behavior!
There are many other techniques for discouraging unwanted barking that I will cover in future posts.
Remember to keep training pawsitive!
You must be logged in to post a comment.