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Demand barking

Written by Jean

Monday, 17 September 2007

When I’m at an off-leash park with my dog, and I stop for a minute to talk to someone, my dog Blue will wait a few minutes and then start to bark at me until I continue on the walk. He does this to the dog walker, too. How should we handle our bossy dog?

Blue’s burning desire to continue walking is the key to your success. In dog trainer-ease, we call this “having” the dog. By “having” I mean having the dog right where we want him for training purposes: highly motivated by something we can control by. Currently Blue is being paid in spades for barking. It works. That’s why he does it. It’s not so much “bossiness” as obedience to learning laws. Dogs will, without fail, do what works. So, this is what we will exploit.

From now on I recommend you do two things: 1) ask yourself, “if this is wrong, what’s right?” Waiting quietly. We tend to ignore dogs when they are doing things like waiting quietly, slaughtering the very behavior we want in the process by making it not work. No attention, no snacks, no walkies. Waiting quietly, from the perspective of any properly functioning dog, is a dud. So, try on occasion to carry on the walk before he starts barking to start making deposits into the waiting quietly bank account. The rest of the time, when he starts barking, provide an immediate, dramatic consequence that ruins Blue’s walkies agenda. Put him on leash and march him back home or to the car and then straight home. Consider barking a request to go home. It’ll feel drastic, but it’ll kill the barking quickly, probably in just a few repetitions. This is a great, great technique but you have to do it; don’t talk yourself out of it, even if it means radically curtailing the length of the walk. Short term inconvenience will yield long term peace and quiet.

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Comments (1)

	1. 18-02-2008 07:57
	just a dog nut We walk 2 neighbor Portugese water dogs with my Schnauzer. Milo, the older male PWD, is SO wildly excited about getting his ball chucked that he often starts a very shrill demand barking. Either at the very beginning of the walk or during a brief pause in the chucking. To try to stop this, the owner asks him to sit and wait quietly. After he's done this, she'll go back to chucking the ball. Since without the walks and ball-throwing, the consequence for the owner is bad --they're nervous and wound up very tightly at home while she works... so the dogs may chew, on themselves or stuff. After being asked to sit and wait, a few throws go by and he'll start excitedly "throw it more" barking. She'll repeat the process (sit and wait quietly). definitely more throwing after waiting, So is the answer to make the consequence more serious like above? Registered

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