Puppy Training Tips

Someone recently asked a good question, how not to extinguish a dog barking for the right reasons, for example if there was a prowler on your property, etc.  With all the talk about how to stop your dog from barking for the wrong reasons, (or in some cases for no reason) it’s important to encourage your dog to bark to warn you of something.

If you have a problem barker, they bark all the time at anything, it’s going to be more difficult to teach them when they can and when they can’t bark.  But if your dog is normal, maybe there’s something that makes him bark (in our case it’s a neighbor’s whining dog) but generally they don’t make a big fuss then that’s a lot easier to deal with.

You need to discourage and correct by giving a stern ‘no’ to your dog whenever they bark at something they don’t need to bark at. I correct our Retriever whenever she gets a chorus going with the neighbor’s dog.  I correct her too when she stands outside the glass doors and barks because she wants some attention.  But when she starts barking when she hears someone at the door I pat her on her head and tell her she’s a good girl.  I positively reinforce the barking that is helpful and I discourage the barking-for-no-valid-reason.

She’s a good, trainable dog and it hasn’t taken her long to catch on.  She’s also pretty friendly and to be honest she might bark at an intruder or she might just as likely come running up to them with her frisbee in her mouth, looking for a game.  Retrievers are like that, they’re not the greatest guard dogs.  But at least she’s learned to bark at the right time.

We had another dog that was a very good watch dog. He was a mutt, but very loyal and good around the kids.  We tried the same approach with him–corrected him for senseless barking (once we’d made sure he was comfortable, not afraid or feeling threatened etc.) and rewarded him for barking when people came on the property.  We had a large property at the time in a fairly secluded country area and we were thankful he was such a good watch dog. He’d also bark whenever he found a snake, and in so doing alerted us to quite a few dangerous snakes that were crawling around our yard (one had slid in under our house!)

If he took a bit of a dislike to someone though, he’d tend to circle them still barking which we didn’t want. That was going a bit far, so we’d have to correct him and tell him off then, so he’d get the point.  One a couple of occasions he wouldn’t let up, I think because the person was quite afraid of him, so we had to haul him off and tie him up.

With both the Retriever and our old faithful mutt, we were able to teach them to bark when needed and to quieten down when told just by positive reinforcement of the one, and negative reinforcement of the other. That seemed to work well, so for your average dog that doesn’t have a problem with excessive barking it should be possible to teach them this.