Reduce Excessive Barking
Excessive barking is often frustrating and annoying for family and neighbors alike. Fortunately, there are a number of easy things you can do to quickly and effectively address this problem.
The easiest thing you can do, by far, is to feed your dog their food from hollow chew toys. To learn more about how and why this is so worthwhile, watch the Chew Toy Training video in the Household Training section of this course.
Feeding your dog only from stuffed chew toys is probably going to reduce your dog’s barking by about 90% within just a couple of days.
The beauty of food-stuffed chew toys is that they work automatically. You can leave your dog with one and it will reduce their barking even while no one is at home with your dog.
However, food-stuffed chew toys will not eliminate your dog’s unwanted barking entirely, so you’ll also want to reward your dog for not barking, and just as importantly, for stopping barking.
Most people pay little attention to their dogs when they are calm and quiet and instead respond and interact with their dogs mostly when they bark. You want to do the opposite.
Reward your dog when they are being calm and quiet. Set a timer to go off every 20 minutes. Whenever it goes off, check on your dog. If they’re being calm and quiet, praise them. Maybe give them a scratch behind the ears or even a piece of kibble. Tell them they’re being a good, quiet dog, and that you appreciate it. Most dogs are good most of the time and it’s important that you praise and reinforce that good behavior.
When your dog does bark, you want to reward your dog whenever it STOPS barking. Barking is episodic. No matter how long the barking episode, each one starts and then, … stops. When your dog stops barking, gently praise, “Good Shush One, Good Shush Two, Good Shush Three”
and then calmly walk over to your dog and offer a little gentle attention and affection. Don’t worry, you will not be reinforcing your dog’s barking or training them to bark more because when it comes to dog training, rewards only reinforce behaviors that occurred within the previous three seconds. If your dog was quiet for at least three seconds before you praised or rewarded them, then you will only have reinforced their silence.
If you do these things, your dog will bark less and they will be more likely to settle down calmly and quietly.