A dog trainer has shared some simple tips on how to stop your pooch from barking incessantly, including the golden rule owners must follow.
Dogs are funny animals, sometimes they just bark at nothing. A shadow? A leaf? A rogue slipper on the floor? They have to loudly woof at it and let it know they mean business.
While it’s important to acknowledge a pooch’s barking as it is their way of alerting you to danger, it’s also an integral part of communication, which is essential for their socialisation and development.
Owners should be able to calmly tell their dogs to stop and have the command followed, however, this is easier said than done for some people and their pooches. Now, a dog trainer has shared some short and snappy tips to help you call time on your dog’s barking and the golden rule all owners should be following for an obedient canine.
Taking to TikTok, Jack from Dovecote Dogs, explained that he often sees people reacting incorrectly to a yapping pooch. He said: “Do you have a dog that barks relentlessly at sometimes absolutely nothing? Well here’s three tips to help you guys out.”
He began: “I can almost guarantee the way most people have tried to deal with this is the dog is over in the corner barking and you’ve gone ‘stop it, pack it in’ or ‘behave, come this way’.
“You’re essentially shouting commands over the top of the dog. Our body language is facing the same way as the dog, so in the dog’s mind, we are also barking at the same thing they are barking at. They don’t know what we’re saying. All they can see is our body language is in the same direction as them.”
The first tip from Jack is to “break their eye contact”. He went on: “Step in front of them and be face on with them. This makes it very clear that we are communicating to your dog.”
Next up, Jack recommends this golden rule of sticking with your choice of command. He said: “It could be ‘quiet,’ it could be ‘enough,’ whatever it is be consistent with it. Wait for a small gap in your dog’s barking, there will always be one, you may just have to wait for it. When you have that small gap, step in front and say your command.”
Why, you may ask? Jack explained: “The reason we wait for a gap is because we want to pair the command with actually being quiet. If we start using it while they’re barking we end up pairing it with the barking.”
The expert suggests once you have moved in front of your dog and broken their eye contact, and then waited for them to pause to issue your command and stopped barking, you should always follow it with a reward.
He finished: “It will really reinforce this good behaviour. The way to do this is to offer them a reward in the opposite direction to what they were barking at. The reason is because it builds value in coming away from the thing they were barking at. It builds value in disengagement.”
People watching were impressed with the tips and others shared their own tales of noisy dogs. One person wrote: “Mine barks at ANY animal on the TV whether a real one or an animated one and every advert has an animal in…. she sits and watched TV waiting.”
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