99% of people that come to me with problem barking behaviors with their dogs are having those problems because of something that we call a learned behavior and if you want to be able to fix your dogs barking you have to understand what learned behaviors are where they come from so that you can flip the script and have a dog that is beautiful quiet and well mannered in the home which is what the vast majority of people want alert behavior is simply something a dog has learned gets them what they want and the thing is we
help them with this process most of the time completely by accident and don't understand that it was us that's creating the problem in the first place when your dog was a puppy and really cute and it yapped and barked did you pay it attention did you try and reassure your dog when they were barking at something out of the window and not realizing that actually you weren't reassuring the dog you were rewarding the dog for The Barking behaviors all of these types of examples is where the vast majority of problem barking behaviors come from and
if we don't understand that we can never truly flip the script and make any progress but now that we understand learned behaviors and where learned behaviors come from it allows us to move on to step two which is to Simply flip the script in a situation where your dog barks and you usually try to reassure the dog but now you realize oh actually I'm accidentally reinforcing that behavior I'm accidentally rewarding that behavior well now we can use that exact same principle to reinforce and reward the desirable beh Behavior rather than giving our dog any attention
when they're barking we wait for them to be calm and quiet curled up on their bed and then we can give them some rewards we can give them some fuss we can give them some praise we can give them some treats we can give them some attention guess what's going to happen they'll be calm quiet more often now before we move on to step three there's an extra bit of information when it comes to barking that we have to understand and that is around having realistic expectations of our dog based on our dog's breed it
is very common for people to come to me with problem barking and I say oh what breed is it and say it's a German shepherd and I go well why did you get a German Shepherd if them barking at somebody by the window is a problem that is what they were born and bred to do it would be an unfair expectation to ask them to not bark at a stranger walking by the window you should have got a greyhound or a whippet that is born and bred to be quiet it's part of their genetic and
breed makeup so yes we can always improve on these behaviors and even if you do have a German Shepherd I work with many clients helping to minimize barking but we have to have realistic and fair expectations of the dog that we decided to bring into our homes and therefore understand what the fair and realistic expectations of how quiet it is possible for them to be now we've started to teach our dog what we do want from them instead we can absolutely begin the process of challenging this undesirable Behavior I like to do what I call
an empowered verbal correction I have a range of verbal Corrections with the dogs that I work with enough no ah and in this specific situation shush so in the early stages I will challenge those behaviors with a little bit of lead pressure and my verbal shush correction and what happens through something called pavlovian pairing or classical conditioning is that we pair those two things together the physical leash challenging of the behavior as well as the verbal one and what happens very quickly is that we can remove the challenging of the behavior with the leash pressure
and be left with what I call an empowered verbal correction where our dogs deeply understand when they hear the word shush they know that that means stop doing what you're doing right now with some dogs we can utilize that to say stop barking completely this is inappropriate with dogs like my German Shepherd example from earlier what that might mean is yeah I understand there's somebody walking past the window thank thank you for doing your job as a guard dog and letting me know but that's enough now you can stop you don't need to continue barking
the principle is the same and it's helping our dogs understand that there's a time and a place and it's our job as their loving leaders to communicate effectively to them what that time and what that place is and you have to be able to reward the desirable behavior and help them understand when we want them to be calm and quiet and we have to be able to effectively let them know when the undesirable behavior is too much and they need to stop because as always leadership is love
