Welcome to another episode of the fixing separation anxiety podcast.
Today we're tackling problem barking,
and we're going to look at the different types of problem
barking, what causes them and how to fix them.
Welcome to the fixing separation anxiety podcast,
where it's all about healingyour dog,
regaining your freedom,
and getting your life back on track.
And now here's your host,
Julie Naismith.
So today I want to talk to you about how you
can tackle home-alone barking,
but also how you can tackle different types of problem barking,
because barking isn't just a problem when you're gone,
barking can also be a problem when you're at home with
the dog.
So that's what I'm going to do today.
Let me go through three types of problem barking,
and I'm going to tell you what you can do about
each one of those.
First off,
I want to talk about something called watchdog barking.
Now this is where your dog is basically doing his job.
It's your dog,
raising the alarm,
letting you know that something incredibly scary and threatening is going
on outside.
As far as the dogs concern that is.
Now, that could be something as scary as the delivery guy
approaching the house.
It could be something as scary and as worrisome as somebody
closing a car door.
But as far as your dog's concern,
he's letting you know that there's a threat to your survival
right outside the door.
Now, this is a very common problem.
Many of us have seen this in our own dogs or
maybe experienced it in a friend's or the dogs of our
family when we've been around at their homes.
It's the dog who lets us know if anything is happening
outside with a big robo.
And with this kind of barking,
the first line of training,
the first line of changing the behavior for this dog is
you're going to block out sights and sounds.
So, in other words,
you are going to give your dog less opportunity to rehearse
this unwanted behavior,
this unwanted barking.
If we can stop the rehearsal,
sometimes even just doing that can reduce the problem behavior.
So when I say block-out sights and sounds,
what do I mean?
Well, to block out sight,
you can obviously pull curtains.
You can obviously draw blinds,
but for most of us,
that's not ideal.
We don't want to live in a home where we can't
see out the windows.
So what a lot of people I work with do is
they use frosting.
So you can buy online now.
It's plastic stick on frosting,
which comes in kind of a plain frosting,
or you can get patterned frosting.
It's not terribly expensive.
And my husband tells me it's fairly easy to apply.
We use it in my house too because I'm a big
believer in stopping behavior from being rehearsed.
So that's a really good go-to for blocking out sight.
We know that dogs are very sensitive to sounds as well.
So we need to work on that.
My favorite for that is using something like white noise,
and you can find white noise apps in the app store.
You can find white noise playlists on things like Spotify.
And if you don't want to use white noise,
you can use music,
just play music,
leave the TV on leave the radio on.
White noise though,
is something which is really quite neutral.
It's designed to deaden,
to reduce the impact of sounds in the environment.
So it's designed to do that.
Some dogs don't love it.
Some owners don't love it.
And then actually my preference is I use something called Brown
noise. It's just a different frequency.
I find white noise is a little bit high pitch for
me. So we use Brown noise,
but we also use the radio or we use a playlist.
And in fact,
I prefer playlist sometimes to the radio because there's no gap
between the music.
So there's no talking where the volume can go down.
I'm a big,
big fan of this approach,
blocking sights and sounds for watchdog barkers.
Like I say,
sometimes just stopping them from being able to do the behavior
can help improve things on its own by the mere act
of doing that.
But your second line of changing watcher barking,
your second line of training,
is it going to get your dog to do something else
other than bark.
The easiest thing to start to do is to teach them
a really solid recall away from the window or away from
the door.
Now you won't be able to teach your dog to do
this in the heat of the moment.
So if your dog's barking at the window and you ask
for a recall,
chances are your dog's not going to return to you.
If you've been following my training approaches,
you will only hear me talk about incremental plans where we
use tiny,
tiny steps to gradually increase our dog's ability to do something.
And if you want to train your dog to come away
from barking at the delivery guy,
you need to start by training your dog to come away
when there's nothing going on.
You need to start with a much easier step and gradually
increase the difficulty.
Don't start with calling him away from the doorbell 'cause he
ain't going to be able to handle that first off.
You need to start with an incremental plan,
gradually increase the difficulty,
get him up to a level of proficiency where he can
come away from that exciting stuff that he's trying to alert
you to.
You could also ask them to go to their mat.
Again, you're going to start with a really,
really easy criteria.
It could be go to your mat when absolutely nothing else
is going on in the house.
And you would gradually build up the difficulty.
Think of training a dog as more like learning a musical
instrument or learning a language than knowing something or not.
So it's not like I know the capital of France is
Paris. I had to know that or I don't,
that's not how dogs learn to do behaviors.
They learn to do behaviors incrementally.
So as I said,
think about it like learning to play the piano or maybe
learning to ski or play tennis or learning a language where
you gradually gradually get more and more proficient and you do
it in incremental steps.
Okay? So watcher barking,
you're going to block sight and sounds,
you're going to teach them something else instead to do that
incrementally. And one other thing you can do,
they don't do this with an anxious dog,
do it with a dog who's just barking for kicks or
barking to let you know that there's something going on outside.
One thing you can do is if they give you a
wrong answer,
you can use a timeout.
So in other words,
if they continue to bark,
you can warn them and then pop them into a timeout.
So Matt can be,
they go into the powder room or a timeout could be
you leave the room.
What happens there is the dog just loses access to the
thing that it wants,
I, you or the window or the room.
He really needs to be careful.
They don't make this aversive.
Don't go sliming your dog into his crate or slamming your
dog into the powder room.
You can use a crate for timeouts,
but you just going to gently encourage your dog to go
into the crate.
We're not doing massive collar grabs when not rough handling our
dogs into the timeout space.
That's really important.
We want to make this a penalty we're not using an
adversive technique.
Okay? So we don't want the dog to be fearful when
we do the timeout.
All right that's watchdog barking.
Let's talk about spooky barking now.
And spooky barking is different than watch dog barking.
Although it can look very similar.
So as with watchdog barking,
your home,
your dog barks at something outside.
But what's going on instead of your dog doing an alarm
call or alerting you to something,
he's actually really quite upset by the noises outside.
It could be that he finds those noise is actually really
quite aversive.
And that's why he barks in response.
Maybe he's nervous because he doesn't love people.
And so when he hears people in the street or people
coming towards the house,
he gets upset.
So that's the difference between watch dog barking in the first
problem barking that I explain to you and this one.
So spooky barking is your dog being upset and barking as
a response to being upset.
So how do we tackle spooky barking?
Well, first of all,
we're going to block sights and sounds again.
I know it sounds obvious now doesn't it?
And sounds like it's too simple,
but sometimes simple things can deliver a ton of return in
dog training.
So don't ever underestimate the power of just managing the dog's
environment to make it less easy for the dog to do
the thing that you struggle with to do the problem behavior.
So block out sights and sounds.
The second,
change how the dog feels about the outside noises.
So notice here,
we're not necessarily getting our dog to do something different.
We're accepting that our dog is upset by outside noises and
we're going to change the way the dog feels about those
noises. And here we can use a technique called counter conditioning.
If you follow me for separation anxiety training,
you'll know all about desensitization,
where we gradually get the dog used to something that it's
scared of by showing it a non-scary version of that thing.
And sometimes they're not in separation anxiety,
we can combine desensitization with something we call counter conditioning and
counter conditioning is just using food to change how the dog
feels about something it doesn't like.
So instead of being scared of a noise outside,
we use food to make the dog feel better about that
noise. And in fact,
what happens with counterconditioning is,
that scary thing,
that noise starts to predict food.
So every time the dog hears a car door slam,
if we do our desensitization and counter conditioning really well,
we do it well.
When that car door slams,
the dog starts to go,
Ooh, I know what happens now,
I get chicken.
And that helps to change how the dog feels about the
thing it was previously scared of.
And I've linked to an article in the show notes that
goes into more detail about how to do counter conditioning.
Okay, number three,
let's move along to talk about home alone barking.
Sowhat if your dog barks the whole time you are gone,
well, we need to figure out what's causing it and what's
causing it could be a continuation of the watchdog barking or
spooky barking that you see when you're at home.
It could be your dog getting frustrated that you've gone out
and her wait a minute somehow you've forgotten to take him
with you and he's barking out or sheer frustration that if
he barks and barks and barks,
you might come back,
pop his leash on and take him to the park.
Or it could be barking that's caused by your dog's fear
of being left alone.
And how can we tell?
Well, as I always say,
video is your friend here.
Whether your dog is barking when you're around or whether your
dog's barking when you leave,
video him.
Why would you video your dog when he's barking when you're
home alone?
I tell you what,
you can miss so much stuff,
particularly in the heat of the moment when you're getting really
agitated by your dog's barking.
So having a video running and going back over it can
really aluminate and help you see things that honestly you just
miss. Whether it's because you're too busy trying to sort out
the problem or whether,
with the home alone dog,
you know,
you're not there,
so of course you need video.
And so if we set the video up on her dog
when we go out,
and we discover that our dog is barking the whole time,
how can we determine whether that's frustrated barking or whether that's
fearful barking?
So I'm going to come onto in a second,
some tips for you as to how to look at that
video and determine which of those is going on.
It just coming back to what's dog barking and spooky barking
while you're out,
you might be wondering,
well, how on earth am I going to fix those?
If I'm not there,
I get the training plan when I'm around,
but how am I going to do that when I'm not
there? So if the barking that you discover on video,
when you leave your dog,
when you're view the video and you discover it's just a
continuation of the watch dog or spooky barking that he does
the rest of the time,
you'll know that by the way,
because you'll see him barking at noises or barking in a
pattern that's very similar to the barking that you see when
you're with him.
Well, obviously you can't train those behaviors when you're out,
can you?
So you've got to rely heavily here on blocking out sounds
and use.
And what you'll often find is if you can work on
this unwanted behavior when you're at home by stopping it being
rehearsed, and by asking your dog to do something different or
changing how it feels about the noises outside.
If you work a lot on that when you're home with
your dog,
it can actually help change the behavior,
even when you're not there.
Okay. But what if you find it's frustration at being left
or fear of being alone,
how is video going to help you?
The big thing you're going to see on video is body
language. You're going to be able to see also,
what else is the dog doing?
Do they look bored?
Do they look like they're just looking for something to do
the kind of a bit,
a loose end.
And they're looking for some fun.
And also videos going to tell you how long the behavior,
how long the barking goes on for anxious dogs,
by and large,
is not entirely 100% the case nothing ever is with behavior.
Anxious dogs tend to perse if they're more with their behavior.
And that makes sense,
doesn't it?
If you've ever been extremely fearful or extremely anxious at something,
your adrenaline would have kicked in and you'll have noticed that
you feel like you just have more energy to keep going,
and that's biology.
That's helpful to us and to any species that when we're
in a fight or flight situation of fear of death situation,
adrenaline will help us keep going even when we feel tired
and our body is getting drained and we feel like we
can't go on,
adrenaline keeps us going and keeps us doing the right thing
to get us away from the thing that's scaring us.
So the same is true with dogs.
Anxious dogs are more likely to persevere with barking than frustrated
dogs. So those are the clues you're looking for when you're
reviewing a video.
We're looking for anxious body language,
we're looking at what else the dog is doing and we're
looking at how much your dog is persevering.
If your dog is frustrated.
So if you decide your dog's frustrated when you leave him
home alone,
try giving him more to do when you go out,
anything from puzzle feeders to foraging toys,
to choose,
to hide and seek or treats around the house.
Anything, see if you can up the amount of fun stuff
you give him to do when you go out.
And also see if you can increase his exercise,
no matter how much you currently do.
See if you could up the amount of exercise,
cause that can really make a difference.
I find with the frustrated guys that upping enrichment and really
upping exercise can help reduce that frustrated home alone barking.
With the anxious guys,
we can't tie them out and more than likely,
they're not going to be interested in games or fun or
feeders when you're gone.
So for the frustrated guys,
upping exercise and enrichment can really help.
Now if your dog is barking because he's frightened of being
home alone,
he's a classic separation anxiety.
You need to remember I say all the time,
I don't think I can say it too often.
You need to remember that this behavior is emotional behavior,
not thinking behavior.
And the way that you're going to stop this home alone
barking is to change the way your dog feels about being
home alone.
We've got to teach your dog that home alone time isn't
scary. And we do this by gradually exposing him to safe
amounts of alone time.
We increased duration,
we go up ever so slowly in duration.
We go the dog's pace.
We don't rush him.
And if we think we're not going fast enough,
we're probably not very slow enough.
And that whole process is what my subthreshold training protocol does.
And I've linked to a video of how subthreshold training works
in the show notes.
So keep reminding yourself that to fix separation anxiety barking,
you need to stop the fear.
Now the common theme with all of these fixes for the
different types of barking that I've mentioned today is that we
are not physically stopping our dog from barking.
We're either getting our dog to do something that's incompatible with
barking, like going into a downstate,
or if you're barking at the window,
come away from the window so you can no longer bark
at the window.
So we're either getting the dog to do something different or
we're changing the dog's desire to bark by changing their emotion.
And that's why methods that try to physically stop the dog
barking don't work.
What methods do I mean what I mean,
things like shock collars,
citronella collars,
or muzzling a dog to stop them barking,
because none of those change your dogs decide to bark.
None of those teach your dog another way of behaving.
All they do is suppress the bark.
If they do,
more often than not,
I see issues with all of those where you think they're
going to stop the dog from barking and they don't even
do that.
And actually when it comes down to things like the citronella
collar, like the shock collar,
and even the muscle to a degree,
if you use those on an anxious dog,
you're using a fear-based training method to deal with fear based
barking. That doesn't make any sense.
So not only is there a really good chance that those
tools aren't going to stop the barking,
there's an excellent chance,
sadly, that you're going to make the fear worse.
So you stick a shock collar on a dog who barks
at home alone,
you set it so that the call it goes off and
the dog barks.
And now what's happening is your dog is who's petrified of
being home alone is also getting a shock,
an electric shock when he's home alone.
So now he's thinking,
Oh my gosh,
not only is it really scary when mum goes out,
cause I don't know the sky's going to fall on my
head or something,
but now I get this,
Oh, this pain thing.
Am I nervous?
I don't know.
I hate it when she goes out.
So can you see how treating fear with fear just doesn't
make any sense at all?
Don't use these tools.
I don't want you to make your dog worse.
You've got enough to deal with as it is.
Okay. Anyway,
to summarize this poll barking conundrum to stop the barking.
The first thing we need to do is work out the
cause. If the dog isn't upset,
we can use an incompatible behavior.
We can get them to do something different.
And if the dog is upset,
we're going to change how the dog feels in order to
stop that emotional barking.
And if in doubt about what's going on with your dog,
always use video.
Even if you're with your dog when he barks,
video is going to show you things you will miss.
Okay. I hope this helps.
And I look forward to seeing you on next week's episode.
Bye for now.
Thanks for listening to the fixing separation anxiety podcast with Julie
Naismith. For more information,
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