Training the Trainer

Bella has a habit I find annoying: barking. In general, she is a quiet puppy, but when she's particularly amped up, she barks...and barks...and barks. Like two repelling magnets, moving towards her (i.e., to grab her collar or muzzle) pushes her away. Saying quiet makes her bark louder. Finger to the mouth—even with no noise—has no affect. She barks at my husband when he ties his shoes in the morning. (Somehow I am normally exempt from this display.) When we stop our mountain bikes, she barks when we start rolling again. Recently, she has started barking at a certain part of our morning (not afternoon) walk.

I am frustrated that I don't "get it." Nothing either of us has tried has curbed this. No ignoring the barking, nor putting her go through a litany of party tricks. Nothing. So I wrote into a forum to ask for help. Wow! I got a fabulous, picture-perfect response from one of the members who owns/run a local training facility . She said:

My dog has a "speak" on command. My cue? I take finger to mouth and say "shush..." and she speaks! How did I teach that? When she barked, I cued it and treated it! Talking to a dog when the dog is talking is just talking with her. Think of this. When we teach sit we do so when the dog is moving into a sit. So action = cue/word, we have a sit. Same with "Down" As dog goes down, we lure and we say "down" when they are in the action of going down. But for some reason when dogs bark, we think that if we say words "quiet!" that they will get quiet but the dog thinks "Great, we are all barking, she is on the same page as me!"

All my dogs bark, only one is a nuisance barker and we curbed it by teaching him the word "enough" (it's our word for quiet because our kids burned the quiet word while yelling it when the dog was barking, he was in heaven I'm sure thinking they were all joining him!) so I changed it to "enough." When the dog was not barking but just looking out the window I would offer him some cheese, lure him off the window and as he ate it and licked it, is said "enough, enough, enough" and I did this off and on during the day for weeks. Then he BARKS, I go to him and say "Enough" and he turned off and came to me and I rewarded. I built an off switch that worked great.

What a head slapper. Of course! Why would a dog know that "shush" means the opposite of what they are doing? We will begin today. Results to follow.