Why Is My Dog Barking? Understanding the Noise Before the Fix

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It's the Dog People Podcast with your host Jack Lawrence. Secretly, I decided to start this podcast for some free dog training advice. You know, Malinois seem to be like the dog at the moment. Like, I think people see them on Instagram doing these incredible things.

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You would not believe how many people I meet And I go, what made you want to get, say, an Aussie Shepherd? They go, I don't know. And I go, had you met one before? They go, no. If you want to ask me how often I walk my own dog a week, it's only twice a week.

It's the Dog People Podcast, the podcast hopefully giving you a no-nonsense approach to dog training so you never have to shout, it's okay, he's friendly. Now, Max from Down Under Dog Trainer, my name's Jack Lawrence. Nuisance barking, it's a big one that a lot of people deal with. When it comes to their dogs.

Yeah. So it's definitely a really common inquiry we get in our inbox. People saying, oh, my dog barks at home all bloody day. I'm absolutely sick of it. What can I do about it? And before we even get into the treatment and training stage, we first go through a really thorough diagnosis with those people. And we're going to help you through that today. Because when your dog is barking at home all day, there's generally 4 types of barking that you're going to be encountering. Number 1 is what we call alert barking. That is your dog patrolling a perimeter, reacting to noises, things that they see, et cetera. It's trying to just like alert Alert you or just ward that person off, like, hey, get away from the property. That, that style of alert barking. Number 2 is just general boredom. In the same way that, you know, if we're left alone in a room, we probably sing or whistle or hum to ourselves, our dogs will vocalise just as a way of displacing some stress and some boredom and some energy. And we'll just see boredom barking, running around just like, and carrying on. Number 3, you may have a genuine separation anxiety problem. Uh, so you leaving causes your dog a significant amount of distress or potentially anxiety, and your dog is barking as like A stress call to you and as a way of displacing a lot of that stress. And then number 4 is what we call reinforced or communicative barking, where your dog is barking because they think it will bring you home. Either you've, you know, you chuck them outside and let them have some time in the yard and they'll come and bark at the door for you to let them in. Or when you're gone, they bark, bark, bark. And what can often happen is if your dog has been barking for hours on end and right at the end of that, you happen to be Pull up in the driveway and arrive home.

They're like, oh, it worked. It worked.

Exactly. Yeah.

I bark and you come back.

Yeah.

They go, yeah, this works. Like, yeah, my mum's recall's not the best, but she comes eventually.

Yeah.

So, they're the 4 types of barking we typically see. So, when we go out to a person's house who's been dealing with this barking, we'll generally go through this diagnosis process so we can figure out what type of barking it is, because how we treat each of these is drastically different. So, we'll give you just a very brief rundown on each of these today so that you can, if you do Suffer with barking at home, you can start to look into this yourself and start to do your own little diagnostic process and figure out what's going on. And then that will, you know, dictate on how you treat a little bit. So alert barking is what we'll generally see with that is what's very typical for alert barking is your dog might be fairly relaxed through most of the day, or they might be alert, but we don't really see a lot of barking. We'll only see barking in response to some other type of stimuli. Again, your dog might see something. Or hear something or someone appear at the door, things like that. They'll only bark when a certain thing enters their kind of ether. And then once that thing is gone, the barking will generally stop. Alert barking's pretty easy to spot. Boredom barking is when there's no real pattern to it. It's just when they're home alone and your dog goes, okay, well, mum or dad's gone. That means I'm not going to get a chance to have any sort of fulfilment through them. I'll have to kind of make up my own games. So, with boredom barking, again, there's no real pattern. Your dog Doesn't really do it in response to stuff. Your dog doesn't really do it right as you go or at a certain time. It's just throughout the day, we'll just see periods where they just bark, bark, bark, bark. If you've got a barking issue, I always recommend to people to get a pet camera and set that up and actually get some video for us. So, whenever people message us, I say, cool, I need you to get this over the next few days or weeks before I see you. And that'll often tell us a lot. So, when we see boredom barkers, they're typically just pacing around the backyard, barking up into the sky, barking at thin air. Barking for no reason, barking at themselves, doing all sorts of— you'll often quite see quite different vocalisations. Whereas alert barking might see some quite deep barks like, hey, get away from my property. Boredom barks can be anything and everything just because our dogs are trying to occupy ourselves. Again, if we're left alone to our own devices, we might sing, talk, whistle, hum, make weird noises. We might kind of just do everything, and our dog will do something similar. So, all sorts of random vocalisations.

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If we're seeing a separation anxiety sort of style of barking, is you will hear the distress in it. I mean, you can just hear it's just that higher in volume, higher in pitch. And you will see this— look, this is a whole episode in itself, so I'm going to go too deep into this, but this could start as soon as you go, or this could start, you know, uh, half an hour after you've gone, or this could start 3 hours after you've gone. But Generally with separation anxiety, barking is, if it's true separation anxiety, it generally doesn't let up until you're home. Once it starts, it's constant and it doesn't often stop.

My neighbour's dog howls.

Yeah.

You heard it when you arrived today. It just howls and howls and howls. And you think eventually this dog is going to give up, but it does not.

Yeah, exactly. It's, it generally doesn't let up if it's true anxiety. You'll have some dogs who, I guess what we call is, if we're getting technical, separation or isolation distress. Where they certainly get overwhelmed and freaked out by it, they don't enjoy it. And that can kind of come in waves a bit more. They might go like bark and get really upset, but then they're— it's not stress-inducing enough where they can't stop and can't kind of bring themselves down. So, we may see that come in pulses and waves, but you'll generally hear that. It'll sound quite distressed. That's generally the one the neighbours might call you for. That's one people react to quite strongly as well. And like I said, it's generally unrelenting. If you've got a camera, you'll you'll also probably see other behaviours associated with it. So, if it is a separation anxiety issue, you'll probably see other things like potentially digging, clawing, pawing at an entrance or exit, trying to escape from the property. You might see some self-mutilating behaviours, chewing of the paws and the nails excessively. You might see pacing, panting, excessive salivation. You might see them trying to destroy things, etc. Whereas with boredom barking, we might just see our dog just getting up to mischief. With separation anxiety, you'll be able to tell, like, oh, the dog looks visibly stressed.

Yeah.

They look like they're doing some pretty unusual and erratic behaviour. And then lastly, we've got our reinforced or communicative barking. This is when a dog will only do this when they know or think that we're within earshot. I will have some dogs whom people go, oh my God, as soon as I leave, they start howling the house down and I don't know if they stop or not. And what's really interesting, we set up a camera and while that person's in the driveway and Locking the door and jumping in the car and leaving, while the dog knows and thinks that the person can hear, that dog will put on such a performance. But as soon as they see the car go down the road and they go, oh, okay, she can't hear, it stops. And same, as soon as they hear mum's car turn into the street, oh, and it all starts again because the dog goes, oh, well, I'm only doing this to communicate with you, so there's no point doing this when you're gone. So, dogs will do this when they think we can hear them. So, either just as we go or just as we arrive. And they'll also do this, say if we put them in the backyard, they could do this at the door to communicate to you. And that typically means we've either reinforced it accidentally or we've reinforced it intentionally. Maybe we've gone, quick, get inside, don't annoy the neighbours, and we've reinforced it. Or like we said earlier, it could be the case that your dog's been barking just as we've pulled in the driveway and our dog thinks there's a link between those 2 things. Oh, you came back when I called. When we hear this kind of reinforce or communicative barking, it can typically sound quite dramatic. There's probably not a better word for it, is our dogs will kind of make it sound really— that like sound like they're distressed. They'll sound quite emotional. They'll sound quite dramatic, for lack of a better word. And we see and we go, oh my God, that just looks and sounds completely ridiculous, because it generally is. So if you've got a dog who's barking at home, um, they're generally the 4 main reasons that we see. So if you're unsure, you can submit some videos in the Facebook group. The Dog People Podcast on Facebook, submit a video and go, hey, what do you think of my dog? And I can definitely help you go through that diagnostic process. And if you've learned something today and you now understand more about your dog's barking, from there you can start the treatment process.

See, because that's the thing, all of those things that you've listed there all have different ways in which to curb the barking. Because obviously separation anxiety is a big issue. It's not something that's going to be fixed instantly or overnight. You know, I think that's where you can pair our episode with crate training with that, because I know that can be very helpful when it comes to separation But if you've got a dog that does have separation anxiety, that is when you're going to actually need to get some help because there's a lot involved in that. And every dog is different. Every scenario is different.

Yeah, it's quite a broad topic. And separation anxiety is something I'm really adept and confident in treating because I've done so much of it and I've done so much research and work around it so that I can best be prepared for these cases. And it's something a lot of people, you know, other trainers on the Gold Coast will send my way to help with that because it can be a complex topic. It might be the sort of thing we touch on some tips and tricks here on the podcast, but it will be by no means a comprehensive how-to-treat guide because it can be so varied. And I could give you advice that could fix it. I could give you advice that could make it worse. So we'll go into a bit of stuff with that. And same, if you guys enjoyed today, let us know and we can go more into depth on those different types of barking. If we get a lot of people saying, hey, my dog's an alert barker, my dog's a boredom barker, or I think I've reinforced this, what should I do? We can spend a whole episode diving into those topics too.

Just one thing on the barking. Again, there's different ways of handling it and sorting it, which we can go into depth on those things at another time, but I saw someone say once you should teach your dog to bark on command and a quiet command as well.

Yeah.

That can sometimes help with those dogs that are just barking for the sake of barking sort of thing, you know, not— we're not talking separation anxiety. Just, you know, someone messaged us and said, my dog just barks at everything. You know, someone walks past, they start barking. It's alert barking from what she was saying. Someone was saying if you've got an alert barker, you should teach them a quiet command. So, you know, with their barking, barking, barking, let them keep barking. As soon as they're quiet, Give them their marker. Yes. Treat. Then you add your sort of quiet or whatever word you want to use. I've tried that with Kira and it just doesn't seem to be—

There's pros and cons to it. Like one of the disadvantages to that is your dog can intentionally start making mistakes.

Yeah. Because they want to be told to be quiet so they get the treat.

When we look at a behaviour, a really simplistic way of looking at it is what we call ABCs. And we'll do an episode on this, but our antecedent, behaviour and consequence. The behaviour here is going quiet brings me a reward. But the antecedent to that is if I start barking, Dad will tell me quiet. They're the antecedents. And then the bark, and then I go quiet is a behaviour, and then the consequence is a reward. So, a dog starts to just set up these little things and go, oh, no, I'm barking again.

Quiet.

Reward. And it becomes a bit of a game.

Yeah.

Also, the way I like to train, I personally don't want to have to say quiet or leave it 100 times a day. I like to tell my— teach my dog to make better decisions rather than always need instruction. If I had to tell Nelson quiet every time we saw someone walk past our house, it wouldn't sound like a real word anymore. I'd say it 100 times a day. Whereas instead, we taught him how to make better decisions. Okay, this is what is a threat. This is what isn't a threat. And he knows how to act accordingly.

Yeah. And there's probably people listening to this go, how do I teach my dog what's a threat and what's not?

Stay tuned.

It's a very long episode. But again, if you've got questions about specific questions about dogs, as Max said, if you've listened to this and go, right, That's my dog. Put it into the Facebook group. This is my dog, and then we'll handle these things as individual episodes because they are obviously all different types of barking. The Dog People Podcast is a Mashed Pumpkin production hosted by Jack Lawrence and Max O'Neill, edited, produced, and audio production by Jack Lawrence.

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