BarkingDogs.net

Go to the index for this article

Page One of a twelve-page article:
A Detailed Examination of the Process of Bark Training Your Dog

This section will provide you with an in depth analysis of how to bark train your dog. It is written for those who want to come to a thorough understanding of the mechanism that underlies bark training. If you're not already familiar with these concepts you'll need to pay attention and learn a few new terms. But if you read carefully, you'll come out knowing not only how to quiet your dog, but also, more about human behavior than you'd ever expect to get from a lesson about bark training.

However, if you just want a brief, bare bones explanation of how to teach your dog not to bark, click on a quick explanation of how to bark train your dog.

Bearly Enough

Back in the nineties, I moved halfway across the country and into a new house in South Bend, Indiana, where my full-time job was to work against a deadline to get my dissertation proposal written. I had to get the paper done and that meant that I had to be at my desk all day, every day.

Unfortunately, my desk was situated against an outside wall, and three feet beyond that wall was a wire fence that ran the length of the line separating my newly rented property from my neighbor's place. A couple feet further beyond the fence, chained to a doghouse, sat Bear, a captive male canine descended from a mix of herding breeds.

The house of Bear's people was rectangularly shaped with its length running in an east/west direction. His owners spent most of their time in the front of the house, which was in the far western portion of the building. The dog, however, was chained behind the house, at the most extreme eastern portion of the property. By putting him there, they placed the dog as far from themselves as possible and, in the process, positioned him so he was never, ever more than ten feet from where I sat at my desk. To them he was a sound in the distance, a casual acquaintance they glimpsed twice a day, but to me he was a constant presence, always with me as he lay in bondage just beyond my window. He was usually in my sight and I could hear him out there at all hours, dragging his chains like a furry version of Jacob Marley.

I was chained to my desk just as surely as Bear was chained to his dog house. We were like Sydney Portier and Tony Curtis in The Defiant Ones, except that we weren't running, and we didn't hate each other and, all right, we weren't all that defiant either. But for all practical purposes we were chained together, sitting there a few feet apart, day in and day out.

Bear was the featured view out my west window, and I often found myself staring at him as I struggled to find the right words to forge a coherent proposal. I'd be willing to bet that on any given day, I saw more of him than his owners did in six months.

Once each morning and again each evening, one of the neighbors would come out their back door and stay just long enough to dump some food in Bear's bowl. On rare occasions, one of them would pat him on the head in a perfunctory, sorry-assed excuse for a display of affection, and that was it. That was the sum total of Bear's contact with his owners.

Bear barked. He barked and barked and barked. He barked and barked. "Woof, woof, woof! Bow-Wow, Bow-Wow. Arf, Arf. Bark! Bark! Bark! Bark!" He was a practiced and prolific barker.

I suffered. I suffered and suffered, but it wasn't just Bear. This was during a time when one of my other neighbor's dogs was also barking at all hours outside my bedroom window. So sleep after dark was hard to come by, and we couldn't catch up by napping during the day, because the dogs barked then, too.

To make matters worse, I wasn't making much progress on my dissertation proposal. That sort of work requires sustained, focused thought, but each episode of deep concentration was brought to a sudden close by a piercing bark that sent my adrenaline surging, my heart racing, and my autonomic nervous system doing back flips. It was that same startle response you get when you think you're alone and then, when you least expect it, someone suddenly jumps out at you. Every time I succeeded in immersing myself in thought, Bear would startle me all over again. I could lessen the scare by not letting myself think so deeply, but then, that's kind of self-defeating for someone who is trying to concentrate. Moving the desk wouldn't solve the problem. The only other places it would fit were close to the favorite barking locale of one of my other neighbor's barking dog.

Things had reached the point where something had to be done, but the police weren't authorized to deal with the problem, animal control was altogether worthless, and Bear's owners damn sure weren't going to swing into action without some prodding. So, with a heavy heart born of much experience, I went to call on Bear's people.

Bear's People

I walked around to the front of the neighbor's house, where a knock on the door brought a woman in her mid thirties. I told her where I lived and said I wanted to talk to her about Bear.

"Yeah," she said. Which meant, let's hear what you have to say.

I said, "Well, he's barking a lot."

"Yeah?" She spoke the word this time with a quizzical inflection that changed the meaning to an unspoken query: "Why are you telling me this? What is it you want?"

"Well, it's really bothering me. He barks a lot."

"Yeah," she said, "He barks all the time."

"Well, have you thought about training him?

"We did train him, but he didn't get it. He's too stupid."

"Well, have you thought about hiring a professional trainer?"

"We took him to a professional trainer. In fact, we took him to two professional trainers, and they both said he can't be trained."

I didn't say it out loud, but I stood there thinking: Now, let me get this straight. You have a dog that barks all the time, and he can't be trained, so he's always going to bark all the time, and your solution to the problem is to chain him up immediately outside my window, where you have, essentially, abandoned him? It's the kind of thing you hear so often from abusive dog owners. The message is: the cost of owning this animal is too much for me, so I'm going to make you pay for it.

But before I could respond she said, "Come back tonight when my husband's home," and slammed the door.

She left so abruptly that she had been gone several seconds before I realized she had brought the conversation to a close and wasn't coming back. I walked home in despair, because I knew talking to the husband would not be any more productive than talking to the wife had been.

I knew from watching him that Bear was plenty smart. If his owners really thought he was stupid, they didn't know the first thing about dogs, and I thought it a bad sign that the wife tried to convince me that professional trainers had pronounced Bear a hopeless case. Without exception, every dog can be taught when to bark and when not to bark, and any trainer would have known in short order that Bear was bright and capable.

Bear's people concluded he was stupid because they couldn't get him to stop barking, but let's take a look at the intervention they used. I have no doubt it went like this. When he was barking a lot, they would go out every once in a while and yell "shut-up." When the frequent barking continued, they resorted to going out once in a while and giving him a sharp smack. When that didn't work, they concluded he was stupid, and gave up. They witnessed Bear's refusal to quit barking and took that to be evidence that he lacked intelligence. But I thought it proved just the opposite. Bear had his reasons for barking.

If you want to understand why somebody does something, you need to look at what happens after they do it. Bear only barked in the presence of a specific class of stimuli. That is, he only barked when there were people around. There were frequent basketball games nearby that took place within Bear's line of sight, and there was a fair amount of foot traffic as well. He learned that, if he barked at people, they would sometimes walk over and attend to him. He also learned that, if he didn't bark, he remained a solitary prisoner aching with loneliness, in sight of people who never seemed to notice him.

Bear was a Social Beckoning Barker, calling people over to him, and sometimes they came. Bear was not stupid. He knew that if he quit barking he'd soon have a social life that was not fit for a dog. In other words, he'd be spending a lot of time alone.

Go forward to page two of this article

Go to the index for this article

This page on bark training is part of Section One:
the Your Dog section of barkingdogs.net