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Page Two of a twelve-Page article:
A Detailed Examination of the Process of Bark Training a Dog

If You Want A Thing Done Right . . .

I didn't like my choices. The noise was driving me insane, but we had signed a lease and, in any case, the housing market was too tight to make moving an option. I was sure it would turn into World War III if I pushed the neighbors to take responsibility for their dog. I knew that even if I tried to move in that direction that, in the end, after all the hassle and upset and energy expended, there was a good chance that the dog would still be out there barking.

I was already locked in one struggle, trying to get my neighbor on the other side of the house to train his barking dog, and each new encounter with him was as unpleasant as it was unproductive. The last thing I wanted was to have to simultaneously do battle with two irresponsible dog owners. The only way I could see out of the dilemma was to train Bear myself, but that seemed to pose some insurmountable problems.

In its most unadorned form, training a dog not to bark is a simple matter. You just give him a good smack, or spritz him with water, from a spray bottle or make sure some other unpleasant thing happens immediately after each and every bark and, if you keep it up long enough, the dog will stop barking. But it wasn't going to be that simple with Bear.

I didn't think Bear's owners would be willing to let me train him, so I didn't ask permission. I figured that, with as little concern as they showed for the dog, if I just did it, they probably wouldn't care enough to hassle me about it. And I didn't want to give them a chance to forbid me to do it.

Since I was going to train their dog without their permission, I needed to take care not to antagonize them. I figured that, if they looked out and saw me on their property, especially if I was on their property striking their dog, they'd put the family foot down and I'd be doomed to barking hell for many months to come.

So how do you bark train a dog when you can't strike him or punish him in any way, or even go on the property where he's located? It's not a problem you're ever likely to face, but I want to introduce bark training by talking about Bear's intervention to drive home the point that there has been 70 years of hard research into the mechanism of operant conditioning. We know why dogs do what they do and we have long since known how to change their behavior in any desired direction.

Changing Behavior

Pay close attention to this section, because, if you understand what I'm going to say next, you will be well on your way to grasping the fundamental mechanism that governs all animal behavior. There is a formula, consisting of three components, that you can plug-in to change behavior. If employed properly, the effect of applying the formula to a barking problem will be to convince the dog that barking is more trouble than it is worth while making it compellingly rewarding for the dog to stop barking. This same general formula works as well with humans as it does with dogs. If you know what you're doing and you can control your subject's environment completely enough, it will work every time. Here is the formula.

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