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

Punishment

The first thing you need to know about punishment is the difference between a punisher and a potential punisher. A potential punisher is anything your dog would probably rather avoid. A punisher (also know as an aversive) is anything that reduces the rate of the response, if it is consistently presented either during the response, or immediately after the response is made. For example, your dog would probably prefer that you not smack him on the nose so, by definition, nose smacking is a potential punisher. But can we say that nose smacking is an actual punisher for your dog? It depends. If smacking your dog on the nose every time he barks results in a reduction, and eventually an elimination of his barking, then for your dog, nose smacking is a punisher. If it doesn't reduce the rate of barking then it is not a punisher. It's just a potential punisher. When it comes to the question of whether a particular potential punisher is, in fact, an actual punisher, the proof is in the pudding. If it stops the barking, it is. If it don't, it ain't.

I have referred several times to giving the dog a "punishing" smack on the nose. When I say "punishing" I don't mean severe, or cruel. I'm just using the word to indicate that the strike must be sufficiently aversive to the dog to result in a reduction in the rate of barking. Although, if it is presented consistently, a light tap delivered smartly should be enough to do the trick.

People sometimes tell me they do punish after every bark but the dog still keeps barking. You can see the absurdity of that statement though. By definition, punishment reduces the rate of the response. You may have gone out and done something to the dog each time he barked, but what you did was obviously not punishing, because the response (the barking) continued. Punishment would have steadily lowered the rate of the response so that, over the course of a few days, the barking would have slowed until it all but stopped. Now, if what you're saying is that your dog will not respond to any punishers whatsoever, then I have to tell you that's nonsense, you just need to find the right punisher and learn to deliver it effectively.

The only instances I have heard of in which punishment did not seem to quiet a canine in short order was in those instances where the dog was kept in such cruel conditions of mind-numbing isolation that even aversives conscientiously dispensed could not serve make the animal appreciably more miserable than he already was.

The Art of Making Punishment, Well, Uh, Punishing

As World War II was drawing to a close, the Japanese steadfastly refused to surrender. Even after all hope was gone, they continued to resist until the advent of the atomic bomb left them no choice. Their recalcitrance had a great deal to do with the aggressive tone of documents sent from Washington to Tokyo laying out the terms of surrender. It was the intention of the U.S. government to treat the Japanese with generosity during the post war period. But the belligerent tone of the documents, when viewed through the cultural filter of Japanese sensibilities, caused them to conclude that their treatment at the hands of the victors would be draconian. They fought on, then, because the official communiques had a very different meaning to the Japanese who read them than they had to the Americans who wrote them.

As you set out to bark train your dog, you will do well to remember that dogs are not little humans with fur. The cultural differences between nations of humans are far smaller than the perceptual differences between humans and dogs, who, like us, interpret every event through a cognitive filter inherited from their ancestors. Any given event is likely to have a very different meaning to your dog than it has to you. That which is unthinkable in polite human society is often natural and expected in the mind-set of a dog.

As we socialize our dogs, we teach them our way of doing things. But the dog can only enter our reality to a limited extent. If you want to communicate effectively with your dog, you have to understand how he sees things. You need to enter his reality and behave in a way that signals your intentions and desires in terms he can understand.

Dogs are extremely status conscious. So are humans, of course, but dogs are even more so. Your dog has assigned everyone he knows, be they human or canine, to one of two classifications relative to himself. The classifications are: dominant/leader/boss and submissive/follower/flunky. To his way of thinking, everyone must be one or the other. You can't be neither and you can't be both.

If the dog thinks you are the boss, then he thinks he is your flunky, and if he thinks he is the boss, then he thinks you are his flunky. To the canine mind, everyone is classified as being either dominant/superior or submissive/inferior, and whichever he thinks you are, he thinks he is the opposite. That's important for you to know as you train your dog, because in his perception, the dominant creature has certain rights and the submissive one has certain obligations and there is an accepted way that the dominant one is supposed to convey his wishes. If you want your dog to respond to you as though you are the dominant dog, then you must behave as the dominant dog is supposed to behave.

If another dog is doing something the dominant dog doesn't approve of, and he wants them to stop, he growls. If the behavior continues, the dominant dog attacks the offending party with a sudden rush and, possibly, the snapping of jaws. If the inferior dog backs off in time he can avoid being bitten. Among dogs that are well acquainted, a canine that views himself as inferior will almost always back off. So, there isn't all that much biting, but there is a lot of rushing forward accompanied by approximations of biting that convey the threat to do bodily harm.

An inferior dog on the receiving end of a rebuke from the dominant dog is not traumatized by the encounter. The inferior dog believes the dominant dog has the right to decide how things will be done and, from his perspective, the physical aggression involved is just the dominant dog's way of making his wishes known. The inferior dog doesn't sit and stew about it. He doesn't wonder if it's right or wrong. He just accepts it as the way it should be and he gets about his business without giving it a second thought.

When you train your dog, you need to deliver punishment in a manner befitting a dominant dog. For the last several years I've watched one of my neighbors attempting to bark train his dog. Sometimes after she barks, he calls out her name in a melodious voice, and he seems to think that will eventually bring an end to her recreational barking. She no doubt knows what he is trying to convey to her but she doesn't care what he wants because his behavior has conveyed to her that she is the dominant dog.

That's how it works. In the mind of a dog you must be dominant or submissive. She takes his failure to assert himself as a submissive posture and, when you take a submissive posture with a dog, from the dog's point of view, it is the same as declaring him the dominant member of the relationship. That's important to note, because a dog that thinks you are submissive feels no obligation to take your wishes into account.

My neighbor, no doubt, feels he is being good to his dog, but the result of his behavior is to make communication with the dog impossible. And in the bargain, he ensures that the potential of the relationship will never be realized.

Your dog is not going to care how you feel about his barking unless he believes you are the dominant dog. And if you want to convince him of that, you must act like the dominant dog.

In the canine world the dominant dog corrects his inferiors by lashing out. That's not how it's done in polite human society, but your dog is not a polite human. He's a dog, and that's the way dogs do it.

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