How to control Barking Dogs?

Barking is quite natural to the dogs and no finds it a trouble unless the canine barks excessively and for no reason. At times this could be because of an illness, but some dogs tend to pick up a very bad habit if barking without any apparent reason. Barking dogs can be a nuisance and annoyance to the neighbors and this becomes real disturbing if the barking dog wakes you up in the night.

  This is not such a big problem and barking can be controlled to a large extent by training the dogs from young age. One common mistake that most of the dog owners do is that they go and yell at the dog “Shut Up”, “Quiet”, “Stop It” and what not. The dog does not understand your language and most importantly the more you use these words, you are actually making the dog repeat barking. The dog barks to get your attention and what you need to do is to divert the dog from barking and make it focus on something else. You might be wondering how to train dogs on this?

Training a dog involves learning and the best learning theory that holds good here is the reinforcement theory. According to this theory positive and negative behavior can be linked to a set of pre determined consequences and the trainee needs to be made aware of the association between these two factors. That is reward the positive behaviors with goodies and negative behavior should be punished. It may not have any impact in the first fee attempts, the behavior and the consequence action has to be repeated several times till the consequence gets reinforced and the trainee really knows what to expect from a certain behavior. This works with controlling barking too.

Since barking is a negative behavior, the dog should be given negative reinforcement. Whatever you do make sure that you don’t harm the dog. At the end of the day, it is your pet and all these are done to make the dog good and stop barking. So, carefully select the mode of punishment. One easy way is to use breath spray. When the dog barks, say quite and then spry it around. The dog would find it uneasy to breath and hates the smell of the spray. Repeat this whenever dog barks till the day the dog realizes that his barking would make the owner say quite followed by a nasty spray. In course of time, once the dog hears the word “Quiet”, it would automatically stop barking as the spraying consequence gets registered in the brain and there is no need to use spray any more.