Petting Cora with a Purpose to Stop Her Protest and Demand Barking

By: David Codr

Published Date: April 25, 2019

Cora K Town Maltese - Petting Cora with a Purpose to Stop Her Protest and Demand Barking

For this West LA dog training session, we use positive reinforcement to teach 3 year-old Maltese Terrier mix Cora that new people are nothing to be frightened of or bark at.

Since I met the guardians and Cora outside the apartment to coordinate parking, I decided to take her for a walk around the block to see how she behaved away from her guardians. This was helpful as one of Cora’s unwanted behaviors was barking when someone petting her stops and stands up. She did this when her guardians were around, but not when we were on a walk apart from them. This tells me thats more of a demand for attention than aggressive behavior. We call this “demand barking” and its a very common dog behavior problem.

Cora likes to bark to disagree and this often happens when a dog doesn’t have enough rules and structure in their life. This lack of structure can be confusing for a dog who thinks that it is in charge since people pet it on demand. To help Cora stop barking to demand attention, I suggested the guardian’s start petting her with a purpose. You can learn how to pet a dog with a purpose in the free dog training video below.

If the guardians get into a habit of petting with a purpose, each time they pet her they will increase her respect for them as authority figures, boost her confidence and help her practice offering desired behaviors instead. It will take the guardian’s about two months to get into a habit of petting with a purpose, but once they do, each pet will become a mini positive dog training session.

When a dog barks for attention, it can get frustrating. The good news is stopping demand barking usually happens once a dog starts to see its guardians acting like leaders. The more the guardians consistently enforce rules, reward desired behaviors via passive training and stop giving attention when Cora does unwanted things, the quicker she will learn that demand barking no longer works and stop barking for attention.

We covered a lot during this three hour in home dog training session. To help Cora’s guardians remember it all, we filmed a roadmap to success video.

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This post was written by: David Codr