Dog Training Tips Help a Trio of Dogs Listen to their Humans and Stop Fence Fighting

For this Council Bluffs dog training session we worked with a trio of dogs (from left); 3 year old Australian Shepherd Nala, 5 year old Dachshund / Terrier mix Baylee and 4 year-old Boston Terrier Mia, stopping them from fence fighting aka charging and barking at dogs on the other side of the fence.

This is really the story of two groups of dogs. Nala was the guardians primary concern as she has gone after the two little dogs when they get to barking at the neighbor dog behind the fence.

While we certainly dont want any dog going after another dog, Nala was likely doing so as the two littles were out of balance and the ones who started the barking. Dogs can certainly feel stress and barking dogs can certainly lead to anxiety. Being a herding breed, Nala was trying to correct the little dogs to stop their anxiety and reactivity – the real problem wasn’t her disagreeing, it was taking things too far.

None of the dogs listened well to the humans outside, especially when another dog was out or they were acting out. This is not uncommon as most people fail to teach their dogs to listen to them in distracting or stimulus rich environments like a barking neighbor dog.

I knew I needed to help the dogs learn to listen to the humans so we talked about adding in rules and enforcing them consistently as well as increasing exercise. Tired dogs are far less reactive. But if the humans aren’t enforcing rules inside, its going to be almost impossible to get the to listen outside.

To help teach the dogs to listen to the humans, I decided to do a little clicker training. This doesn’t seem like the most logical thing to do when your dog is barking at other dogs or failing to listen, but this secret to getting dogs to listen to you is used by many professional dog behaviorists.

You can get some tips on teaching dogs to listen to you by watching the free positive dog training video below.

Doing some basic obedience training may not seem logical, but the dogs need to practice listening to the humans and as a Dog Behavior expert, I have found that this kind of clicker training can work wonders. As the dogs practice responding without the neighbor dogs around, the humane will find the dogs listen better when they are present. This is the first step when it comes to stopping a dog from barking at or charging the fence towards neighbor dogs.

But enforcing rules, increasing exercise, petting with a purpose and rewarding desired behaviors are also important factors when you want to stop a dog from fence fighting or barking at neighbor dogs. That is why we spent 2 hours covering those topics for the first part of this session.

To help the humans remember all the positive dog training tips we shared in this in home Council Bluffs dog training session, we filmed a roadmap to success video that you can watch below.