Teaching a Dog the Quiet or Stop Barking Command

For this virtual dog behavior training session, we show 2 year-old Havanese Roscoe’s guardians how to teach a dog the silence or quiet command and other tips to stop dog barking. Since this was during the time of Covid-19, we conducted the session virtually.

As a Dog Behaviorist I learned a long time ago that there are multiple things involved in stopping dog barking; ensuring proper exercise and stimulation, removing the dog’s motivation to bark, teaching a dog the quiet command and finally creating a heathy leader follower dynamic so the dog listens and respects your leadership enough to follow the command.

We spent the fist part of the session going over the importance of rules, how dogs learn, tips to motivate the dog to want to obey and recognizing and rewarding when a dog does things you like.

Id love to see the guardians start feeding Roscoe out of an Omega Paw Treat Ball as well as from a Snuffle matt (different video) as this causes the dog to have to work for their food which burns energy, helps practice problem solving and can increase confidence.

Teaching Roscoe some self control exercises will also help. There are a number of things you can do to help a dog develop self control like asking them to stay behind an invisible line or wait for permission to go out an open door. Developing self control with these exercises will go a long ways towards helping the dog listen and restrain itself at times.

The secret to teaching a dog to be quiet is to first teach it to bark on command. Once that is the case, you can teach the other side of the coin, not barking aka the quiet command for dogs. You can learn how to train a dog to be quiet on command by watching this free positive dog training video I shot with another client’s dog.

As you can see, this is an easy way of teaching a dog to stop barking, you don’t have to be a professional Havanese dog trainer to do it. Just time, practice and lots of tasty treats.

Like I mentioned earlier, Roscoe will need to see and respect his guardians as authority figures for him to feel like he needs to listen to the silence command to stop dog barking. So enforcing rules, petting with a purpose and passive training are equally important.

Part of the reason for Roscoe’s barking is a low self esteem. Any time you have a dog who has some insecurities, I recommend doing some basic dog training. I love using a clicker as it makes this so much easier.

Id like to see the guardians take turns teaching Roscoe a new trick or command each week for the next 2 months. This will result in 6-8 new ways to redirect his attention and give him a much needed boost of confidence.

Once they have printed the clicker and used it to teach Roscoe a few new commands, the guardians can then start asking him to perform those in more challenging situations like I did with this client’s dog.

Another issue likely related to insecurities is Roscoe not wanting to go on walks. This is a problem I have helped other client’s with. You can get some tips on how to get a dog to like going on walks again by watching this video.

To help the guardians remember all the things we did in this Omaha in home virtual dog training session, we recorded a roadmap to success video that you can check out below.