Sharing 2 Fun and Easy Tips to Stop Dog Barking in Hollywood
By: David Codr
Published Date: April 18, 2024
If your looking for an easy way to stop dog barking, you’ll definately want to check out this summary of our in home West LA dog training session with 4 year-old Pomsky Ghost.
Dogs bark for many reasons, and usually we do the exact wrong thing; telling them to stop barking. While we do not like listening to dogs bark, it’s important to understand that all behavior is trying to achieve something. And for dog’s all attention is rewarding. Your “be quiet prompt may tempoarily stop the barking now, but it makes it more likely to occur again later.
Instead of disagreeing with the barking, I try to identify why a dog is barking in the first place. Addressing the needs of your dog and changing how they feel about the thing they are barking at is a much more effective way to stop unwanted dog behavior. Correcting, disagreeing or punishing a dog for doing things that you don’t like will usually make them happen again and again.
A more effective way of stopping dog barking is more about creating a positive association about whatever your dog is barking at. This way, your dog doenst feel the need to bark at all. The ironic thing abut dog barking problem is humans are often contributing to the issue by how they try to stop it.
Often there are a number of things that we do that confuse dogs or give them the impression that they need to defend or protect us. This can easly cause a dog to bark. I spent the early part of this in-home Hollywood dog training session sharing a number of dog behavior fundamentals such as how to use a marker word, the benefits of rewarding your dog for desired behaviors (Celebrating) and a number of other dog behavior secrets like burning energy with scent games like cookie in the corner.
It’s important to get your fundamentals in place and make sure that humans are aware of the things that they do that may be contributing to or causing dog problems. This is one of the reasons that my clients have such a high success rate; I show them what they’re doing that contributes to their dogs problem as well as how to fix it.
A Trick to Stop Dog Barking
Instead of yelling at your dog to be quiet when it’s barking, I like to show my clients how to teach their dogs they don’t need to bark in the first place. Teaching a dog is far more effective that punishing or correcting them. This is why many people are unsuccessful when they try to stop dog barking by punishing or correcting.
My secret to stopping dog barking utilizes counterconditioning and desensitization. While many of LA’s best dog trainers use one of these techniques or the other, I’d like to combine them. I find that this is a much more effective way of stopping dog barking.
If you have a dog that barks at sounds, barks at people or other dogs, you’re going to want to definitely check out the free positive dog training video on how to stop dog barking below.
This is an easy way to stop dog barking if you go at the dogs pace and stop before the dog feels the need to bark. As weird as it sounds, training a dog to stop barking is all about rewarding it for being quiet when something happens that they normally would bark at. You can achieve that by progressig slowly, making the sound low enough so the dog doesnt respond.
Although I had to change up my technique a little bit, it was great to see how quickly Ghost learned to stop barking at knocks at the door. And as I mentioned in the video, you can use this trick to stop dog barking for other things too.
That’s the great thing about this technique to stop dog barking; you can use it for anything. Even things your dog just doesn’t like such as skateboards, cars rolling by, etc. It’s all the same to the dog, we’re just changing their emotional response from a negative to a positive.
We covered so many tips in this in-home West LA dog training session that I wanted to record a roadmap to success summary video to help Ghost’s guardian remember them all. Watch it yourself below.
Summary of Tips to Stop Dog Barking
- If your dog barks at the window at things outside, cover the bottom 1/3 with white paper so they can’t see out.
- Don’t verbally disagree when your dog barks, instead find a way to recreate the sound quieter, then reward no barking.
- Avoid situations that help your dog practice barking. This stops it from getting worse.
- If you cant recreate the thing your dog barks at, record it on your phone when you can.
- Play the recording at a low volume as your dog eat their food.
- Find a distance where your dog is comfortable enough to sit before you start practicing this exercise.
- If your dog cant sit or wont take a treat, you are too close. Move 5-8 feet away and ask for a sit again.
- Only practice this exercise when your dog is comfortabel enough to sit and take a treat.
- Make sure you go with your dog’s pace. If you push too far and your dog barks, your practicing the opposite.
- Practice in short 2 to 4 minute practice sessions
- Always end on a good repetition
Categorized in: Dog Behavior