Barking at night

Recently Boris has started barking during the night. The normal routine is I lock the back door, pick up a couple of dog biscuits, Boris goes and sits in crate, I give him the biscuits shut the door. In the morning open door start my breakfast and Boris ambles out. A few weeks ago the above routine was followed but after a few minutes he started barking, eventually I came down, no fuss took out into the garden, he didn't perform so back to crate, he was reluctant to enter crate and I had to up the treat stakes to get him back in the crate. Upstairs I went barking resumed. I came down and sat in the room no lights on for 20 mins and then went back to bed , result no more barking. That day and night was very windy and I put this behaviour down to the wind. A week later a repeat performance, again a very windy day. Since then I have several disturbed nights, no wind on these nights. I no, I should ignore him, but I live in a terraced house and excessive barking would disturb the neighbours at the moment we get on well. I could stop using the crate. I am not aware of any barking when he is in the crate and I am out during the day.Any advice would be welcome. Thanks. David

 

Here is a good article

http://www.thelabradorsite.com/night-waking-how-to-restore-the-peace/

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Thanks for the link. The bit I am confused about, is how does aversion therapy differ from punishment ? Previous posts about not saying no and I think it was Dexter's training with the sheep that used a form of aversion therapy and was not recommended.

 

Do you mean the bit in the article where it says:

" For the sake of good neighbourly relations and sufficient sleep, you may feel an aversive is the best answer. An aversive is something the dog does not like and will try hard to avoid. A fierce telling off (grrr you BAD dog) is an example of an aversive, a squirt of water is another. Bear in mind, if you decide to use aversives at 3 in the morning, that the aversive has to upset the dog in order to work, and these days, many of us now longer wish to use aversives on our canine friends. "

The article is clear that may people will not want to do this, and if you do it it has to be upsetting to your dog in order to work (otherwise it won't work). I don't read the article as recommending this, it just mentions it as an option. It clearly is the case that effectively applied aversives work, it's just many of us do not want to apply something that upsets our dogs in this way (and so are often ineffective in applying them and/or fear the consequences of doing so).

Personally, I'd try rewarding quiet, with a remote treat dispenser if that helped, then I'd try waiting it out if I could - taking my neighbours a bottle of wine and flowers while I did that - otherwise I'd have the dog in my room (since my dog is in my room anyway though, I don't have to worry about these things). I am not capable of upsetting my dog enough to make an aversive work, or escalating that aversive if it didn't work at first. It's just not something I can do.

 

scrub my reply.....Julie has covered it!

 

I think if you were to tell your neighbours that you're trying to train your dog not to bark at night and that it might mean that he's initially barking till you get it right, I think they'll be amenable to situation. It's when you don't communicate the problem to them and don't communicate that you're trying to fix it, that is when they could get really irritated.

Well, I'm only saying this from our experience. On the one side we have neighbours with noisy kids, on the other, two houses away, a neighbour with two dogs that bark excessively (feels like every waking moment). When we hear the neighbour telling her kids to shush, we feel we can cope better with their noise. As for the neighbour with the barking dogs, well, she is clueless as to the people around her, and it really irritates us when her dogs bark cos she's doing absolutely nothing about it.

When Snowie was a puppy, we decided to train him to stay sleeping until we were ready to wake up. We did the ignoring thing, and he threw tantrums (it was hilarious, he literally picked up his bed and tossed it across the room while we were heaving with laughter under the duvet). We sent SMSes to our neighbour in the terrace right next door to apologise for any noise at 5am and the reply was: Don't worry, haven't heard a thing. Lucky! It took a week and he stopped barking to make us wake up.

Best of luck with the night-time barking. While Snowie doesn't wake us up anymore in that way, his excessive scratching and licking does (he's an itchy dog), and I totally empathise with your sleep being disturbed.