I don't mind a dog barking some, but I would like to train them to stop on command. Tilly barks when she wants something, though it is not always obvious what it is: Food, To go out on the upper deck, Or who knows what. She can be very insistent, especially when she thinks she should get fed (even if it is not time). Tilly will bark on command, but we have never taught Cooper to do that. Between being old and deaf, I'm not not very hopeful, or concerned about training Tilly at this point. Cooper barks: When she is bored and thinks we should play, When she is playing bitey face with Tilly, And when she hears or sees another dog on TV. She does not normally bark at real dogs that she sees or hears, though she will occasionally when one walks by on the street and she is in the house and can't see it. I don't mind the initial barking, but I wish she would stop on command. Cooper seems to learn things easily, and if I can find a way to get her to do something, it is pretty easy to get her to do it on command. After 3 years of rushing her dog food, it only took about 3 days to teach her to sit and wait for "OK" when I put her dog food down. I just picked the bowl back up until she stayed until I released her. Unfortunately I can't think of a way to get her to stop barking so I can reward her for not barking. We do have a muzzle, which will stop her from barking, but I don't really want to go there. Our Sammy owning friends use muzzles sometimes because both of their dogs are reactive to other dogs on the other side of a fence, and will bark continually. The muzzle stops them from barking, but they have not learned to stop on command.
Barking is a form of communication. If you want to stop it, you first need to figure out what the function of the barking is - why the dog is barking. You can't just ask a dog to stop barking without addressing the underlying reasons the dog is barking in the first place. A dog which is barking because she is bored and wants you to play, should be ignored. If you respond to this, you are only reinforcing it and teaching the dog that barking works. As you already have one dog you've taught to bark for everything she wants in life, it would be best not to reinforce the second dog in the same way unless you want to have exactly the same outcome! Barking whilst play is perfectly normal - why would you want to stop that? It's part of the play. If you had to communicate with your family without being able to talk to them, that might get a little tough, no? Barking is part of play behaviour. If you want to stop it, you will need to stop the play itself. Barking at dogs on TV is a form of reactivity, whether coming from frustration or fear. The best approach to that, is Look At That - we have an entire page on that, here. But really it would be much simpler to call the dog away and/or give them a Kong out of sight of the TV if there is something you want to watch with dogs in it, than train LAT for the TV alone... Barking if she hears another dog passing by, is perfectly normal dog behaviour. Dogs have been bred for centuries to guard humans and their property and those instincts are still present in many dogs. As long as this barking isn't going on for a long time and/or isn't happening very frequently, there's not much wrong with it. Ensuring dogs cannot see down the street through windows or doors and if necessary, masking external sounds with white noise machines or radios, tends to reduce barking.
We did teach Tilly to bark on command, but barking for something she wants is something she developed on her own. We try to ignore her, but she can last a long time. It is pretty had to ignore Cooper when she is standing on the bed, and barking in your face. The best response we have is "Get a toy" which works some times. The problem is that this always happens when we are watching TV and Cooper decides that she and Tilly should play Tug or Bitey Face. They only do it when they have an audience, and Cooper's indoor voice is very sharp and loud. Actually worse than her outdoor voice. I am going to try LAT, but I think it will be difficult in this case, because Cooper is so attuned to watching and listening to TV. I am amazed at how she notices things that we barely see. She sits on the couch all curled up, and then explodes across the room, pushing the screen with her nose. It seems to me that she reacts to TV dogs because they don't smell, and she knows there is something different about them. She reacts more to dogs she can see on TV than to dogs she can only hear. She is not at all reactive to real dogs. She will go up to them to sniff and/or play but she is normally very friendly. I'm not concerned about this. They don't bark much in this situation, and I am happy to have them tell me if someone is coming up to the house. I am always a little puzzled about how they know that someone is walking by on the street, especially Tilly since she is mostly deaf, and there are no windows where they can see the street in front of our house. It must be scent, but that is pretty amazing to me. Cooper is reactive to Skate Boarders, even when they are not on their boards. She has decided that certain people look like skaters, and should be barked at. She has never had a bad experience with a skate boarder, so I am puzzled by her reaction. She does not have that reaction to skiers, but perhaps to snowboarders. She does not meet many snow boarders, since she seldom gets in a ski area, and boarders don't do back country trails much.
My Springer would bark in the garden at people walking past the house it was funny as I would shout out the bathroom window shut up and she would just shut up. I never taught her this she just picked it up.
You can use LAT with TV images. You don't hear a tree fall, when there is no one there in the forest! On a serious note, if you are correct, then the dogs may be getting inadvertent reinforcement from you (or the images on the TV). If the TV is off, do they bark, when you are sitting there.
Cooper might bark at dogs on TV if we weren't there, but normally the TV is not on if we aren't watching, so we don't really know. They really only play Bitey Face when we are very close by. It is mostly initiated by Cooper, but Tilly participates willingly. They have to have an audience, and never do it if we are in a different room. I think I mentioned in a different post, that Cooper has a funny behavior, where when we let her out on our lower deck, she runs, leaps off the deck, runs to the right hand end of our back yard and then usually across the yard to other corner and then back up to grab a dummy that hangs on a bungee from our upper deck. She only does this when we open the door and watch her go out. If she goes out through the dog door she just walks around, and occasionally will go grab the dummy. She definitely wants an audience.
