If your dog barks at people walking past the house and/or noises outside, we first need to give you and your dog a break from the things that are making them bark. This is called managing the environment. Although we cannot control every noise your dog hears, we can help minimise triggers inside the home where we have more control over the environment. You can also use the following strategies during times of the day or night when you know specific triggers are more likely to occur.

Some ideas to help reduce noise triggers include:

• Leaving the TV on 
• Using a white noise machine 
• Playing music such as talk radio, classical music, low-fi beats
• Playing an audiobook or podcast 
• Putting a fan on

To address visual triggers, we can help reduce your dog’s response by limiting their view of outside activity. This can be done using visual barriers such as blinds, curtains, privacy film, or window frosting, or even removing them from the room/outside.

You can also try to pre-empt times when your dog would normally bark by setting them up with an enrichment activity, such as a Kong, puzzle toy, or foraging opportunity. This helps keep them engaged and focused on something positive instead of the trigger that causes the barking.

We want to teach the dog what to do when they see or hear their barking trigger. This is called a cue transfer. Dogs are constantly taking in information from their environment, and certain triggers can become cues for behaviours. For example:

• A person walks past the house → the dog barks → the person walks away 

Over time, the dog learns that barking is part of the order of events.  By transferring the cue of the person walking past, we can replace barking with a different, more appropriate behaviour that is incompatible with barking. For example, instead of barking when a person walks past the house, we can teach the dog to ‘dob on the neighbours’ by coming to you and touching your hand instead.

First, we need to teach a behaviour that your dog can perform reliably and confidently in both low- and high-distraction environments. For example, we can use a recall as the incompatible behaviour to barking. This behaviour should be practised frequently and heavily reinforced. See Touch/Hand Target Skills for how to train a hand touch.

Once the hand touch is well trained, we can begin pairing it with the trigger.

For your dog, we want to pair the following triggers with the recall back to you:

• Neighbours coming home 
• People walking past the house 
• People approaching the front door 
• Each time one of these triggers occurs, ask your dog to ‘touch’ and immediately reward the behaviour with a treat party, thank them for dobbing on the neighbours!

The goal is for the trigger itself to begin predicting the new behaviour (boop my hand) instead of barking.

The ‘trigger’ and the ‘hand touch’ need to be paired repeatedly over time for new learning to occur. Consistency is very important during this stage. You must do this for every trigger. Practice at different distances, different times of day.

Once the recall has been paired with the trigger many times, we can begin “trials.”

For example, have someone walk up the driveway and wait to see whether your dog comes to you without asking them to. If your dog notices the person and then looks to you, immediately give them a treat. Our goal is for your dog to see or hear the trigger and automatically choose to go to you instead of barking. Thanks for telling me! 

Problem solving:

• Don’t forget to ensure that their needs are met first.
• Some breeds have guarding tendencies that can make this more difficult
• You can use your body language to show them that the trigger is not a threat and you’ve sorted it out by going up to the window and acknowledging the trigger, thanking them, and giving them a treat. You’re reinforcing them for quiet, and one bark is much better than 50.