Use Your Inside Voice

When we held group classes we rarely, and I mean almost never had a bark­ing issue.  There was always plenty of space between dogs, bar­ri­ers (we used plas­tic air­line crates so then peo­ple could have a table too), and even another room con­nected by a half door (for the owner to see in).  And although the set up was great, I have to think that was only part of it.

The main trick in a group dog train­ing class is to train the dog.  The other part of the job many peo­ple don’t real­ize is to train the clients (the peo­ple) how to train their dog.  There­fore one of the first things we would teach peo­ple to do was about bark­ing.  If they heard another dog bark in class, no mat­ter what their dog was doing, they were to click and treat their dog, each and every time they heard a bark. What started to hap­pen was the dogs in class actu­ally learned to focus on their own­ers when another dog barked.  Because when the dog heard a bark, a rein­force­ment would come from their owner, so they learned to pay atten­tion to their own­ers.  And sooner than later, the owner could train through hear­ing a bark­ing dog.

We didn’t get a lot of prac­tice though, because we also would instruct the client who had the barker.  The own­ers of the bark­ing dog were instructed to com­pletely ignore the bark­ing dog until he paid some kind of atten­tion to them, and then com­pletely try and engage him by easy cues (sit, paw, tar­get, etc) and click and treat for work­ing.  The barker learned no rewards hap­pened from his own­ers, nor the other clients, nor the other dogs.  After test­ing out the bark­ing a few times the dog would learn there was no reward.  And with the lack of rein­force­ment, the bark­ing behav­ior extinguished.