How to stop a dog barking too much

Case notes

From a real session: the little rescue who barked things away

A small Kelpie cross came to me three months into his third home. Barking at the front window all day at people, dogs and the postie, barking and lunging at dogs on walks, and a family who were stressed every time they picked up the lead. We met at an on-lead area in Newport with dogs going past the whole time.

I asked his owner to score his arousal out of ten, with ten being explosive. She said six. I said eight, and then I showed her why. Big pupils. Ears tight and taking in everything. A twitchy, hypervigilant head. The base of his tail stuck to his bum, what I call a sticker bum, not tucked but nowhere near relaxed. And he had not stopped sniffing since he arrived. That was not the grass. That was air-scenting for threats. Barking was the symptom that annoyed them. I was looking at a dog who lived at eight.

The barking itself told me more. He only barked at the dogs that moved; the still ones he ignored. In a group of people he barked at the last one, the one with the odd gait. Something different, something wrong. And every time he barked at a thing, the thing eventually moved away, so in his head he had made it leave. He did it himself. I also found out he was being fed a little bit every hour by a doting family member, which keeps a dog hopeful and heightened all day.

The plan did not touch the window. I told them the window barking was the last thing we would fix, on purpose. Two meals a day, everything else earned through play. Four cycles a day instead of walks, and at least one of them somewhere new, even if that meant driving two streets over, parking, doing the cycle and driving home. The environment changes, the structure does not. Playing at home was retired because he had mastered it. Playing is a skill, and the world was where he needed it.

In ANCHOR he got one rule, bottom down until let's go. If he barked with his bottom on the ground I did nothing, because the rule was bottom down, not silence. Within the session he was lying down beside passing dogs, something the family said he had never done outside. Then the family member who fed him hourly, who had never handled him, had him settling within minutes. Barking is the noise a high waterline makes. Bring the waterline down and the window usually goes quiet by itself.