Hark, Hark! The Dogs Do Bark!

Barking is by far the biggest issue in our house.

There's a lot of stuff out there about vocalizations and what they do and don't mean from dogs. Before talking about what barking IS, I want to be sure to talk about what barking IS NOT.

Barking is not abnormal for a dog. Most problem barking has very little to do with dominance. Dogs are genetically predisposed to bark and have been rewarded for over 14000 years for barking. Dogs are not wolves and do tend to use more vocalizations including barking, whining, howling, and growling.

Barking is first and foremost a way to communicate. It only becomes a problem when it goes against what we think of as polite and civilized dog behavior. Dogs use different barks, in succession or singularly, to express different messages. Higher pitched, rapid barks usually signal excitement. Lower barks usually signal unease and uncertainty.

Dogs are social creatures, some more than others. For a dog cooped up in a yard or house without mental stimulus and opportunities to burn off energy, barking can become a response to being bored. A bark can be a lonely, "Does anybody hear me?" or an expectant "Come play!" or basically something akin to talking to hear themselves talk. Dogs dealing with separation anxiety, aggression issues, or dogs that startle easily are also prone to stress barking.

Certain breeds are more prone to barking. )Ask anyone who has ever had a terrier like Gus. Oy, the yapping.... ) Some breeds were chosen for their vermin chasing skills, some even being selectively bred so their barks could be heard underground. Left without proper outlets for their excitable energy, many of these breeds become serial yappers.

For some dogs, improper correction and timing of reward (or punishment) can leave dogs thinking they are doing a valuable thing. This can be something they've learned from you or something they think they've figured out themselves. Dogs are very bad at cause and effect. Take a dog barking at the lady who is walking past your house, for example. Dog barks. Lady walks away. Bark = stranger leaves. Never mind she was already headed in that direction, the dog thinks he's caused the threat to his house and people to abandon her mission.

If barking is a problem for you and your dog, remember that it is a communication. Your dog is trying to communicate something to you and it is your job as his friend to try to listen to what he's saying.

Barks and backhoes

I have three very sleepy dogs today.

Last night they ran themselves silly at a bonfire with us and their best friends, Sergeant (a husky) and Shasta (a weimaraner mix) . I've always said, "A tired dog is a good dog." There is quite a lot of truth to that. Ollie, Marshall, and Gus have been wonderfully well-behaved all afternoon. They've listened. But it's a different type of listening.

Normally around 5 or 6 in the evening, there is a lot of barking in our neighborhood. Eight of the eleven houses in my neighborhood have one or more dogs. One family dog sits for their adult children. Another family has fosters in regularly from a small breed rescue. People are coming home and their dogs are excitedly announcing the arrival of their owners. The rest of the dogs join in. The weekends are usually quieter.

One particular arrival that always gets my dogs overly excited is the daily return of the backhoe to salvage yard that abuts our north fence (thankfully behind our tree line). The dogs seem very offended by its return, and very content with its leaving. When it leaves in the morning, there is hardly a woof to be heard, but the whole group runs to defend our property against the evil backhoe seven days a week.

Today, when they began to jump up to run outside, it barely took a quiet 'nuh-uh' from me to get all three dogs to lay back down and leave the backhoe to it's own business. This is a good thing.

The not good thing is that the play with Sergeant and Shasta was largely unsupervised by the rest of us at the bonfire. We left the dogs to be dogs with limited rules. There has been a lot of unsupervised play lately and I've noticed mild behavioral changes with Ollie. He is getting more forceful in our play, using his body more, jumping up when he never has before. I thought it might have just been too much unstructured play, but then as I examined the behavior, I realized it was a result of play itself.

This article from www.paws4u.com explains some of the differences between physical exercise and mental stimulation and striking a balance between the two, especially for active breeds like Ollie.

an excerpt:

"With our dogs, we frequently engage in high stress activities with extended periods of rushing around, and the stress period is unnaturally prolonged. Conversely, we infrequently create rest periods or give the dogs a chance to calm themselves down. Accordingly, with unnaturally long stress periods and no cooling off periods, some dogs go on “stress overload.” They can’t process all the stress, and their bodies physiologically signal that a Fight or Flight response is warranted. Add that to a dog that may not handle relatively low grade stressors very well, and you are much more likely to have a dog that reacts to that physiologic build-up and does what his body demands; that is, the dog chooses to fight or flee.

Even if the dog doesn’t progress to the point of taking “fight or flight” action, the dog may shut down or give other external indicia of stress. For animals that don’t handle stress well, those stress chemicals and physiological changes can stay in the body and brain for up to two weeks. If you continually train activities such as fetch, the dog never (or rarely) returns to a baseline stress level and the stress keeps building on itself.

It’s not the running or fetching itself which is overly stressful. Running, fetching, flyball or agility can be great. But, as with so many things, we tend to overdo it. It is the prolonged rushing about with little or no cooling down or relaxation period where we are artificially creating the drive that can cause difficulty."