Why Can't I Use Intimidation To Get My Dog To Stop Barking? (i.e. screaming, spray bottle, can of pennies)

For some people, instead of trying to ignore their dog's barking, they'll do the opposite, and try to intimidate their dog, either by raising their voice, using a spray bottle, or god forbid, a can of pennies, to get them to stop.

And in their mind, they may thinking, "I don't like doing this, but this situation sucks, and at least I'm not causing physical pain to my dog."

But for a lot of dogs, this doesn't seem to work (or work well), causing people to ask the question, "my dog seems VERY attuned to my tone of voice and my body language, so why don't they put 2 and 2 together and realize that every time they bark, I lose it, and eventually understand that I don't want them to do that anymore?"

On the latest episode of The Family Pupz Podcast, we asked the founder of Positive Partners Dog Training LLC, Brianne Harris, this question, and her analogy with a smoke alarm in the house really helped us re-contextualize what is happening when we try to intimidate the bark away.

Check out her answer above!

To listen to the rest of the conversation with Brianne, check out the podcast episode below:

[TRANSCRIPT BELOW]

Family Pupz: So I think you've touched upon it a little bit. But let's go on the other side of the spectrum.

I think some people when, let's say they come back after a long day of work, and their dog is just demand barking while they're just trying to prepare dinner or whatever. I think some people, instead of ignoring, they'll do the opposite, where they'll just try to intimidate the dog, and be like, “when you're just barking in front of my face, I'm gonna let you know that that's not a behavior I like!”. And I'm going to, let's say intimidate, scare or whatever, to get them to stop.

And maybe in their mind, they're like, “okay, well, I don't like doing this, but this situation sucks, and at least I'm not causing, at least, physical pain on this dog.”

And so, and I know you talked about it earlier, you can't just tell some a dog to stop, and you got to give a dog an alternative behavior.

But at the same time, dogs are very attuned to us. They understand our tone of voice; they understand our body language.

And so I guess a lot of people might be asking, “why doesn't that work? Why doesn’t the dog eventually say, “wow, like, that happens every time - he loses his mind every time I demand bark, maybe I should stop doing that!”

Why doesn't that work?

Brianne Harris: I think it really, first off, it depends on the dog. There probably are some dogs that that would work on. As much as I hate to say that. There are plenty of dogs in this world that if you are harsh enough, they'll stop, because it could be scary. It could be really unpleasant.

I don't think you should do that. Because I don't think it's nice.

But what I like to tell my clients is, you know, there's a lot of different things that are really frustrating for clients, and for us humans, and we want these behaviors to stop. And sometimes we want them to stop and we don't care what it takes to get there.

So if my dog is doing a lot of demand barking, because he is, maybe it's because he's hungry. Or maybe it's because he needs to go out and go potty. Or maybe it's just because I'm eating a steak dinner. And that's really appealing to him. There's a lot of reasons he might be demand barking.

And so if he's just barking, barking, barking, and I decide I'm just going to - maybe I'm just going to yell at him every time he does it, or there's a lot of - it's a lot less out there these days, but it used to be really common to have like a shaker can and have something, like full of pennies, shake it at the dog, which is really harsh on their sensitive hearing. And eventually, if you do that enough, and you do it loud enough, the barking might stop.

But all we've done is address one piece of the picture.

So I always like to tell people, you know, I've stopped the barking. But I did nothing to address what was going on behind the scenes, and why the barking was there. And again, it's really rewarding to the human because my dogs not barking anymore.

But I haven't fixed the problem that my dog is having, and I'm probably going to see something else come up.

So a great example is, you know, if I'm in the kitchen, and I've got something baking in the oven, maybe I got brownies in the oven, and then I walk into the living room, I just want to relax and watch TV. My brownies catch on fire. And then my smoke alarm starts going off. And that beeping is really annoying and I cannot watch TV.

So, I get up. I take the battery out of the smoke alarm and I go back to my TV show.

I stopped the beeping but I did nothing to fix the fire in my oven.

That's what happens here. If I am just focusing on stopping a surface level behavior, I do nothing to address the fire that's raging underneath, and that again is another really important tenet of doing reward-based training is not just looking at the surface but going deeper into what is causing this and how can I address that?