The young gentleman has a Jack Russell/Dachshund mix called Remy. He and Remy have been living with his mother.
Two weeks ago he moved in with his girlfriend and her Miniature Dachshund, Rolo
Change of environment
Due to Remy’s extreme barking at every sound in his new home, Remy is back living with mother.
Fortunately the two dogs already know and love each other. The problem is a noisier area, change of scenery and everything different. Remy can’t cope.
Change of environment sends Remy into a highly stressed state. That ‘stress bucket’ overflows.
Remy barks.
They started with bringing him over to his new home for mornings only. The first three days were fine and then Remy found his bark. They tried a night. Remy barked and barked and the neighbours knocked on the wall.
A big challenge is the young lady’s cat that lives upstairs. Remy sits at the bottom of the stairs, fixated and barking. He doesn’t have to see the cat – just thinking about it is enough to set him off.
To stop him barking? The choice is either to punish and basically gag the dog – or make him feel better so he feels less need to bark so much.
You know which one I advocate!
How punishment ‘works’.
Punishment or an unpleasant consequence like a spray bottle or bark collar in effect means punishing the dog for being scared. It can’t reduce the fear, can it – only make it worse.
The fallout will come out somewhere else.
They both work from home and they need somehow to control the barking.
Distraction v counter-conditioning
They have been to dog trainers who advocate distraction and have worked hard at this. Distraction is a temporary patch. It doesn’t change anything.
Only counter-conditioning can change how he feels. Getting him to associate the scary things with something positively nice.
I compare alarm barking to a child yelling ‘I’m scared’. You would take him seriously.
If you ignore him, he very likely will try harder.
Management is vital also. They will keep him away from the more noisy front of the house. They will also accompany him outside where he may encounter the neighbours.
It’s all a huge change in the environment Remy’s used to.
The cat
We have a plan for working with the cat. Remy watches the stairs in anticipation. They will use a clicker now and pair even a thought of the cat with a click and food. The cat will trigger something nice.
If the cat actually appears, the food stream will be continuous until he’s removed.
Bear in mind the bucket
With the barking out of the house and in cafes, they will take everything in easy stages and BEAR IN MIND THE ‘BUCKET’. The same with barking at the neighbours.
After an upset when an injection of stress will flood the ‘stress bucket’, they should call it a day straight away.
One week later: “We’ve had our clickers at the ready and he seems to be improving well with his anxiety towards noises. He even saw the cat yesterday, and although barking at the start as usual, we were able to show him seeing the cat wasn’t scary, and he only went back and barked once more. Normally he is fixated on the stairs and keeps going back to bark, he went back a few times over the afternoon but didn’t bark again, so that is a huge improvement. And we were using the clicker each time. There was one point where he even fell asleep on the sofa because he was so relaxed!
We found the meeting extremely useful, it completely changed the way we view Remy’s barking. It was different to everything we’d been told by trainers before and it’s already started working which is fantastic. It helped us to understand Remy a lot more as well and advocate for him as much as possible! The meeting helped us to plan how to gradually move Remyt into our new house and how he and Rolo should get used to certain routines prior to it”.
