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August 7, 2005 9:23 AM

How do I stop my 14-month-old pug from barking?

My wife and I love our pug to bits, but lately she's been barking at anything that moves (the pug, not my wife). It seems that it's protective-barking, as she's mostly doing it whenever somebody unknown walks past our house. She's not that loud, but it's annoying to want to play with her and have her run to the back door and bark at something or other. We've tried some of the usual training methods (shaking a noisemaker when she barks, praising her when she's quiet etc), but because we've also got a 6-month-old baby in the house, it's really hard to consistently correct the behaviour, and obviously we can't correct her when we're not home. What methods have worked for other mefites? Do the bark-control collars work well? We don't want anything that'll hurt our little princess, but we do want to get her to stop making noise.

posted by gwenzel to pets & animals (11 comments total)

In all seriousness, I don't think you can without surgery or cruelty. It is just the nature of small dogs.
posted by 517 at 9:44 AM on August 7, 2005

My upstairs neighbors had a dog that was driving me nuts with barking. They recently bought some sort of device that senses the barks and then lets out an inaudible (to humans) noise. Within 3 days the dog had shut up for good--down from barking, literally, for 6 hours straight daily.

I don't know exactly what they bought, but I did ask if it was a citronella collar and they said no. If you want, I'll try and find out what it was. I have no idea, however, if a baby's cries would set it off and have your dog hating the infant.
posted by dobbs at 9:44 AM on August 7, 2005

I'm not an expert on small dogs like this, and as others have said, barking is in their nature so it will probably be very difficult.

I should, however, tell you about the experience with our own dog (german shepard x border collie). We spent a few months doing all that "positive" training, and found that, quite simply, it didn't make a lick of difference. So, instead, when he started barking, I stamped my foot loudly on the floor (if inside) or threw a can full of rocks at the ground (if outside) to basically scare the hell out of him.

And it has worked. And my dog still loves me. I think the results were best when the response was immediate. One bark = me stamping my foot and chasing him out of the room. It didn't take him long to learn what it was that was causing me to be angry at him. When he (very rarely) slips back into his old habits, my response is the same, and he's getting better all the time.

I guess the even bigger problem is if she barks when you're not around to discipline her - you'll need a way to find out if your training goes out the window the minute you leave the house.
posted by Jimbob at 9:57 AM on August 7, 2005

We used a shock collar on one of our medium-sized dogs for a while. The results were immediate, but disappeared whenever the collar was taken off him. We stopped using it because we felt bad, and he grew out of the habit as he got older. I wouldn't recommend it. Those sound-emitting devices seem more humane, and you can get units that aren't attached to collars, so the dog doesn't associate the punishment with the collar like ours did.
posted by emyd at 10:42 AM on August 7, 2005

For those feeling that shock collars are inhumane -- Have you tried them on yourself? My sister bought one for her dog, and I tried it out. It didn't hurt, it was more like an unpleasant tickle. I'm sure the voltage varies, but I certainly wouldn't call that one cruel.
posted by agropyron at 10:49 AM on August 7, 2005

I have had a few devices VERY similar to this.. and they worked great.. and on a a lot of different dogs with very different personalities..

It doesn't seem to do anything but get their attention.. and stop their barking instantly.

You, of course, have to be there to use it. It is not an automatically triggered device. I personally don't feel that is a downside of the device.
posted by cowmix at 10:57 AM on August 7, 2005 [1 favorite]

My pug just sort of grew out of it at about 3 years of age. She went deaf at 8 and now she rarely barks and I actually miss it!
posted by yodelingisfun at 12:46 PM on August 7, 2005

We used the coins in a coke can distraction method for our pug when she was young. It helped somewhat with the annoying senseless barking, but she would still bark occasionally.
posted by SteveInMaine at 5:59 PM on August 7, 2005

We had a similar problem with our little dog, especially while we were out of the house. We use a citronella collar, which has a microphone in it that's triggered by barking. It sprays a pleasant-smelling citronella spray, which startles and distracts the dog. It's humane and works quite well. It probably won't eliminate the barking, but for us, it cut down on it a lot. Depending on your dog, you might not want to use it all the time, because then the dog might get used to it and learn to bark through it, but put it on for a while and take it off for a while.
posted by walla at 6:46 AM on August 8, 2005

Seconding the citronella collar (and then move up to a shock collar if that doesn't work, but only if it has adjustable settings), however, the FIRST thing I would do is get a thorough vet check including an eye and ear exam to make sure that your dog isn't having perceptual problems. It's the nature of most dogs to have some degree of territoriality (it's not protection if there is no danger), and often that involves barking at people passing "their" home. Can you not just close off the front of the house so the dog can't see people walking by? Seems this would be the simplest way to at least cut down on the territorial barking.

A quick comment about "positive training" - I hear comments about how it "didn't work on my dog" all the time, and invariably, if it was ineffective, you were in all likelihood not doing it correctly and/or you didn't give your dog enough time to figure it out (this is very often the case with dogs who have previously been trained in the more "traditional" punishment-based methods, since these methods discourage the dog from being an active participant in the way that operant-conditioning training does). However, some proponents of it seem to think that "positive" means "permissive", and this can be where the effectiveness breaks down. Training based on operant conditioning works on anything with a nervous system and the ability to move.
posted by biscotti at 8:25 AM on August 8, 2005

To the people who have successfully weaned their dogs from indiscriminant barking - do they continue to be audible when it's appropriate (ie., stranger, danger, alarm)?
posted by PurplePorpoise at 9:34 AM on August 8, 2005