A puppy barking at visitors can turn into being quite a problematic behavior if not tackled in a timely manner. Puppies need to learn to be accepting as visitors as your puppy will encounter many during his lifetime. Your puppy needs to learn that visitors are not a bad thing, and that great things happen when visitors come over. Puppies should ideally learn normal behaviors exhibited by humans from an early age so they don’t feel uncomfortable having visitors over. Following is a guide on how to stop puppy barking at visitors before it turns into problematic behavior.
Puppy Barking at Visitors From Fear
You may find a puppy barking at visitors because he feels a bit intimidated by them or perhaps he is not totally comfortable having them in the home, which is a place where your pup is used to feeling happy and relaxed.
Sometimes puppies may emit a few barks when the visitors enter the home, and then may settle when the visitors sit down to eat or hold a conversation on the couch, but then the barking starts again sometimes for no particular reason.
However, many times there may be a reason. This is when you need to put your investigative hat on. It may be that the pup barks when a visitor gets up from the chair to use the restroom or to a get a glass of water.
It may be your pup is uncomfortable when the visitor bursts into a laugh or perhaps coughs or sneezes. It can be the visitors move a bit or uses certain hand gestures that your pup finds intimidating. Perhaps the visitor deepens the voice, talks in an excited manner or mimics the voice of somebody or some animal and that scares him.
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Your pup may also bark as a response to when the visitor jingles a bracelet or necklace and the sound perhaps reminds him the noise produced by dog tags.
You will therefore have to put yourself in your pup’s mind and identify the trigger. This may require careful observation and noting down what the triggers may be. It may be challenging at times finding the exact culprit, as the triggers may come from multiple visitors. Recording the barking episodes from a camera set up at a distance and watching it later can help at times identify the triggers.
How to Stop a Puppy Barking at Visitors
Stopping a puppy barking from fear takes a totally different approach than a puppy barking for attention, hence why it’s important to distinguish different types of barking when visitor come over. In this case, you will have to use a combo of desensitization and counterconditioning. Here are a few tips.
Keep the Pup Under Threshold
Keeping your puppy under threshold can often help prevent him from feeling the need to bark at certain triggers. Often, this is a matter of simply increasing distance. If your puppy is crammed in the same room with your guests and your puppy has no way out, he may feel trapped. If your puppy barks from the window, keep him at a distance from the window.
Often, keeping your puppy behind a baby gate or in play pen or crate at a distance from the guests can help him relax. Providing a stuffed Kong or an age-appropriate chew toy to where your puppy is confined can further keep him stay less focused on the guests.
However, if your puppy seems stressed or barks at certain triggers, this may not work and you may have to confine your puppy in another area at a farther distance or find an alternative until your puppy is more relaxed.
Work on the Trigger
Have you observed your pup’s behavior, kept a log, and identified a possible trigger or several triggers your pup reacts to when visitors are over? Well, knowledge is power! You are now ready to work on the issue. Here’s how.
While your visitors are over, keep your pup on leash at a distance. Have your visitors rehearse the trigger behavior but in a form that is less threatening. For instance, if your guest’s coughing makes your puppy bark, have your guest cough very lightly, in a barely audible form (remember dogs have more sensitive ears than us!) and feed your pup a high-value treat right when the guest coughs. Then, have the guest cough in a more audible form, and pop a treat in your puppy’s mouth.
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Gradually increase the intensity of the guest’s coughing always giving a treat when it happens. If your puppy barks at any time, your guest may have coughed with an intensity he wasn’t ready for. Keep a note of it, and take a few steps back to coughing levels that are less scary.
At some, point, your pup may have learned that great things happen when your guest coughs and will look for a treat rather than barking! You can do the same with puppies who bark at visitors from the window or when they approach the door, practice keeping him on leash and have volunteer visitors practice coming to the door as you feed tasty treats.
As your pup learns to look for his treat instead of barking, you can then introduce a “sit.” Ask for your pup to sit and pay attention to you and feed him tasty treats. For a fun game, you can also release your pup from the sit and toss the treats on the ground so your pup can go searching for them and then start the game all over.
Keep Up the Socialization!
Puppies need a lot of socialization, especially during their first three months of age. Ongoing socialization must be provided so to keep puppies “up-to-date” on what humans typically do. The ongoing socialization reminds puppies that it’s normal for humans to cough, laugh and act silly at times. The more you expose your puppy to people who act in typical human ways, the larger your pup’s archive of acceptable human behaviors will be, meaning that he’ll be less likely to react.
Socialization is ideally done before the puppy acts fearful in presence of certain people, but if the pup missed the boat, there is always the chance for “remedial socialization.” On top of exposure, this process requires changing the pup’s emotions towards certain triggers by gradual exposure and creating positive associations with them.
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