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This was written in response to someone who uses an electronic bark collar to stop her dog from barking at storms.
Nowhere is it natural behavior for a dog to bark at thunderstorms. The natural behavior of a canid is to go to ground and hunker down until the storm has passed. My yard teems with coyotes, foxes and many other species. They do not bark at the storms we are getting every day here at present, they disappear, and re-emerge once they have passed. In fact, barking is a behavior of infant wild canids not adults for the most part.
In the case of your Beardie that barks at thunderstorms I would say that he is expressing his fear by barking at the thunderstorm. Maybe he believes the storm is barking back at him, but I find that unlikely.
You say Beardies love to bark, do they? When do dogs bark? Mine bark when they are stressed or to warn of something potentially threatening - eg stressful. OK, they may bark once at sheep if the sheep are not getting the message and acting the way they want, in other words they are stressed by the failure to get the response they want. The more skilled they become the less they bark. They bark because they don't know how else to manage the situation. |
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Helix
Training Tips
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If a dog needs to go out, the person needs to be told - maybe the dog has even trained to bark for this, he is stressed, he wants to relieve himself, or see what's changed in his outside world. Perhaps he's just on tenterhooks to release pent up energy. Dogs bark when they run with friends - peer pressure; when they meet sheep - "OMG I'm off leash with lots of weird creatures that run around, this is so stimulating, it's over-whelming"; or on the agility course - performance anxiety.
If a dog is barking, it is stressed and anxious. Stopping the barking without doing all you can to resolve the anxiety and reduce the stress is perhaps more punitive than any punishment that you use to stop the barking.
— Linda Aronson, DVM
Linda is a veterinarian with a behavioral practice. |
