Owning a dog who’s an incessant barker can give you a headache…literally! And if your housing situation has you living in close quarters, a barking dog can quickly make friendly neighbors into angry adversaries and no one wants that to happen.
Over the years there have been many methods and theories out there about how to cure a barking dog problem. Some of the methods revolve around hiring a dog trainer and others depend more on mechanical devices that send a negatively physical message to your dog to let him know that barking is not a good thing.
There can be a bit of a dilemma with teaching your dog not to bark, since many people appreciate the watchdog aspects of having a dog in your home. If you think about it from a dog’s viewpoint, he sees part of “his job” as a family member to use his bark to alert you when someone comes to the door or into your yard, etc. So to teach your dog to never bark, might not be what you’re going for either. As it is with many things in life, the goal with a problematic barker seems to be to find some sort of middle ground to make life peaceful and enjoyable for everyone involved.
I’m assuming if you’re reading this article you probably own “a barker” and you’ve probably already exhausted all the training methods you know of. In the past, you might have been deterred by the first generation of anti-bark dog collars that were designed to give Fido a zap of voltage every time he barked. And I’m right there with you on that, because the voltage zapping method rubs me the wrong way too.
Recently I had a friend who had to deal with her dog’s barking issue because her neighbors were complaining, so I was introduced to a cool new “natural “ anti-bark option that I witnessed worked perfectly for her and I just had to share it with you. This Petsafe Anti-Barking Collar is designed to emit a spray of harmless citronella everytime your dog barks and the company claims that it is 88% effective in helping to reduce nuisance barking. Reviewers who purchased this collar seemed to give it high marks too.
Image: wag.com
While I can’t speak to verify these statistics myself, I can say I saw it work amazingly for my friend and there is now peace again in her neighborhood again. The way she uses it is to clip the anti-bark citronella collar over his regular collar when she puts him out into the backyard if she needs to be gone for several hours. Then when she returns home, she removes it when she brings him back into the house again. If your pup is not deterred by the citronella method, check out this Anti-Bark Vibration Collar to see if it might do the trick for you. It’s true what they say, Silence truly can be golden when it comes to problematic barking!