What to Do When Your Dog Barks at Guests
📝 Summary
A guest comes and the dog barks nonstop - what to do? Whether guests at home or on walks, constant barking troubles the owner greatly.
1 Overview
When a dog sees a stranger, barking usually has two causes:
One is the dog’s natural guarding instinct; the other is poor socialization causing fear of people, leading to barking at strangers.
When barking comes from poor socialization, we need desensitization training, following the dog’s thinking and learning modes. A dog thinks vertically and cannot generalize; its learning is by accumulated experience.
So we take the dog to crowded places for desensitization, with all kinds of different people – men, women, old, children, fat, thin, tall, short.
This way the dog learns no stranger harms it and gets a reward. Also, when a stranger gives food for desensitization, follow the dog’s learning mode step by step: first have the stranger drop food near the dog, and only when the dog is clearly relaxed do you let the stranger hand-feed.
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