How To Reduce "Demand Barking" At The Dinner Table

On the latest episode of The Family Pupz Podcast, we asked the founder of Positive Partners Dog Training LLC, Brianne Harris, what she would recommend to a client who is expecting a large gathering of friends and family, and has a dog that has a bad habit of "Demand Barking" at the dinner table.

Check out her answer above!

To listen to the rest of the conversation with Brianne, check out the podcast episode below:

[TRANSCRIPT FOR THE VIDEO BELOW]

Family Pupz: So let's dig into demand barking and your approach to demand barking.

And so, you know, let's paint a picture.

I mean, the holidays are coming up, big gatherings are there. And obviously, one situation that you pointed out in your blog post is your dog begging for food at the table.

And so, let's say someone in our audience is like, “that's exactly what's gonna happen, people are gonna come over and I'm worried about my dog.”

And so, when you start working with a client that might call you, a couple of weeks before this dinner, or maybe even a couple of months, right, let's say more a couple of months, what would your typical training plan for that specific demand barking be?

And if you just break it down from like, let's say session one to graduation, what are you doing to help them gradually get toward their goal?

Brianne Harris: Yeah, so the first thing we're going to talk about is, again, we have to make sure that all of the dog's needs are being met.

And that can be really in depth.

There's a lot of things that go into that. But we're going to make sure first that the dog is getting enough sleep, because you would be surprised how many behavior “issues” comes from a dog that's just simply overtired.

So for an adult dog, they need at least 14 hours of sleep in a 24 hour period.

For a dog under a year old, they need around 16 hours of sleep.

So if your dog is running on empty, then they're going to be barking. Just going to happen. And like I said earlier, their dogs they bark, it's what they do.

So I always start with those basic needs.

Is your dog getting the right amount of sleep?

Is your dog getting sleep at the right times?

Because if they've been awake for six hours, but they still got 14 hours of sleep, then we still have a problem because they're just not made to be awake that long. They're not. Dogs aren't like us where they sleep eight hours and then are up. Whatever that math for that is.

Family Pupz: 16 hours. Yeah, it did it! Yeah!

Brianne Harris: Anyways, you know, they're not made to just be up for hours and hours at a time.

So we make sure our dogs are getting the right ratio of sleep. So for like a puppy, we might shoot for an hour and a half awake to two to three hours of sleeping. So that helps them stay rested.

And then we're going to make sure that our dogs are getting exercise and that they're getting the right type and amount of exercise. And that's a little more complicated. There's no quick answer for how much exercise your dog needs.

But I have worked with people whose dogs were very demanding, they were very amped up, they were just kind of bouncing off the walls. And it's usually related to fetch, which, fetch is a great thing to do with your dog. It's really fun for both of you guys.

But you should not be fetching for 30 minutes a day, and definitely not with your teenage dog.

So if you have a dog who is doing too much of this really high excitement or high arousal play, then you're training them to be an athlete, when you're building up their endurance, and then they have a lot of adrenaline pumping through their system.

So I had a client last year whose dog was playing fetch for 30 minutes, twice a day, and then could not settle down in the evening. And I was like, “Well, yeah, I couldn't be there. If I was, if I was like doing something that exciting for an hour.” Especially if she was a young dog. She was a teenager that she just was high on adrenaline all day. And so then she was barky and demanding. Because she just was exhausted and amped up, that's just gonna happen.

And then you know, there's making sure they've eaten.

If you're eating dinner at 7pm and your dog eats at eight and you have something really appetizing. I'm not gonna blame them for barking at you. I mean, if me and my best friend are hanging out and she has like some cheesecake and I haven’t had cheesecake in for….and it looks so good…I’m going to ask for some, right?! We’re best friends! Give me a bite!

Family Pupz: Give me the cheesecake, damnit!

Brianne Harris: So yeah, and then, I mean there's so many more things that go into that making sure my dogs not bored. They've had mental enrichment you know, we talked about chewing earlier, make sure it making sure their needs to chew has been that all of this that is day one.

You know, in our first lesson, we go over how dogs learn.

How are we going to train them. I want to make sure they understand behind the scenes before we get into the training, and then we make sure their needs are met.

And the other big thing that is very important that a lot of advice out there misses or I feel like doesn't address well, is the prevention stage.

We're not going to stop your dog from demand barking overnight. And in fact, we're probably not going to do it in just a few weeks. Like you said, you were like two weeks and then were like, maybe, like, two months.

Especially if your dog is older, if your dog has been demand barking for all six years of his life, then I hope you're ready to really have to buckle down, because he's been practicing it for a long time, like said, practice makes permanent.

So we have to make sure that we're preventing the barking, while we're working on training it, because we, it's just not sustainable for us to be trying to train 24/7.

We're gonna get frustrated and give up if that's what we have to do, we have to be hyper vigilant, it's just nobody can do that, I can't do that, you can't do that. It's just not realistic.

So we stop and we look at, so my dog is potentially going to be barking at the Christmas dinner table. And I don't want that to happen.

So first, we think about what are ways that I can prevent my dog barking at the dinner table, while I'm working on teaching him what he should do instead.

And there's a lot of valid things to teach our dog. And I start with the easiest way to prevent possible, which is usually giving my dog, I call it a pacifier, but giving them a safe chew or a food enrichment toy. And I'm gonna hopefully know my dog. And if not, we're gonna like I said, be a scientist and figure it out and say, it usually takes me about 30 minutes to eat dinner, then I'm going to try to pick something that's going to take him about 30 minutes or so to chew on.

So I really like using Toppls, which are like a Kong, but they're bigger and more open, or giving my dog again, a digestible chew that's soft enough that it's not going to break his teeth.

And people get worried when you say that, because they're concerned that they're gonna have to do that for the rest of their dog's life.

Which, you know, I'm like, “Okay, if that's the worst thing ever, that's not a big deal.”

But I get it, we don't want to have to do that with our dogs, we just want them to be quiet.

So I start with management, and then just, you know, remind the humans that for right now, if you can't actively do the training to prevent your dog from barking, then we need to give him something that's going to keep him busy. And if he's chewing on something, he's very unlikely to be barking at you.

So that's step one: we get the management in place.

If your dog is comfortable with being in their crate quietly in another room while you eat dinner, then you can do that, you don't have to give them a pacifier. But a lot of dogs who have demand barking issues are also not going to quietly be in another room.

If your dog likes to be outside, and there'll be outside quietly and the weather's nice, he can hang out in the yard. Brody lives on a farm, he wants to be outside most of the time. So he's happy with that.

So we think of ways to prevent it from happening, because we don't want our dog to continue to practice barking at us at the dinner table. Because every time they practice barking, they dig that hole a little bit deeper. And they go deeper and deeper into the behavior. And then we're trying to climb out of it. And we're taking two steps backward and one step forward, which means we're always moving backwards.

And then after that, we start training alternative behaviors. And that just depends on your lifestyle, and what you envision with you and your dog.

For many of my clients, they would like for their dog to just lay quietly under the table.

Some people don't want their dog in the dining room or in the kitchen. So we might teach the dog to go lay on their bed, we might teach the dog again, maybe we just want to put them in their crate and have them settle quietly there. Maybe we want them to entertain themselves. There's plenty of things that are legal for our dogs to do.

So we start teaching them the skills separate from the actual dinner table.

So I like to teach dogs to go to a bed and to lay down there because it gives them really clear boundaries. It's very obvious. This is where you should be. And it's nice and comfy. So it's easy for them to be there. And if it's the dinner table, well they're usually a little sleepy so it can help them learn to settle down. So we teach them how to find the bed. We teach them how to stay on the bed. There's a lot of different techniques that we teach our dog that when they see the bed, it means they should hang out. They should relax and they should chill out.

Once they know that, which usually only takes a few days. Dogs like to be comfy and it's easy to teach them that while you're watching TV at night, it's like pajama training. Put on your pajamas, put your dog on the bed and just drop treats on him, it's really easy, then you start teaching them, alright, I'm gonna go sit at the table, and I'm going to put the bed close enough to me that I can toss a treat to you. There's no dinner involved yet, but I'm at the table, you're on the bed, you're getting treats, and we're going to hang out and relax.

And then again, once our dogs are building up those foundation skills, then we start bringing the food into the picture.

And the way that I like to do this for a dog that barks at the table, because I tell my humans to set up a time, close to dinner, but not when you want to eat it. And what you're gonna do is you're gonna go through the motions to preparing dinner, and you're gonna get the food out, and you're gonna sit at the table. And you should have already asked your dog to go settle on their bed room, but they have to have, they have to know something to do.

And you're gonna sit down and you're gonna pretend to start eating or actually start, you could have microwave food if you wanted.

And then if your dog starts barking, again, they're usually barking in this situation, because they want access to your food.

So what we're going to do is we're just going to quietly get up, put the food probably in the microwave, we want to make sure our dog can't get to it, we don't want to try to stop demand barking and teach your dog to jump on the counter. So we're gonna put the food away.

And then I'm gonna go into the living room, I'm going to call my dog to come with me, and then I'm going to start scrolling on my phone or something, I'm gonna just do something completely different.

And, you know, again, I want to call my dog with me, I might ask him to settle on his bed again, I'm gonna, I want to make this as pain free as possible for everyone. I don't want this to be like, “Oh, you started barking Well, no dinner for anybody.” And I don't want it to be something that's really unpleasant. But I also want to be like, “Well, nobody's getting dinner, if the dinners in the microwave”, and we go and we hang out. And we just pretend like we weren't going to eat. Once my dog settles down and calms down, and has kind of forgotten about dinner, we're going to ask him to go back to his bed. And I'm going to start over again.

And for most people in dogs, if you're consistent with this, it really only takes a few weeks before you start to see change because they realize that barking is going to make access to the food go away.

But if I'm hanging out on my bed, remember, we're still teaching them to stay on their bed. So if I'm hanging out on my bed, then my human's going to let me have my chew, or my humans going to maybe keep tossing some treats over here. And you're gradually spacing out the time in between treats and making it longer and longer. And they're gonna go you know what, this is actually pretty cool. And it's really easy to lay here and I'm still gonna get good things and I'm not missing out on something in the process.

And then you just kind of keep practicing that until one day, you just ask your dog to go to bed and you give them a treat for laying on the bed. And then you fix your whole dinner and you hang out and your dog is just happy to hang out and relax because you've made the bed a really awesome place. You've been working on relaxation techniques, aside from this training. So as soon as they get on the bed, they just start kind of chilling because that's what they've learned.

And then they're not barking to get what they want.

And like I said, you're also you should also be teaching them options on how to request things. So maybe they really do need something and he gets off of his bed and he comes and sits beside you, then that's a cue to you. He needs something. it's been it's probably not just my food, but maybe there's something else going on. Maybe his tummy is upset and he can't lay here on the bed because he really needs to go out go to the bathroom.

It's a really multifaceted process.

And it's more than just stopping the barking.