I had a phone call from a woman who wanted me to help her stop her dog from barking. She had just recently moved to Portland and was living in an apartment and her neighbors were complaining. The dog has always been a barker but until recently, she and the dog had been living in the country. Because of their relative seclusion and lack of nearby neighbors, the barking hadn’t been an issue.

Barking can be a tough problem. It really depends on why your dog is barking. There are a number of reasons that dogs that dogs bark, but I’ve narrowed it down to three major categories: concern, excitement, and to get your attention.

This latter kind of barking I call demand barking and it is the easiest to resolve. This is the dog that barks to go outside, or barks when it is time for dinner, or barks to get you to throw the ball. This is learned behavior and the dog does it because it gets results. Even though it can be annoying, or maybe because it is annoying and we want it to stop, we give in to these demand barkers. Remember that behavior that gets rewarded gets stronger.

To fix this problem, you must resolve not to reward it. For example, if your dog begins to barking furiously when you pick up his dinner dish, immediately set it down and walk out of the kitchen. When he stops barking, count to five and walk back into the kitchen and once again pick up his dish. If he begins to bark, leave the room again. Repeat this until the dog can remain quiet while you fix his dinner.

Bear in mind that when you are trying to extinguish behavior it often goes through an “extinction burst” which means that the behavior gets worse before it gets better, so initially you might have a dog that barks even more furiously. A human example of an extinction burst is what happens when you put your money in a soda machine and nothing falls out. We are so accustomed by be rewarded with a can of our favorite beverage that when this happens we get frustrated. We push the button a few more times just to make sure we can’t affect the outcome; we might even resort to pounding and kicking the darned machine before we finally give up and walk away. But we do walk away. The same is true of our dogs; they will eventually give up and wait quietly while their dinner is being prepared. Understand too, the longer the barking has been rehearsed, the longer it will take to extinguish.

Additionally, when dogs get excited, they will often bark. You can intervene and interrupt this kind of barking and if you are consistent, you can often modify the dog’s behavior.

The hardest kind of barking to resolve, in my opinion, is the kind of barking that dogs do when they feel concerned about something: outside noises, strangers and other unfamiliar things. Some trainers will recommend that you teach the dog to bark on command and then teach the dog a “quiet” cue. I’ve not had much luck with this in this approach. This is a dog that isn’t barking deliberately but rather reflexively. What’s that noise? Woof. Who’s that person? Woof.

To demonstrate to my clients just how difficult it might be to curtail this kind of reflexive response, I ask them to imagine themselves sitting in the middle of the room with their eyes squeezed tightly shut. Now I ask them to imagine that I am there in the room with them and they know that at some point I am going to sneak up behind them and spook them. When I do, I say, they must not involuntarily gasp or flinch. I know it would be impossible for them to do this even though they are fully aware that at some point this is going to happen. Now imagine that you are a dog and you hear something that spooks you or see something that spooks you. How hard would it be to contain that response?

There are things that you can do to prevent spooky things from happening. A white noise machine, which produces sound that can muffle outside noises, might help. Making sure that your dog is engaged by providing them with good things to chew on while you are away might be helpful. If your dog barks at people going by the house, keep the curtains closed or somehow prevent your dog from being able to see outside by using gates or crates or other barriers.

Once the dog has alerted to the noise, there are certainly ways that you can interrupt and distract to diminish the duration of the barking. But I’m not convinced that you can “stop” this kind of barking.