As a dog owner, you must be prepared to face all sorts of situations, like excessive barking, that might annoy your family and neighbors.

What Can You Do?

You have to determine what stimulus makes your dog bark. No dog barks for no reason. There is usually an external stimulus that annoys your dog; maybe it’s an animal (like a cat), maybe it does not like people walking on the street or maybe it gets bored if left alone more than a certain amount of time. If you cannot remove the stimulus that annoys your dog, then you need to find alternatives.

Never punish your dog if it barks out of stress or fear, because this will only intensify the barking. You can use positive training techniques instead of coercion. Positive traning techniques include exposing your dog repeatedly to the stimulus, while you try to calm it down; distracting the dog when the stimulus occurs or the reshaping technique – teach it to bark on command. Many times these methods work efficiently if you have enough patience to apply them. However, sometimes it takes more than that to calm the repeated barking. You can even consider taking it to a training center or a vet.

About The Bark Collar?

Some people who own dogs use a bark collar to prevent excess barking. Three different methods are available, as well as combinations of methods for even greater effectiveness.

There are collars with “citronella” that can spray when the dog starts to bark. Some collars even give the dog a warning “hiss” so that they can learn to avoid the smell entirely.

Other Bark collars use sonic or ultrasonic methods, using sounds that only your dog can hear. Because your dog does not like this type of sounds, it will not start barking when the stimulus occurs.

There are also electronic barking collars you can use; they give the dog a shock whenever it barks. This collar is painful, but effective in reducing the barking.

You can find alternatives to these collars, but they will not be as effective. They can work by citronella spray, sonic / ultrasonic sounds, or electronic static. No type of bark collar can hurt your dog, but it can successfully prevent excessive barking.

If you need a solution to prevent your dog from barking excessively, you can either use dog training or Bark collars. The latter comes in three versions, which are all very efficient – collars with citronella spray, electronic collars or sonic/ultrasonic dog collars. Any of these methods will not harm the animal. More information on barking collars is available here.