Training Problem Finder: Two Questions, One Plan
Tell us your dog's stage and what you're working on. You'll get the cognitive reason the problem happens, a practice routine you can run today, and the guides and games that actually apply.
1Which stage is your dog in?
2What are you working on?
Your plan
Adult barking: alert, demand, and reactive need different plans
By adulthood, barking has usually been rehearsed thousands of times and reinforced by something. Suppressing the noise without addressing the function tends to escalate reactive dogs rather than quieten them.
Lead dimension: Cunning
Routine: Function-first bark plan
Daily management plus 5-minute counter-conditioning sessions
- Classify each episode: demand (wants something), alert (something happened), or reactive (fear or frustration at a trigger).
- Demand: remove the payoff completely and reward the pause instead.
- Alert: acknowledge with a consistent phrase, then cue and pay a settle so the alert has an end point.
- Reactive: work at the distance where the dog can still eat, pair the trigger with food before the reaction, and shrink distance over weeks.
- Manage the environment in parallel — window film, route changes, white noise — so the dog can't rehearse the behaviour between sessions.
Know when to progress: The dog recovers faster after each episode. Recovery speed improves before frequency drops.
Read next
Games that support this routine
Train the dog in front of you
These routines assume a typical profile. Dognition's assessment shows where your dog actually sits across the five cognitive dimensions, so you can pick the method that lands first time.
Take the dog IQ test