Alert barking. Territorial barking. Attention barking. Demand barking. There are many  “types” of barking that occur inside of the home, but what is actually happening in these scenarios? Why do these types of barking occur so frequently, and why it so hard to get dogs to stop? In this episode we cover:

– How to unpack barking to identify what is maintaining that behavior

– How the environment is reinforcing your dog

– Strategies for reducing barking towards foot traffic and delivery people

– Teaching dogs to self interrupt

– And so much more

About Kiki:

Kiki Yablon, MA, KPA CTP, CPDT-KA, is a Chicago-based dog trainer who holds a master’s degree in applied behavioral science from the University of Kansas, where she conducted thesis research related to excessive barking in dogs. In addition to helping pet-loving households, Kiki teaches fellow professionals through several channels, including as a faculty member for the Karen Pryor Academy and as a co-instructor for Dr. Susan Friedman’s Behavior Works.

http://kikiyablondogtraining.com/

@kiki.yablon on instagram

Support for dog trainers: Leash Reactivity Mentorship for Professionals 

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For courses on helping reactive dogs for both pet parents and dog professionals go to www.jessicawheatcraft.com

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Transcript

I’m Jessica Wheatcraft, and this is Rethinking Reactivity, a podcast designed to educate, empower, and equip the modern handler of reactive dogs. Whether you have a reactive dog or you help people with their reactive dogs, you’re in the right place.

Jessica: So far, most of my episodes have revolved around dogs who react on leash. But what about dogs who are barking excessively inside of their homes? There are a lot of different labels we use to describe this behavior. Alert barking and territorial barking often describe barking towards foot traffic or delivery people.

And we’ll use things like demand barking or barking for attention to describe dogs who bark at their humans for something. And most of the time, these conversations revolve around getting the dog to stop barking. [00:01:00] Yes, we’re going to cover some of those strategies today. But what I really wanted to do is to dive a little bit deeper into these behaviors to really understand what is actually happening in these scenarios.

I wanted to go beyond a simplistic explanation. One of my favorite people to talk to about behavior is Kiki Yovan. Kiki holds a master’s degree in applied behavioral science from the University of Kansas, where she actually conducted her thesis research related to excessive barking in dogs. So I could not have picked a better person to help us unpack this topic.

One of the things I love about talking with Kiki is the lens in which she views behavior, and I always feel smarter after I talk to her. So thank you, Kiki. One more thing before we dive into the show. My leash reactivity mentorship for professionals is now open enrollment. You heard that right. No more waiting for the next [00:02:00] cohort, and you now have access to the mentorship for a full 12 months.

So come and join us. You’ll get to nerd out on all things leash reactivity while transforming the way you work with reactive dogs and their people. All right, let’s dive into the show

I know that a lot of reactive dogs that are reactive on leash also bark at other situations, which we think of dogs barking, that’s normal, right?

 But sometimes we have dogs who might have what we would describe as like a disproportionate reaction to something on a leash, and then also something that we might view as disproportionate, types of barking inside of the home, and I think that’s the part that I really wanted to talk with, with you, and unpack that help listeners have a better understanding of how and why this is happening, and then also, what are some interventions and so forth that you found really helpful in your work?[00:03:00]

Kiki: Yeah. Well, it’s funny, ’cause I always think when you say like a dog that barks on leash, might also bark inside the home, I always think like wouldn’t it sound funny if we substituted child and talk-

Jessica: Yeah …

Kiki: Like, like this child who yells in class also sometimes yells at home. And then that- Right … I think kind of brings you to the most important questions that you have to ask, which is, well, talking about what, when, what happens when they do it.

And that’s, that’s kind of, what usually leads me to what I’m gonna do about it.

Jessica: Yes. I love that you are bringing up that point, because- People get annoyed by dogs that bark, right? Yeah. The sound of it can be annoying to people.

Kiki: And- Also by children who [00:04:00] yell

Jessica: yeah. So I think that the barking inside of the, the home is an annoyance to people. It also could be disruptive for people who maybe they’re doing meetings, and they work from home, and their dog is exploding in the background, so it’s disrupting part of their daily life.

And yes, they’re annoyed by it. But dogs also, as you pointed out how we could compare that to children, you know, talking or screaming, it’s normal for them to vocalize. this is just what they do, and some dogs vocalize more than others. And perhaps a better theme for today is for dogs who vocalize more than others might be a little bit more of a fair-

Kiki: Exce-

thing. Excessively for the situation or something. Yeah.

Jessica: Right, exact- exactly. Yeah. For, for that scenario. More, more than the people expected they would vocalize is also another- Yeah. … another way to- Maybe, yeah … think about it. There’s some people who are seemingly, like, [00:05:00] not bothered by their dogs barking at all, and then there’s other people who are very, very sensitive to it.

So I guess actually, the more that we’re, c- just going back and forth on this, I guess a lot of it comes down to the person and their tolerance level of it, right? Like, that g- is probably a pretty big, pretty big factor in who decides that they want to do something about decreasing their dog’s barking-

Kiki: Yeah

Jessica: compared to somebody who decides they don’t wanna do anything at all because they don’t care about it. It doesn’t affect them.

Kiki: Yes, for sure. And I think also, like, tolerance is a, is, like, a product of your conditions also as a human. Like, if you’re on Zoom talking to your boss Maybe you care more about your dog barking or if you have guests over who, and you’re trying to have a dinner party, then maybe you care a little bit more about it.

Or, you know, if you’re a dog trainer, and then your dog barks at people when they come in the [00:06:00] house. Mm-hmm. You know, you have some motivation. Like, you’re embarrassed or, you know. I, I wouldn’t know anything about that, but…

Jessica: I wouldn’t either. I’ve never had to put my dog on leash when guests came over or done anything different than I would normally do.

Kiki: Yeah. So yeah, like, there are, there are conditions for people that make them want to stop the barking at some times more than others. So it might be also, something that we’re born with, like we have more sensitive hearing, or you’re a person who’s like I’m a person who is bothered by smells, you know, and there are people who are bothered by sounds.

I think also a lot of it is, conditional, and that’s part of the problem, is like, you know, maybe you don’t care if your dog barks at the mailman ’cause it only happens for five seconds a day, but when they bark at someone on the porch who might be the [00:07:00] mailman and turns out to be a guest, now you’re upset, but you’ve consistently, you know, not done anything about it most of the time, so.

Jessica: Yes, that is a great point, and also why that could be so confusing for our dogs, because they don’t understand why something’s more important to you at that specific moment.

Kiki: Yeah.

Jessica: I’m wondering if we could start first by talking about why for some dogs this generalizes so quickly. Because An example that I’ll give is, it, well, it generalizes to other things, but then they start to pick up on other cues earlier on as well. So maybe I’ll separate these two things, so I can also be clear about what I’m referring to.

There are a lot of dogs who will start by only barking at a delivery person, for example, and nothing else at first. [00:08:00] And then it starts to become delivery people, any sort of truck that they start to hear on the street, and then it becomes anybody who comes over, and then it becomes the dog that lives two blocks away.

And it starts to just spiral into something where w- we have clients that are like, “My dog is literally barking at everything.” So that’s one, one thing, and then the separate thing that I was saying is that we’ve got dogs who bark at delivery people, and first it just is when they are approaching the door and they hear the, the delivery person there.

But then they start to pick up on the cues that indicate-

Kiki: Beep, beep, beep. Beep, beep, beep. Yeah, yeah.

Jessica: And the trucks. And I had one client’s dog who, I don’t know how she, how this dog knew this. Probably because there’s a sound, right? The beeping or something.

Kiki: Yeah.

Jessica: That could pick out anything that was a delivery vehicle, even if it was, like, [00:09:00] unmarked and didn’t have

It, it wasn’t, like, a UPS or a FedEx or a mail truck. Like, even the vans, that Amazon would deliver in, and would only react to those ones, but every other car was fine except for those. Yeah. And it was so interesting how they can then start to pick up on all these other cues that indicate, “Oh, this is a delivery person that’s gonna come to the house.”

So I guess, ’cause I … Those are two different things, but also kind of similar because it basically the dog is now more likely to be barking from the home. There’s more things that they, that they’re picking up on that they wanna bark at. So I’m wondering if we could help people who have dogs who bark a lot inside of the home maybe just have a better understanding about why this can spill over to so many other sorts of things, besides the thing that it originally started out as.

Kiki: Yeah. I think it’s really interesting, too, to ask, like, why doesn’t it when it [00:10:00] doesn’t,

but I think we can just look at how does any behavior get learned? Yeah. and then there’s also the question of, like, where does behavior come from the very first time it happens?

So behavior that comes the first time it happens, I think a lot of times we don’t know when that first time was, right? Like, we… Most of us, even people who get a dog as a puppy generally don’t meet them until they’re, like, eight weeks old or something like that. Yeah. And they’re learning from the time they’re born, and possibly before that.

Like, Susan Friedman in Living and Learning with Animals, recently, in recent years she added, some information about, like, these cuttlefish who apparently… Like, cuttlefish eggs are transparent, and these cuttlefish that were still inside the eggs were more likely to eat certain [00:11:00] foods if they saw cuttlefish eating those foods from inside the egg sac.

So, you know, there’s certain behaviors that sort of come with the package of, like, an animal that has teeth, and fur, and legs, or vocal cords, or whatever. but then the question is, like, with those behaviors, what happens to them when they hit the environment and the environment gives them feedback?

Jessica: Yeah.

Kiki: Like I think, like for barking, it’s not like barking starts with the mailman. Like probably that is not the first time a dog has barked. It might be the first time they barked at a mailman, but it might not be the first time they barked at, you know, another puppy coming into their space while they were eating or, you know, trying to get the same nipple they were, they were going for.

or that they barked and a human did something in response. Like, it’s like babies, I was thinking like babies crying. Initially they only have so [00:12:00] many behaviors they can use to get everything, and so, you know, crying mean, might mean I’m wet, I’m hungry, I’m tired, you know, I have to burp.

Like, and then you start to learn other ways to communicate those things. Mm-hmm. Um, so I think, like barking inside the home might happen, the first time it happens inside the home it might already be a product of experience where you, you barked at something and something happened. I think a lot of times it’s you barked at something and it went away, but also it might be that you barked at something and it came closer, you know?

Mm. so we, we don’t really know that, but what we can observe is like what happens once the dog is barking inside of our home, what might be happening that makes it worth doing again? And I’ll be honest, like I think barking like at people outside Is a really hard one to determine [00:13:00] sometimes because the same thing doesn’t always happen.

Jessica: Yeah.

Kiki: Sometimes people come in, and sometimes they don’t. But, with my dog, I notice barking at delivery type situations sounds different from barking when someone is on the porch who didn’t come from a truck, you know, or it changes once he sees that that person is coming in. So I think it could actually function, have more than one purpose for the dog.

Like if people whose truck beeps always go away when you bark at them and the dog keeps barking, we can make a good guess that the purpose of the barking is to make them go away. And if, you know, they bark less at, or shorter or whatever, at people who a- who didn’t come from a truck, and then, you know, then we can also see how they respond to those people when those people come inside.

Like, it might also be, you know, “Hurry up and get in [00:14:00] here.” so I think that barking at the door can be hard to figure out the purpose of sometimes just because you have to do a little bit of testing and observation to see, like, what, what does this produce for the dog or that the dog thinks it’s producing for them

Jessica: Yeah

Kiki: just by, by the fact that it happens with good timing.

Jessica: Yeah.

Kiki: You know, oh, I barked and the mailman went away.

Jessica: Mm-hmm.

Kiki: Like, he was gonna go away anyway, but we don’t have any way to tell. Well, we do, actually. We could actually t- find a way to tell the dog that, right? If we have them do something else and the mailman goes away anyway, they might learn, oh, that wasn’t necessary.

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So, so, like, And then your, your other question, which I think you’re right, you’re absolutely right, is related, is, why does it go from person coming on the porch to the gate squeaking [00:15:00] to the truck beeping to the truck slowing down in front of your house?

Um, and that’s just a natural learning process. It goes by different names depending on what you, what field you’re in, but, like, I would call it transfer of stimulus control, or cue transfer, right? Like-

for the same reason that if you say, “Sit,” and then you lure your dog into a sit repeatedly, you’ll start to see them sit on the word sit before you’ve lured.

Same process, you know, the, the bark to make something go away when they hear the footsteps on the porch, and that’s always preceded by the gate squeaking. Pretty soon the gate squeaking might, cue the same behaviors.

Jessica: Yeah, I appreciate you breaking that down. And you make a great point, which I think a lot of listeners will, will know that the difference, you know, between a delivery [00:16:00] person coming versus a guest, but maybe there’s listeners who have not thought of that, about how their dog’s perception of those two events are a bit different.

Because the people that are delivering packages never come inside of our homes. They are people that the dog never gets to really know who they are, and all they perhaps perceive, we can’t talk to dogs and ask them how they’re really viewing these things. But, you know, there’s somebody that, that just randomly shows up to their house and, and drops something.

You know, sometimes makes kind of a, a, a noise outside. Yeah, the

Kiki: lid. Yeah.

Jessica: Or the mailbox, you know? Like, does something where they, like, leave something behind, and the dog also doesn’t know what that is, and then they leave. You know, they always, always leave, compared to guests are different. And so they come in, the dog has a chance to get to know who they are.

many times they get to develop relationships with these people. So their whole [00:17:00] perception of the person who is coming over is completely different because of just the nature of who these people are. From, from their own experiences, they’re not getting the same experience with each of those people. So it would make sense that their reactions to them could be very different.

Kiki: Yeah, yeah. And I mean, not all dogs want to meet a guest either. You know, they could… Some dogs- Yeah … are barking at guests to make them go away, and some are barking, you know, for other reasons.

but I do think there’s probably certain behaviors that a given species does when they are excited, like, you know, chattering kind of- and I, you know, I always wonder, like, how much of that is… Some of that surely is learned, like when to do it and maybe when not to do it.

Yeah. So, but then, the, again, the cool and terrible thing about behavior is that once it hits the environment, even if it was done for one reason, it can [00:18:00] acquire lots of new reasons I mean, I think on, on the whole that’s a good thing.

You know, like, ’cause we only have certain amount of things we can do with our bodies, and it’s good to find out that you can use them for more than one thing. But, but sometimes we, sometimes we learn ill-advised- Yeah … uses.

Jessica: Yeah.

Kiki: So.

Jessica: One of the things that I will ask clients when they’re having issues with their dog, right?

So it’s always the person who has problems with the dog barking. The dog thinks it’s great, right? They’re- they’re probably not having a, an issue with it. unless, though, I will say sometimes some of them get really, really stressed by constant foot traffic that’s going past the house, and we will talk about that, like, why we would want to address this, because it is stressful for dogs to have to experience a lot of that.

But I just, the reason I’m bringing up this other part of what I will ask my clients as it relates [00:19:00] to what you were saying, how dogs learn well, I might vocalize for other reasons as well, you know? There’s could be excitement involved in that, or anticipation, and there’s many reasons why they might vocalize.

And I do tend to see a pattern of dogs who just vocalize a lot in general as a way of expressing themselves, compared to dogs who don’t vocalize as much. And I can give my own dog as an example. He is not reactive on leash. very, very rarely will ever bark away from the home. doesn’t really bark a whole lot inside of the home either if he hears different things.

but he will vocalize at a certain time of the day, and it’s almost always in the evening time, and it’s when he knows, “You’re gonna take me for a walk, and then you’re gonna feed me.” Or I might feed him and then take him for a walk. But there’s gonna be an event that’s gonna happen. And he always does this, Well, I guess I ju- should just, since I’m explaining it, might as well just say really how it goes. I mean, right now I’m living in the studio, and I live by myself, so I can just pee with the door [00:20:00] open, right? And then my dog knows, “Oh, my gosh, my mom likes to go to the bathroom before we do these other events.”

And so then he jumps on the bed and he’s like, “My mom’s gonna do the thing soon.” And then he starts to do his, like, fun little, like, bark. And then of course, I mean, he’s my dog, so then I kinda talk back to him, we’re having, like, this little conversation, and it’s this whole thing, that goes down.

And, uh, but that’s really the only time that he vocalizes. And yet I have other clients whose dogs, they really vocalize when they’re trying to express a need. L- like, “Hey, I c- I, I want this,” or, “Hey I’m really excited about this thing that’s gonna happen, and I’m gonna vocalize about it. And so I feel like obviously there’s just some dogs who just naturally express themselves that way, and other dogs who don’t, or, or do less, do less of it.

I think that’s one of the things for people to think about when they think, “Oh, I really am so annoyed when my dog vocalizes in this [00:21:00] context.” But we also have to think, are these dogs also vocalizing as a way to express themselves in other situations as well, where they do get other things that they wanted or needed, right?

Kiki: Yeah, and the first time they vocalize, it might not have been to get that outcome. But- Yeah … once that outcome happens after they vocalize, then it’s hard to say whether, because we do lots of behaviors for the first time, and we learn, you know, for better or for worse, not to do them in that situation

um, that is not, just to be really clear, that’s not to say that I think all of that barking needs to be addressed. Like, you shouldn’t reinforce it. You should make sure you don’t give it any good outcomes. I think there’s a lot of benefit to learning to enjoy it rather than to see it as a problem.

Jessica: Mm-hmm.

Kiki: [00:22:00] So.

Jessica: I’m wondering if we could also go through this from, like, a little bit of a lens of why these behaviors are getting repeated so frequently. And also, like, why it can be very difficult to decrease barking, people that think it’s excessive, right? if the person feels this is excessive barking for me.

or we could also use the argument of, like, if your dog is, is sitting and staring at the window and barking for eight hours a day, that’s also probably not really healthy for the dog either. So there’s reasons that we would want to decrease barking. but-

Kiki: Yeah, it can definitely… Like, something like that can definitely be a sign that the dog doesn’t have enough else going on in their life.

Jessica: That too. That too. That too. Because it’s something that… the dog is getting something out of it, right? So there is something… It’s, it’s filling some need. They’re getting… There’s some sort of consequence that’s happening for this dog, that is maintaining this behavior.

[00:23:00] I think you had pointed that it could be so many different things, and that’s why sometimes this can be really difficult to figure out, what’s driving some of this. But I just wanna touch on that a bit, of like why is this so challenging? Like, once a dog starts to vocalize a lot, at things that are going on outside of the home, or things inside of the home if they wanted something, it, it’s getting close to mealtime, and, “Hey, are…

Is this event going to happen soon?” why this seems to be something that is very difficult, for your average, you know, pet parent to modify on their own.

Kiki: Uh, that’s a great question. I think some of it is, like, just, like, why don’t we learn how behavior works, like, in ninth grade along with basic biology?

Like, why don’t we learn about even just the real basic, you know, what’s [00:24:00] reinforcement? and even a lot of people who work with dogs or have more dog experience might think reinforcement is equivalent to rewards. It’s like, well, I didn’t reward that barking, so I don’t understand why it’s happening.

And reinforcement is this 24/7 sort of process that just, like, every,… Like, what I, what did I just do on camera? I just pushed my bangs out of my eyes because my bangs were tickling my forehead. And so I moved my arm up, and I pushed my bangs off that part of my forehead, and that removal of that itchy sensation is reinforcement.

And why did I, why did I use that behavior? ‘Cause I’m a primate, and I have arms and fingers, and I can reach my forehead. and I’ve learned that I can, you know, if I push with my fingers, then my hair moves. You know, it’s just, [00:25:00] like, that kind of stuff is just, it- it’s not just, like, something we go and do to our dogs.

It’s this process that’s happening all the time. So if you understand that, then you understand, like, if a behavior is happening repeatedly, something, there’s some outcome that … Well, I mean, there are some behaviors that don’t rely on this, but the large majority of behaviors that we do, and barking is a behavior that, my test is always could you punish it?

I’m not suggesting you do, but, like, could you punish barking? Could you punish talking in a child? Yes, you can. So it’s operant. It’s something that is, influenceable by consequences to some degree at least. so if barking is happening, then you can trust there’s something, there’s a reason.

There’s some outcome that the dog is barking for, and you can also start to look for, well, what [00:26:00] happens in the environment that tells the dog, if you bark now, this outcome will happen? Or what, what is happening in the environment before the barking happens that makes it valuable to get that outcome?

so you were talking about barking out the window, and this is , another thing that makes it sort of tricky. I think a lot of times people are looking for their, the reinforcers in what they do, right? and sometimes even if they analyze, like, okay, what … when the dog barks, what happens?

Well, I go over to him and I pull him away from the window. But why would that be reinforcing? And what they’re not looking at is, like, well, also the mailman went away or the person continued passing by the house. We often tend to over attribute the problem to, like, our attention.

Jessica: Yes.

Kiki: Um, but sometimes we under attribute it [00:27:00] to our attention. I have this presentation up where I talk about a lot of different barking cases, and one of the first things I talk about is that while, looking at what the barking looks like is often will give us some clues, it’s not always reliable by itself.

You still have to sort of look at what happens after the behavior. And so I had this case where I was dog sitting for, my friend’s sister who had a couple of Portuguese water dogs, and we were in a house that was in a pretty isolated area, and if people walked by, one of the dogs would bark out the window at them until they left.

But what I noticed was every time I sat down on the couch and opened my computer to get some work done, he would go and bark out the window. and then I would go look, and there was, like, nothing there. [00:28:00] And sometimes he would bark out, if he barked out that window and I didn’t do anything, he would go bark out a different window.

And I have this video I took of him, like, with my phone kinda held up in selfie mode, like, over my shoulder. Uh-huh. And what I saw is he would, like, bark out the window, and then he would kinda glance over at me. And so, you know, that is the shape of the behavior, and it did give me some clues, but, like, if you weren’t really paying attention, you might think, like, “Well, he’s barking out the window.

There must be something out there. You know? Why, why is he barking out the window?” And, I did a little investigating with the owner, and it turns out, so I, and I knew this ’cause I was dog sitting for him, but he can’t have toys on his own because he’s ingested pieces of toys and had to have surgery to remove them.

And so he can only play with toys under supervision of a human And so, so one thing that would [00:29:00] happen sometimes when he would go bark out the window while someone was trying to get some work done is they would get up and get him a toy and play with him for a little while. Mm-hmm. so that was my educated guess about what was reinforcing that barking.

Yeah. and one of the things that makes it tricky too is that a lot of times with barking, people have been told to ignore it. Mm-hmm. but then they end up being unable to ignore it, and so it only gets reinforced sometimes, or it, it, it gets reinforced after it has gone on for quite a while because the dog is getting more and more frustrated because barking used to w- work sometimes, but not working now, and what the fuck, lady?

Oh, sorry, I just made your podcast explicit. Um. We’re good. Ab- Um, okay. [00:30:00] See, I don’t have good stimulus control about when to curse and not. so, like, anyway, so, you know, it, that makes it hard too, ’cause if you’re sort of investigating and you’re like, “I don’t see what’s happening that’s making this worth doing,” it might be because it’s only happening sometimes.

And one of the clues for me about that is that the behavior has become very, like, long duration and persistent. Like, that usually kind of gives you an idea that it might be something that only happens intermittently. and so the dog has learned to just keep going until it happens. So, yeah, so, like, that was impossible to ignore ’cause I was trying, like, I was dog sitting, and so my…

And I wasn’t getting, like, paid what I usually would make, you know, in a week, but I was, you know, I really wanted to do this dog sitting job ’cause it was in a really pretty place and near my friend whose sister, whose sister it was. And, but I [00:31:00] really needed to, like, make use of my time there by, like, getting a bunch of non-paying work done, you know.

and I, I couldn’t ignore it. It was un- unignorable, and so I had to come up with other, solutions. And so the first thing I did… Is it, is it okay to go on and talk about this thing?

Jessica: I was gonna ask. Yeah. T- please tell us what you did. the

Kiki: first thing I did was I, I don’t know that many Portuguese Water Dogs.

Like, I’ve had a few as clients, but, like, never d- you know, lived with any. Yeah. And I was like- What do they need? What do they, what’s their deal? You know, what do they like to do? Are they getting enough of it? And so, you know, first, of course, I added, like, more toy play into the day. but, like, sometimes I would offer toy play, and he was like, “I don’t wanna do that right now.”

So it wasn’t like I could just move it to other times of [00:32:00] day it seemed like. I know that they are water dogs. And I mean, I was already walking them for about three hours a day on long lines, and we were, in this area that’s really beautiful and has a lot of hiking. And, so they were, out in nature and all of that stuff, and I was kinda racking my brain for this breed specific stuff.

And then I was like, ” Okay, dummy, what would you tell a client to do here?” ‘Cause I don’t usually take, like, that approach like, oh, it’s, he’s barking because he’s a Portuguese Water Dog, and he needs more of Portuguese Water Dog things. Like, that might be the case, but I mean, how many hours a day can I, you know.

and so I asked this really, this question that I think has become one of the most valuable questions for me, which is, when does it not happen? Hmm. Or alternately, when does the behavior I would like to see [00:33:00] happen? Yeah. what are the cues for that behavior? What are the reinforcers for that behavior?

So I looked for when he tended to settle. and one thing I noticed weirdly was, if I put his leash on, he would settle. Like, I didn’t have to be holding it or anything, but he would just… And so I don’t know if he had a history of, like, being taught to relax on a tether or some- something like that.

But that worked to some extent, to just put his leash on, and then he would, like, lay down for at least a little while. the other thing I used was, in this house that they were in, the first year that they moved in there, that they lived there, the dogs sleep in crates.

and they have crated breaks during the day. And the first year they lived there, that happened in the basement. And the basement, when I say basement, I mean, like, media room. I mean, it was, like, a nice [00:34:00] place. There also aren’t any windows there.

Jessica: Yeah.

Kiki: So I was like, okay, so their main experience of being in the basement is sleeping, which is what I would like them to do for, like, a few hours while I get, you know, a chunk of work done, and then we can go out.

and you know, there aren’t any windows, so the opportunity to bark out the window isn’t there. and also there, they’ve never done any toy play in the basement. They’ve never played with each other in the basement. Like, there just hasn’t been much else happening in the basement except sleeping.

There were two dogs, and th- the one was like a year, I think she was like a year and a half or two years old. And so for her, I took one Nylabone, and for the dog that was barking out in the window, I took nothing into the basement. And I went down in the basement, I sat on the couch, and opened my computer, and literally in five minutes they were asleep, and they stayed asleep for like three hours.[00:35:00]

Jessica: Wow.

Kiki: Yeah. So that became the routine. Like, okay, when it’s time to work, I gotta get some work done. You know, we’ve had breakfast. We went for a walk, you know, or we went on a little outing. we did a little toy play in the yard, and now Kiki needs to do some computer work. And I just went in the basement, and it worked every time

Jessica: I love that.

I think what you’re illustrating there is how much the environment plays a role in behavior, but also with barking because I just really love this example that you gave us because earlier you were saying how much we tend to focus on ourselves and what kind of attention we’re giving the dog, or what, you know, what the human’s response is to the barking.

And yet a lot of the things that you changed really didn’t have a whole lot to do with your response to the barking. [00:36:00] You just created an environment in which there was really nothing to indicate to the dog, “Now it’s time to bark,” because you just changed- the environment. And you also didn’t do any training at all, I just want to point out.

Like, technically it’s training if you, de- depending on someone’s definition of training. But I really love clever changes like that s- because , you got the result that you wanted, and a lot of it was because of just the change in an, an environment by really paying attention to what are the cues that tell the dog to bark, and also what is the dog’s learned history in certain environments.

Kiki: I mean, that’s kind of my favorite kind of training is, what did I call it the other day? Like, beneficial environmental design. Like You know, like, or I always think about, Rick Hester, who is another, person who works for Susan Friedman at Behavior Works.

I forget what his title is, but he’s basically, like, the head of animal behavior at the Cheyenne Mountain Zoo, and he… [00:37:00] What did he say? Something about, like, try to, try to get the environment to do 99% of the work or whatever. and I do think that’s I think it’s training.

I have a very broad definition of training, and I was having an interesting discussion with at least two other people, like, in the last month about what is training, and, I think a lot of people don’t consider it training unless you’re teaching a skill and applying reinforcement to increase that skill.

But I don’t really care what we call it. We could call it beneficial environmental design. That’s okay.

It’s like, like change, changing behavior intentionally by changing the environment, which is what you’re doing when you’re teaching and applying consequences and adding cues, but it’s, you’re also doing it when you change…

Because changing the antecedent, the before environment, that’s not independent of consequences [00:38:00] ever, , but the consequences for doing the sleeping behavior in that environment are whatever the, you know, the benefits of sleep are. Like the, like sleep h- is a behavior like peeing that comes with its own rewards, if you will.

Maybe sleep is the, itself is the reinforcer. When you’re doing stuff like that, you’re just, you’re connecting the animal with different reinforcers that maybe you don’t deliver, but they’re there.

but to, to think like that, you have to have this like kind of worldview that all behavior is related to its antecedents and, all operant behavior is influenced by the outcomes that it produces, whether they’re delivered by somebody else or not, and then the role of the environment before the behavior is to help signal what behaviors will- [00:39:00] Produce what outcomes.

So if you think about, like, the whole world is just like that all the time, then it, I think it kind of enables you to look at these cases that way More so than if you think behavior is coming from inside the animal.

Jessica: Yeah. No, I like that a lot. I’m wondering if we could talk about barking at foot traffic, like the dogs at-

Kiki: Yeah …

Jessica: windows, or whether they see it, smell it, or hear it. And I think the smell part is something really, really interesting that- Yeah … a lot of people don’t think about. You know, they think either my dog sees it or hears it, and then the human will say, “Well, I didn’t even hear it,” you know, or, “There was nothing there.”

Yeah. and I have found so many dogs who actually, if you look at them, they’re air scenting, and you can see them, that they’re, they’re picking up the scent, and then they start to respond and bark. Yeah. And so I think it’s really interesting that we tend to forget, you [00:40:00] know, about dogs and, just how powerful their sense of smell is.

But I’m curious for that one because the, the barking when they are at the window, or something that’s gonna go past the house, so it’s n- not necessarily a delivery person, but something that they hear in the distance, and how some of our interventions might be a bit different from the one that you just described that was more related to if I’m in this room and I open my laptop, this happens.

Kiki: Okay, when I open my laptop, you could potentially control when your laptop gets opened.

Jessica: Yep.

Kiki: But when somebody’s going by the house, you don’t know about it until your dog is barking at it.

Jessica: Yeah. exactly.

Kiki: I always refer to that as, like, the situations where you can’t get ahead of the cue. Like, so the cue to bark is, like, somebody walking past the house, and if you’re out on a walk with your reactive dog or [00:41:00] whatever, you can see somebody show up at the end of the block, and you can take evasive maneuvers.

You can, catch your dog doing something, like just looking. you can direct your dog to, you know, you can offer them the chance to move away. Like, the order, the order ideally is the cue for the problem behavior happens, and then the cue for what you want instead happens, and then reinforcement happens.

What that does is that it makes that cue transfer happen like we talked about before, where if the sight of a delivery person predicts the cue to look at your person, and then you look at your person and you, in common situations you get food, or you get distance from the thing, or maybe you get to go closer to them.

Depends on what the dog wants. [00:42:00] That’s ideal, but I think cases where the dog is, barking at a closed fence, or out the front window, or, at the door of an apartment where there’s an elevator in the hall or something, those are trickier because you can’t get in there at the right time.

You can’t pre-direct what you want the dog to do when they perceive that thing. They perceive it, they bark, and that’s how you know it’s there.

Jessica: Yeah …

Kiki: stop there for a second and make sure I’ve got that right.

Jessica: yes, exactly.

Kiki: So I think there’s, like, a few things you could do about it.

Like, one is you could… I think all, all solutions start with one, like, when you’re not prepared to train, if you can manage, if you can just remove the opportunity To prevent the behavior from continuing to get reinforced by whatever, like the thing going away or whatever’s happening, then start there.

And then [00:43:00] for some cases, like that’s it. That’s all you need to do. If it’s a visual stimulus, put up window film, or put a tarp across your fence, or put some strategically planted bushes or, you know, whatever. That- that’s a little longer term thing, gardening. But, you know, take the cue away.

It’s not gonna change what the dog is gonna do if they do see the thing or hear the thing, or and it’s not gonna work if the vi- the stimulus isn’t visual, if it’s scent or whatever. But, so that’s, like, kind of first and possibly easiest solution. Yeah. you know, for the dog that’s barking out the door of the apartment, like running a box fan near the front of the house or whatever.

And I’m gonna be the first to admit that a lot of these things are things that I wouldn’t wanna do. I don’t want- Like, I don’t wanna put window film on my front window. I like to see out the window, you know? I don’t wanna keep my blinds closed. I don’t [00:44:00] wanna run a box fan all the time. It’s annoying to me, you know?

there’s people, like, who don’t want to put a gate in the middle of their house so that the dog can’t access the front windows. And, you know, but it’s worth, it’s worth thinking about if the barking is really problematic and it’s happening a lot, and it would… You know, people are gonna do that if it would provide them some relief, and if it’s gonna be more annoying than relieving, then they’re not gonna do it.

Jessica: Yeah. Yeah. No, that’s, it’s a great point. And as you said, sometimes that’s all you need to do. Yeah. I have been really surprised by some of the cases where all they decided to do was to do the window film, and, there’s some window film out there that’s really nice e- that has, you know, pretty rainbow-ish, like when the light hits it, you get rainbow light that comes through, and it’s really pretty and it’s decorative.

Yeah. And that solves it. And it’s really [00:45:00] amazing where you’re like, “Oh, wow, all you had to do was just that thing,” and then again, you didn’t have to do any training, or, or deal with the dog alerting throughout the day, and then that solves it. So love- Yeah … that you brought that up because sometimes it really can be as simple as that if the person is just willing to try it.

Kiki: Yeah. and so, you know, we can work extra hard to find something that- Works for the, the client or ourselves. go out of our way to find the right looking window film. Like, some people don’t wanna put up window film because they think it’s all decorative, and when I point out that you can get window film that just looks like frosted glass- Mm-hmm

then they’re more amenable to it. You can also put foil on your windows. Yeah.

Jessica: That’s always what I tell clients. I’m like, we’re not gonna put foil up. That’s not what I’m recommending.” Some people think that. I’m like, “It can look really nice, I promise.” Um, but- Make your house look like

Kiki: a meth lab.

Jessica: [00:46:00] Right. If you want it to look like a meth lab, you could do that.

Kiki: Yeah. Um, so then, then one of my go-to approaches is, what, what some people might have run across as the thank you protocol. I didn’t name it the thank you protocol, I just used the cue thank you in a description of doing this once and it sort of turned into this crazy thing.

But, lots of people have different versions of this, but the way that I talk about it is that you’re going to teach your dog a cue that means come over here and get a treat. Or ideally, many treats in a row, or treats in a snuffle mat, or some kind of treat procedure that takes a little while. Yeah.

And I’ll get to why that is. One, I want it to be a big reward, like you would with a recall, but I also want it to take some time to [00:47:00] consume so the dog expects to, like, be there for a while, and it might give, enough time for the thing to go away without the dog having to bark at it.

So if they are paying attention to that at all, they can learn, like, oh, also that went away and I didn’t, I didn’t make it, it’s not me actually making it happen. So I like to pre-train that first in a situation where the dog can very easily do it, and then, like, starting to call them, like, starting to give that cue while they’re in the area where they would bark.

Make sure they can come to where you’re. And the location of the treat, I like it to be predictable, but that could mean that it’s the person, that you come to the person, or it could mean that you go to a particular place where, like, there’s a bucket of, you know, where there’s one of these, like I have this in my office.

Mm-hmm. Like a little pop-top box- Yeah … with treats in it that’s just out, you know, ready to use all the time. Yeah. and then sometimes I’ll have, [00:48:00] like, a snuffle mat underneath it, ’cause that, and that’s where the treats always get dropped. Yeah. but I’ve also had the person be the location. I’ve had, like, the, just the floor in front of the box be the location or whatever.

and so you make sure you’re getting sort of a joyful whiplash turn and running to the location when you say the cue. And the gimmick was I, I said, “Thank you,” as the cue, and I just picked that because it’s hard to say in a pissy voice, and it’s- I guess you could, y- if you try hard enough, you can say anything in a pissy voice.

But, um- Can’t say it mad and probably the dog hasn’t heard it a million times already. Yeah. So, but it really could be anything. You could click the dog. If you have a really good recall cue, you could use that. And then, you, then you start to introduce distractions that aren’t the thing, ideally.

and then when the [00:49:00] dog can do it, come away from various distractions, then you try it when they alert towards the thing outside. And you just try to get it in at the earliest you can. It might be when the dog’s ears, when the dog picks its head up from the floor and makes a face, and its ears go up.

It might be after they’ve r- barked once. It might be after they’ve run to the door and barked a couple times. But just whatever you can do, like, get it in there earlier. And then the question I always get at at that point in the instruction is, aren’t I reinforcing barking?

Jessica: Mm-hmm.

Kiki: Hopefully you are. but what people don’t understand is that the barking is already being reinforced by something happening that you have no control over. So my goal is just to get it, to get a smaller amount of barking under the control of something that I deliver.

Jessica: Yes.

Kiki: And then I think you can stop, like a lot of people just stop [00:50:00] there.

Like, okay, cool. My dog barks once or twice, I can call him away and give him a treat and then we’re, it’s over. for me, like, I don’t, I don’t particularly wanna have to do that either. Like, but, so I have, like, an additional piece that you can do, which is if the dog really is barking to get you to say thank you, and then you don’t do that- What you’ll very often see is the dog will do that, a little bit of barking, and then turn and look at you like, “Eh?”

And then you could call them. Mm-hmm. So you, what you may end up with there is the dog that interrupts themselves, after a little bit of barking, and comes back to you. And then another phenomenon that often happens is, the, the first behavior, that little bark, gets even weaker because it’s [00:51:00] further away from the reinforcer, and maybe once they just turn and look at you, and you reinforce that, and they just start to learn, to learn that they don’t have to do the whole chain.

And like this is exactly the kind of thing that you wanna avoid if you’re trying to teach a chain. You don’t want to skip, you don’t want your second cue to come with bad timing or delayed timing because you’ll weaken the behavior that’s at the beginning of the chain. But if you are, and I’m kinda talking to trainers here, you know, but if you do the first behavior in a sequence, and then you’re expecting that to be reinforced by the opportunity to do the next thing, but it doesn’t come, or it’s late, like, you might start to just put some perfunctory effort into the first behavior and , get to the second behavior quicker.

And I got that idea from a really old Karen Pryor video where she’s got people doing it with a, with, like, a person from the audience, where they cue her [00:52:00] to turn, and then they cue her to clap, and then they click and give her a Hershey’s Kiss.

And, and she shows what happens when the clap cue is late. It gets pulled out of the chain, and she starts to turn and clap at the same time. Like- … and the turning gets weaker and weaker, and Karen is talking about it like, “You don’t want this to happen,” and I’m like, “But what if you do?”

So. What if that’s exactly what you want? So, so I did this with, the first time with my own dog, who would go like Tasmanian devil at the front gate- Whenever anybody walked by the front of our house, and it was really annoying to be in the backyard. and I didn’t do any of this pre-training that I just described.

I did, like, a really half, half-ass job of it, ’cause I guess I was, like, a beginning trainer then. And I, what I was thinking was I just wanted to be able to recall her- Mm-hmm … [00:53:00] initially. And so I would give her recall cue, and she ran snarling to the gate, and she was just totally not responding.

Right. And so my thinking was, “Okay, how can I make it easier for her to respond?” Like, right? That’s what you do. You lower your criteria. And so I would just follow her down the gangway and, stand, like, right over her shoulder and whistle, and then present chicken and initially she, like, I would whistle and she would give me, like, a dirty, stiff side eye.

And then, and I would give her chicken anyway. And then pretty quickly, like, when I followed her, she would respond quickly to the whistle, and then I was able to, like, sort of back off, like, not follow her all the way down. But, like, because I had to follow her all the way down, she was barking a little bit anyway.

and so then, I got to the point where I could stay seated in the backyard and call her back quickly, and then one day I noticed that when I was late, she, like, ran halfway down the gangway and then turned around and looked at me, and I was [00:54:00] like, “Okay, okay.” Like, “Hey, good, good. That’s, that’s what I want.”

and then I kind of back engineered it from there. Like, why is this happening? And then I remembered that video.

Jessica: I’m following what you’re saying, because the dog has this expectation that you’re going to cue them in that moment. And then when you don’t cue them, they’re like, “W- w- wait a minute, what’s happening?” And right, and it’s like a self-interruption, and they then go to seek you out to see why you didn’t give the cue.

Yeah. And then you give that cue, and then it buys you more of that time, right? So essentially, we’re almost teaching the dog to seek us out to then give the cue that it’s going to then predict reinforcement from you- Yeah … versus Yeah.

Kiki: I think this is also how look at that works.

Jessica: That’s exactly what I was thinking. The same thing when we’re teaching some of those check-ins of, like, look at that thing, but then [00:55:00] eventually, because you’re expecting that reinforcement to happen.

Kiki: I think it often just starts to happen, naturally because of the way that chains work. Mm-hmm. Like, when you, when you’re building a chain as a trainer, you’re teaching the dog, you do this behavior, and then you’re gonna get the cue to do the next behavior, and then you’re gonna get the cue to do the next behavior.

And when you do it in order over and over again, the thing that comes before your cue, which is, like, them completing the first behavior, that’s gonna start to cue the next behavior. And if you’re trying to build, like, a permanent chain where the dog does the whole thing on their own, that’s what you want.

If you’re trying to do agility, you don’t want that Like, or, you know, you want the dog to wait and to hear what you’re gonna ask them to do. Yeah. But, like- Yeah … you’re teaching, like, a permanent sequence. Like, if you’re teaching a, a person how to make coffee by cuing them through it. Okay, [00:56:00] open the water reservoir, pour the water in.

Like, you want them to start to be cued to pour the water in by seeing the- they’ve opened the reservoir.

Jessica: Yes. I like that example of the coffee maker and how a person might be able to relate to these chains, right? Because- Yeah … for your average pet parent who’s listening, and they’re like, “A chain?

Like, what?” it’s something that they m- probably have not heard of before. but I like the example of the coffee, ’cause I think that’s a really helpful one. And there’s many cues within the chain, but then eventually the reinforcement is happening at the end.

And-

Kiki: Yeah, you don’t get coffee until you do all the steps.

Jessica: Exactly. You have to do all the things before you get this. And how this is tying into the barking is that it would be really nice if you, the human, didn’t have to, like, leap to your feet the moment- Yeah … your dog started barking, in order to teach your dog to [00:57:00] eventually do other things, further along.

Kiki: find you.

Jessica: yes. And I also do like how you gave the example of agility, because even though the handler’s giving the cue, sometimes I will describe that for people who are wondering, like, well, how do you get the dog to do, like, several things in a row, Yeah

And I’m like, “Well, have you ever seen a dog run agility?” Like, they’re, initially, all of those things are taught separately. but the dog is waiting for the next cue, the next cue, the next cue, the next cue. and then they get, usually tug, at the very end, or whatever their, whatever reward that they have, yeah, that happens at the very end.

So I like that example as well.

Kiki: The, I was thinking more about the coffee example. Like, to pour the water in the reservoir- It actually has to be open. So you have to complete the first step there to be able to do the second step. But with barking and then turning and coming to you, there’s nothing preventing them from just sort of fudging the first step, [00:58:00] or shortening the first step and coming to you.

And if, if that was making coffee, that would, might be a problem.

Um, I mean, I’m now, now I’m thinking about all the times that I’ve, like, put water in and not put the pot under. Yeah. Um, but, yeah, like, there’s no such requirement really in the, like, barkinG. So, that allows the first behavior to get weaker.

Jessica: Yeah. Exactly. Um, then kind of wondering if we could kind of frame, more of the long-term, I don’t know, I don’t wanna use the word expectations of this.

But we have clients who are then another question they would ask is, “Well, then do I have to keep doing this?” Right? when the dog is barking, even if they come to seek me out, do I then always have to then, go- to the treat jar and put the treats on the snuffle mat? Do, like, do I always have to do this?”

Kiki: Yeah.

Jessica: And [00:59:00] there is this environment that could also reinforce your dog Yeah … because you don’t have control over it. So I, I, I do wanna say that some of this has to be very, it’s very context specific, right? Because the thing, the example that you gave of the Portuguese Water Dogs and just going in the basement, n- that didn’t involve any food.

It involved none of that sort- Yeah … and, and didn’t get any barking. And that’s because you had more control over what are the cues that tell this dog to bark. And then we gave this example of there’s a lot of other cues that could tell your dog to bark that you don’t have control over. So for that, what is something that you tell your clients if they come to you and say, like, “Well, do I always have to do this for the rest of my life?”

Kiki: I think there is, there are a couple of possible things there. And I actually, I think this is a really important topic for trainers and especially, like, people who would consider themselves a positive [01:00:00] reinforcement trainer to start to think about, and that is what is the right reinforcer for a particular behavior.

And in this case, for some people it might not be that hard to, you know, maybe you put your jar of treats where you would normally be sitting, and it’s not that big a deal to pop the top and give your dog a few treats, and maybe you like giving your dog treats. But, so you can make it easier for the human to u- keep using treats by ma- doing some beneficial environmental design for them.

But what was the dog originally barking at the person to get? If it was for them to go away, that’s our best guess unless we’ve tested it. the interesting thing is that, that happens anyway. and it happens, the fact that it happens might start to feel like it’s [01:01:00] contingent on coming to you or eating treats.

but I think that people aren’t often all that consistent with their timing, and so it might just be, get associated with, like, nothing. Like, they go away, and I didn’t have to bark to make it happen. So that would be sort of the ideal, I think, is that the dog learns, oh, they’re gonna go away anyway. The problem, I think, is that often they, sometimes they don’t.

Like, sometimes they come up on your porch and ring your doorbell or whatever. But, so it’s probably hard for the dog to tell when they’re… But I, on the other hand, they can tell an Amazon van from a plumber’s van, so who knows? So the other thing is, I think, that you can transition to other reinforcers that you deliver.

Like, if your dog really likes petting, and they’re, they’re, they’re already, like, a little less, like, worked up, you know, they’ve got a little less [01:02:00] stuff coursing through their system, when they come to you, then maybe you start to give them some chest scratches and then the treat, and then eventually just the chest scratches.

I think if you just, like, they’ve been coming for treats, they’ve been coming for treats, and then they come, and you scratch their chest, a lot of dogs are gonna be like, “What the hell are you doing?” “I did not come over here for this.” Uh-huh. So there’s, there’s an art to, like, to transitioning to other, reinforcers that are more likely to be available.

I had a, a way of talking about this that I was, I couldn’t decide what to call it. I was calling it the milk/Pepsi moment, but then I, then I heard Sarah Stremming using milk in a slightly different way as like, a, how an unintended rein- like, the wrong reinforcer can be a punisher. And it is sort of related, but I I changed the way I was talking about it to orange [01:03:00] juice/Pepsi moment.

Like, just, like, if, you might like both of those things, but if you ask for one and you get the other, and that, you’re gonna be like, “Ugh.” Like, so, but milk/Pepsi works better because if you mix them together, they actually taste like an ice cream float, so

We’re fans of Laverne & Shirley. Like, I hope you remember, Laverne & Shirley. Laverne liked- Yeah … milk and Pepsi. And so- Yeah … when I was a little kid, I was like, I asked my mom for milk and Pepsi, and it does, it tastes like an ice cream float. So- Yeah … um, anyway, get weird on you. But, uh, like if you, if you sort of mingle those things together initially, I think it makes the transition easier.

Like, you can come over to me and get petting. but, like, I initially might give, like, petting right before the treat- Yeah … or give them at the same time, if the [01:04:00] dog doesn’t mind being petted while they eat, which some dogs don’t like. But- Yeah … so I think if it’s important to do so, I think there are ways to transition to, like, naturally occurring reinforcers, which are just…

Naturally occurring reinforcers is, is a term that means, the thing that’s gonna be available in the environment to maintain that behavior after training is over. So, like, we learn math for praise or good grades or to avoid getting failed at school, and then eventually math is for you know, doing your taxes or, you know, getting the right change at the grocery store or whatever.

Jessica: Yeah.

Kiki: So.

Jessica: I like that example. I appreciate you sharing about the different kinds of reinforcers that we could be using and how somebody could apply that, because I think a lot of people will [01:05:00] switch to something else too quickly, and then, like you said, the dog is coming over. They’re like, “Well, this isn’t really what I signed up for.

I thought I was getting something else.” And then that also, I think, frequently becomes, I don’t know, just this assumption that humans tend to make about their dogs. “Oh, well, they were only doing it for the food.” but out of fairness to the dog, that was the thing that we gave them the whole time. and then we just dec- if we just decide to change the rules one day, it’s, it should be more of a, of a progression, and then, as you said, finding something else that the dog actually likes.

So not making a reinforcer up that we think the dog should get. it needs to be- Yeah … something that the dog actually finds valuable.

Kiki: Yeah, and, like, it, there’s also, like, shock problem. Y- you came to get one thing and you get another, and, like, maybe the second time you come and get it, you’ll be like, “Oh, okay.”

Like, Emil- Emily Johnson-Bey has a good, metaphor for that, which is, like, if you come to me and you ask me for a glass of [01:06:00] milk and I give you a soccer ball- Like, the first time you might be like, “Mm.” But then you might be like, “Oh, soccer balls are fun.” And then now you have this weird way of asking for- A, a soccer ball.

Jessica: Yeah.

Kiki: You know, so.

Jessica: Well, I really appreciate you coming on and chatting about all of this. I think it was really insightful to look at barking through this lens, you know, rather than, this really over-simplistic way that a lot of barking seems to be talked about in general. specifically, like, alert barking in the home.

So I’m really glad that we could get into all these different nuances and things for people to think about.

Kiki: I think, like, it would be good if … Like, I use, I fall into using these terms just like everybody else, but, like, alert barking, demand barking, excitement barking. And, the first thing you kind of have to do is unpack that a little bit.

Like, alert at what, [01:07:00] for what outcome? You know? Because, like, you could have alert barking that’s tells you, like, “Go open the door. There’s, there are, there’s a friend out there.” Or you could have alert barking that is, you know, go … You think it’s alerting you, but really they’re just telling the stranger to go away.

I think it’s more useful to, like … Like, those labels, those are shorthand. Like, we need shorthand so we can talk to each other quickly. But- Yeah … but if we are gonna get down to problem-solving, we need to, to ask, like, what does that look like? What are we talking about in

terms of cues and the outcomes-

Jessica: yeah, Absolutely. Yes. Well, thank you. I appreciate it.

Kiki: Thanks for having me. I hope we get to talk to each other more in the future.

Jessica: I know. Absolutely. Absolutely.

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