Kathy Santo's Dog Sense Episode 1: Barking Kathy Santo's Dog Sense

Kathy and Sarah give tips and advice on how to stop your dog from barking!
 
Transcript:
Kathy: Welcome to Kathy Santo’s Dog Sense: “Episode One: Barking; The Whys, The Woes, And How To Finally Ditch The Earplugs.” I'm your host Kathy Santo, and I'm here to teach you everything I've learned in my over three decades of training dogs, their families, competing in dog sports, writing about dogs, and being a guest on radio and TV shows. I'm so glad you joined us today and I'm also so glad that one of my favorite people is here, too. And today my guest is Sarah. Now Sarah is one of my trainers and she started when she was with our facility in New Jersey and she has since moved, about a year ago, to Colorado and she's opening a branch of what we do up here with the dog training and the daycare out in Fort Collins, Colorado. Hey, Sarah!
Sarah: Hey everyone!
Kathy: So is it about a year that you've been gone?
Sarah: Yeah, it'll be a year midway through January.
Kathy: It feels like dog years.
Sarah: Exactly!
Kathy: You couldn't have moved to like freaking Connecticut where you could have just come and visit. You had to go all the way across the country.
Sarah: Hey, we got a lot of dogs out here that need training as well!
Kathy: This is true and you know, this is a funny story. She moved to Colorado and, like, three weeks later one of my students from here said, “Oh, I'm moving.” I said, “I'm so sad. We're going to miss you. Where are you moving?” She's like, “Fort Collins, Colorado.” I'm like, “No way!” So she got out there, right? Lilo and then she started training with you. So we got to get more of those happening.
Sarah: Exactly, yes.
Kathy: Alright, so what are we talking about today?
Sarah: Alright, so today's episode, we're going to address a topic we get asked about every single day, whether it's in classes or private lessons at the school, or when we also got these questions from the online dog training program, as well as comments and messages on our social media pages.
Kathy: I think it's probably one of the biggest. I'd say it's probably one of the top three questions we get asked about and, like I said in the Intro, I've been training dogs for over 30 years and I hear this every day. Now, we teach seven days a week at our school, so we're pretty guaranteed this topic is going to come up, but there is such mystery and frustration surrounding the topic that, I thought that this would be a really good one to start off with to help people fix their barking issues, or not let them happen in the first place. So, if you're listening to this and you're like, “Ah, my dog doesn't bark,” keep listening because you may one day do the wrong thing and then you have a barker on your hands, which you definitely don't want to have. Right?
Sarah: Exactly.
Kathy: So before we have to tell you the solution, we need you to understand why the dog is barking and that's pretty much how we attack all the training. People are like, “Oh my dog runs away!” And were like, “Well, here's why it's happening, and then here's the solution,” because I believe if you don't understand the why, you can't effectively use the solutions we're telling you. So here's some insight into what might be the reason your dog is barking. So, first, there's no single reason they bark and it can change day to day, so there's really no quick fix guaranteed cookie cutter method to stop barking. You kind of feel your way through it, and it's frustrating to live with a dog who bugs you or even next door to, or if you're an apartment, over or under a dog that barks, because once the dog is an Olympic barker it gets much, much harder to fix. And, so, if we know the motivation behind it, then we can better address the problem with a solution. So, we know that obviously dogs bark, a dog barks because it works and they're scaring somebody away, their self soothing and they're getting attention or they're releasing