Episode 38 - Puppies Who Demand Bark: Why Puppy Owners Fail and How We Can Help Them Succeed

1/6/2026

This episode is a fan request:

"Looking for a podcast - My co-owner needs help. I’ve worked with them on training behaviors, and they’ve done a masterful job at teaching puppy (who’s about 3 months old now…) that barking gets attention. They wait until they just can’t take it anymore but then cave in just as extinction burst really ramps up.

Is there a podcast that will guide them through navigating this? To be fair, one of them works nights and NEEDS their sleep!

I can understand how they got here. But just like parenting- pay now or pay later, and this one is gonna sting! They do have PC curriculum- I told them to start looking through it again."

This podcast unpacks:

Straightforward advice for handling confinement and demand barking
Why that straightforward advice often fails to help puppy owners
How we can re-frame the emotional component of this issue for puppy owners and help them succeed

Listen wherever you get your podcasts, and subscribe so you never miss an episode!

To read the transcript for this episode, click the link below.

Transcript - Episode 38

I'm Jane Messineo Lindquist, and this is a Puppy Culture Potluck podcast. You bring the topics, we bring the discussion.

This episode's podcast is about helping puppy owners navigate through puppies that bark in confinement. And here's the question.

Looking for a podcast? My co owner needs help. They've done a masterful job at teaching their puppy, who's about three months old now. That barking gets attention. They wait until they just can't take it anymore, but then cave in just as the extinction burst really ramps up.

Is there a podcast that will guide them through navigating this? To be fair, one of them works nights and needs their sleep. I can understand how they got here, but just like parenting, pay now or pay later. And this one's going to sting. They do have the Puppy Culture curriculum. I told them to start looking through it again.

Okay, this is me again. Well, you know, it's really interesting about the barking because before we did our puppy course, I did a survey of breeders, trainers and puppy owners and asked them what their biggest stumbling block was in the first weeks that they had the puppy home. And I fully expected it to be something like puppy biting, destructiveness, house training, but no, it came back, crate and confinement issues. I mean, by a landslide, 75 to 85% of the answers had something to do with crate or confinement issues or demand barking. So this is a really persistent problem in the new puppy owner community. Let's put a pin in that, because that in and of itself is diagnostic.

I'm going to give direct advice first, but I'll plot spoil it that what I'm going to tell you is not something new. If you type in stop dog barking, you're going to get thousands of hits with excellent step by step instructions on how to put that behavior on extinction. And then you're going to get another couple thousand hits on how to use a shock or spray or other no bark collar after the puppy owner fails to be able to execute the above mentioned, absolutely spot on protocols that those excellent trainers have laid out for them for free thousands of times on the internet.

So after I give my direct advice, we're going to examine why, despite the fact that there are literally thousands of resources out there that explain this, puppy owners continue to struggle. So when it comes to crate and confinement training and demand barking, there are two concepts that the puppy owner has to understand. The first concept is the difference between I want and I need.

And the second concept is the fun house is closed aka how to establish discriminative stimuli. So at the top level you have to decide when this puppy's barking in its enclosure. Is it reasonable to leave the puppy in there? Or does the puppy have a legitimate need that you haven't fulfilled? And then once you decide that no, the puppy does not have a legitimate need, you need to set up conditions where the puppy understands that this picture of being put in the crate under these conditions is an automatic cue to settle, and there are no other options.

Now, when you're doing this analysis, context is everything, and understanding all the different pieces that you need to read to get the context right in any given situation is going to be beyond the scope of a podcast. That's course level detail. But let me just set this one up. The breeder’s done crate and confinement training. The puppy's been sleeping quietly and very happily in a crate at the breeders house.

There's an established routine, and the puppy has never had a problem. So now, Mr. and Mrs. Puppy Owner, you get your puppy home, you follow the instructions we given the course, and everything's going swimmingly. But then somewhere around the third day, you put the puppy in his pen and he thinks, you know what? No, I think I'd rather play some more.

And he barks. You hesitate, you go back in. You shush the puppy. The puppy thinks, heck yeah, I know how to get attention. And so it begins. Now you're at a crossroads. As a puppy owner, you have to make sure that it is, in fact, fair to have put the puppy in confinement at this time. So the first step is to eliminate any possible legitimate need that the puppy might have.

Is there any possibility the puppy's hungry or thirsty? Has the puppy had adequate social interaction and mental stimulation? Has the puppy had sufficient physical stimulation? I'm just going to sidebar and say I could talk for an hour about puppy owners incorrect assessments of puppies need for mental and physical stimulation. But that's another podcast. Then you have to look at is there any other possible physical reason the puppy's in distress? Is the puppy in pain or sick?

So that's your punch list of antecedents. You got to check all those boxes off before proceeding. Not to beat a dead horse, but I'm going to say it again, because I don't want any casual listeners to traumatize their puppies, that all of this is assuming that the breeder has put in a good foundation of crate and confinement conditioning.

The puppy's been in his new home a few weeks, which is long enough that he's acclimated to his new home and really feels this is his home. And his people are his family, and there is no possibility of true emotional distress for this puppy. That is not going to be true for every puppy belonging to every listener of this podcast.

Okay, so once all those boxes are ticked off and it's fair to put the puppy in his pen or crate and expect him to be quiet. Now we have to put this behavior on extinction. And all that is, is leave the puppy alone to bark until he gives up. For certain I recommend beginning this by giving the puppy a stuffed food toy or a raw, meaty bone, when you put him in his confinement area in hopes that he'll self-soothe and find sleep overtaking him before he starts his attention barking.

But even if that does not happen, the procedure is truly just ignore the barking until it stops. If everything goes normally, what you'll notice is that the barking has a distinct cadence. If you pay attention, there is a general tone, pitch, and speed of the barking.

As you ignore the barking, that musicality will at first start to get less shrill and the barks will be more spaced apart the longer you wait them out. You will probably even get to a point where you think, has it stopped? ... and then it will start again. This is good. You're on the right track. But then just when you're thinking, oh yeah, we're almost there, it's going to start up again and it's going to start up again explosively.

It's insane. It's shrill. It's like the puppy isn't even taking a breath. It's loud and you're sure your puppy's leg is caught in the fence? It's dramatic beyond belief. It's a good idea to have a camera in the room so you can look and make sure that, in fact, your puppy does not have his leg caught in the fence.

Because trust me, you're going to be sure there's something wrong. This is the extinction burst, and it's gnarly. This is the darkest hour before dawn. The behavior is about to go away. You're almost there. But this is where the average puppy owner just cannot take it. And then they run in and yell at, comfort or let the puppy out. And this has profoundly bad consequences.

Because if you want to build a super durable behavior, you go in and reinforce during the extinction burst. That is literally the rock that dog training is built on. You thin your reinforcement ratio, which will cause a surge in behavior, the extinction burst, and then you go in and reinforce during that extinction burst and you will get a dog that persists in that behavior and does it with enthusiasm.

And the more times you thin the reinforcement ratio and reinforce during the extinction burst, the stronger and more durable the behavior becomes. This is fantastic when you're teaching competition heeling, or scent detection. Tragic when you're teaching the puppy to bark, because that is what the puppy owner is doing.

They're not just ineffective at stopping the puppy from barking. They are actively training a loud and persistent barking behavior. And they are unbelievably fantastic at training this. Frankly, they could not be better at it if there were professional dog trainers and explicitly set out to teach their puppies to bark in confinement.

At the end of the day, it's simple. Make sure it's appropriate for your puppy. Set up the correct antecedents. Do it at a time when you have the time to let this play out. Not on the late night when you have to get up early for an important meeting the next day. Put the puppy in confinement with a chew object and steel yourself for however long it takes. That's your first successful session. Then the next time your puppy goes into confinement, he'll probably bark and there'll be another extinction burst.

But the entire cycle will be shorter and it will be less dramatic. By the third or fourth time your puppy goes in it'll be a routine. There might be a chirp or two, but that's it. So again, if you've set up all the antecedents and checked all the boxes off, this is how it's going to go. And this is what everyone, all of those thousands of fantastic dog trainers on the internet are going to tell you.

And this is what you will probably fail to do. And either wind up with an ever escalating attention monster, or you will move directly onto an aversive spray bottle, shock collar, citronella collar and just stop the barking. But then also you'll set up a tone of suppression and leave a great big stain on your bond with your puppy right out of the gate.

So what's going on here? Well, what's so interesting to me about this situation is that when it comes to this kind of attention seeking barking, puppy owners don't have the heart to listen to it, but they have the heart to silence it. So yelling or using an aversive is somehow okay, but ignoring it is just not. And what puppy owners can't understand is that even if they suppress that behavior and stop the barking, the puppy is still feeling the same thing.

The puppy is equally dissatisfied whether he's barking or not. But the puppy owner doesn't feel like a bad guy if the puppy's not barking. So this is really about the emotional state of the puppy owner, not the dog. And that's what we have to address.

You know, dogs and people are highly social animals, and we have a strong evolutionary bias to be in dread of being ignored. Being ignored is worse than negative attention. Not just for the puppy, but for the puppy owner. So if the puppy owner is yelling, spraying, shocking, it's something. It's social interactive. It's not being shunned. And somehow that feels more right to the puppy owner than just ignoring.

I think this is at the heart of why the perfect solution to the barking problem is just lying all over the place. Freely accessible to all. Yet sharing that information does not seem to move the needle. It's not about lack of information. It's about lack of addressing the deep social and emotional component for the puppy owner. So the question is, how do we get the puppy owner to feel that ignoring is in fact interaction and the puppies not being abandoned socially?

And that in putting the behavior on extinction, they're not cutting the puppy off socially, but creating a workable and varied deep connection. I can't say that I have a scalable solution completely figured out for this, but I will tell you for sure what does work? As they say in the writing business show them, don't tell them because your communications with your puppy owners really are like novels.

You're building a story that they can understand, and it's more powerful to show rather than tell. I have personal experience with this. I placed a puppy with a very dear friend who lives three doors down from me, so I had a unique chance to sort of co-parent this puppy with her. I got to witness on a firsthand basis, the genesis of this dynamic between the puppy owner and the puppy.

And because the puppy was coming to my house and sometimes going with me to class and sometimes going with her, I mean, I got to witness the puppy barking in his crate when I took him to class, and I got to put that on extinction, because I know for a fact that this puppy doesn't need to bark in a crate.

And my friend and co owner got to see this. She witnessed her puppy not barking in the crate when I ignored him. So I can't really speak for another person, but to me it seems that it gave her a level of comfort that I don't think she could have gotten without witnessing it firsthand. I mean, don't get me wrong, I believe she'll still tell you that she feels terrible about the amount of time that her puppy has to stay in confinement.

But I do think seeing it work out in the long run at the breeders house gives the puppy owners perspective that they couldn't get any other way. So when possible, have the puppy owner bring the puppy back to you. Put the puppy back in the context of where they first learned crate and confinement training, and where you're confident that they won't bark or they won't persist in barking.

And then your puppy owner is going to see how content and happy the puppy is in that context, and it's going to help them believe, because they have to believe that the puppy is capable of being happy and content in confinement.

Failing, being able to have the puppy owner observe you interacting with their dog and see how that works, it's really tough. But I can share a few thoughts. Part of the problem is that there's a rock bottom crossroads where the puppy owner has to accept that at certain ages and stages, you're not going to make that puppy happy, that there is going to be a certain amount of disappointment on the puppies behalf.

At some stages in a dog's life, there are no solutions where everyone wins and it's going to feel crappy to the puppy owner because the puppies in jail. And some people think in that moment that they would just rather live with an attention monster than to have to ever disappoint that puppy. But consider this it comes to a point where it's literally like letting the inmates run the asylum.

The asylum will be torn to shreds. You'll have an enormous vet bill for the obstruction from the stuff your puppy ate. You'll be fired from your job because of the barking dog in the background on every zoom call. And you'll dislike the attention monster extortionist puppy that you have to entertain every waking moment and double dislike it because you will not have been able to sleep at night through four months because your puppy likes to get up at 4:00 am.

And yes, a percentage of people will return those dogs to the breeder or relinquish it to a shelter. This is a very sneakily high jeopardy issue, and it all comes down to that puppy owner's ability to ride out an extinction burst.

So while I said earlier that at some stages in a dog's life, there are no solutions where everyone wins and in a very immediate sense, that is true at that exact moment in time, the puppy does not feel he's winning. But in the long run, this is not true at all. Everyone always wins when the puppy learns that his confinement area is an automatic cue to settle.

This is why we as humans are able to keep dogs as pets. We have a higher cognition and ability to see the future and have a picture that the dog cannot see. So in that moment when the puppies in extinction burst and barking like his leg is being sawed off, instead of focusing on the immediate communication that the puppy's giving you and how you don't want to be the bad guy, and how you can't take being mean to your puppy. Understand that there is so much you know that your puppy does not, and so much that you can foresee so many fun adventures and wonderful years with your puppy, growing to a dog and sleeping at your feet while you work from home.

Christmases, birthdays, camping trips. You can see all of that and see that it depends right now on this puppy learning that sometimes this is what it is to be a dog. Sometimes it's boring, sometimes it's not what you want right now, but it's a ticket to all those fun times ahead of which that puppy has no ability to comprehend.

But you, as the primate with the thumbs and the large prefrontal cortex, do have the ability to comprehend. And it all starts with this pinpoint in time of you waiting out that extinction burst.

If you liked this podcast, you'll love our puppy owner course, With Open Arms and a Level Head - How to welcome a puppy into your life. Available at puppyculture.com.

Breeders, do you want to get your puppy owner started off on the right foot? Check out our bulk discounts on puppy courses, booklets and bundles at puppyculture.com.

Well, that's it for this time. Thanks for listening. Bye bye.