Hello and welcome back to the Talking Dogs podcast. I'm Graham Hall and it's been well over a decade now since I first started helping humans train their charming but often cheeky dogs. I'm known as the dog father and you might recognise my voice from TV's dogs behaving very badly.

This podcast is the place where I can give you even more experience, advice and opinions

in the hope that if you are reaching the end of your tether,

you'll leave with a couple of new training tips that you hadn't thought of before.

And if you're lucky, well, we might even have a laugh or two while you're taking some notes.

One question I get asked a lot is how to tell when your dog's really trying to tell you something or when he's just attention seeking. Now that comes up particularly

with regards to barking. So today I'm going to look at when it's right to give your dog attention,

either praising him or indeed telling him off, or when you're actually just better off ignoring him.

So how do you know when a behaviour is attention seeking? I think there's no simple answer to that.

But the thing to do is watch the dog's behavior really carefully.

When they're at it, a bit like humans, there are often telltale signs.

So let me tell you a story to illustrate that.

Years ago, I used to have two rotties, Axel and Gordon.

And I lost them to old age, two, three years ago. But Axle, when

he was young, was quite the character and he had a great big, deep, sonorous bark, which he

would use at the bay window in the house I lived in, seemingly, to get rid of anybody who was walking

past. It's a common problem. So I thought, well, he's barking to make people go away.

Now, I didn't know as much then as I do now. And I was inadvertently rewarding him because I'd read somewhere, perhaps you have too, that when a dog's doing that, they're a guarding breed, he's doing his job.

So you go up, you sort of like pat him on the end go, yeah okay that's enough now i'll take it over from here so i was doing that thing but actually what

i've learned since this is a bit confusing because you're actually rewarding him from barking

and then you tell him not to bark so that's that doesn't make sense to a dog but that's by the bike

so i'm going up going yeah yeah stroking him on the head he's getting attention

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