I found Olive on Petfinder.com and adopted her from Kirkland charity K9 R&R on August 14, 2012. She was four or five years old then. Olive was taken from a California home based on a complaint from a neighbor. Two other dogs were removed from the home along with her. Her fur was matted, she weighed about five pounds less than she does now, she had never been spayed, and it was obvious she had many litters of puppies. She also had a dislocated shoulder. K9 R&R freed her from the California kill shelter and brought her to Seattle.
When I first met Olive, she was very afraid of feet, and of men. While her confidence and trust of others has grown over the years, she remains an always shy, sometimes skittish little terrier mutt who loves, loves, loves to bark. I have had some success in reducing the behavior with a collar that sprays citronella when she barks. I imagine with trepidation the parade of RV parks foreign to Olive, with lots of new people, sights, and sounds. I hope a bark collar will keep us from getting kicked out of the parks due to excessive barking!
Stay tuned on that one.
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Love your blog & look forward to following! We are RV-ers, with two mini-Dachshunds. They are epic barkers, but actually bark less on the road, perhaps because they feel less responsibility in the motor home than they do on the home front… Both at home and abroad, we’ve had fair success using a DAP, or “dog-appeasing pheromone”, plug-in that seems to calm our girls somewhat. Order online from Drs Foster and Smith. Happy traveling!
Diana, thank you for the advice! It’s certainly hard to take the bark out of a terrier. I’ll check out the DAP!
We have had success with the DAP plug in at home. But on the road, we have used the citronella bark collar and it works great – one bark, one automatically triggered spritz of citronella, one shake of the head and no more barky at that location.
To teach a Dog to not bark, one must teach a Dog to bark on request.
Maybe this will help. Positive reinforcement always.
You can do it Olive!