Bark
People yell. Cats hiss. Lion’s roar. Dogs bark.
No. 65: Bark
My dog barks a lot. Not in the annoying, non-stop Chihuahua kind of way. But pretty close to it.
It happens when he sees someone outside or when there’s a knock on the door. My hope is he’s attempting to protect us, but he could just be afraid for his own safety. Whatever his reasons, his growls and barks would probably scare off an intruder should we have one, so they are useful that way, which is one reason I’m hesitant to call his barking a “problem,” per say.
My girlfriend isn’t hesitant. To her, it’s a problem.
It’s enough a problem that she ordered a bark collar on Amazon, which I only learned about after the order was placed. And I had questions.
First, was it ethical? Apparently yes, since the collar used vibration instead of electric shock.
Second, did we really want to silence our pup? Isn’t barking sometimes called for? For example, the intruder scenario. Did we want to behaviorally condition the barking out of our dog, rendering him mute for the rest of his life? This seemed, at best, a mistake, and, at worse, an unnatural injury to his dogness.
I had one more bit of argumentative ammo, albeit of a very ineffective caliber. In a weird way, I kind of like his barking. It’s . . . fun? My childhood dog, Nellie, never barked. At least, not until she got older, sort of blind, and a little delirious. Then she would bark randomly at walls and shadows and things that she had been familiar with her whole life. It was kind of funny. I liked hearing her voice.
So with Archer. I like hearing him. He is vocal and has many different kinds of barks depending on the situation, which I read as a show of intelligence. There’s his menacing bark, which is deep and loud and prolonged by long growls. There’s his “pay attention to me” bark, which is high and sharp and mixed with crying whine. There’s his play bark, which is the cute and typical puppy bark—not deep and not whining, just a pure, snappy bark. Then there’s one of my favorites, his herding bark, which only comes out when he’s chasing me or another dog. This is a half bark at an extremely high pitch that he repeats. His mouth stays open when he barks like this. It reminds me of a Native American battle whoop. I call it his “banshee bark.”
While sipping a beer one day with my friend Drew and his wife in their backyard, I raised the bark collar conundrum after noticing their well behaved and remarkably quiet — by my standards — German Shepard.
Drew’s wife gave me some good advice: “Would you rather have your dog wear the bark collar temporarily, and solve his barking problem forever? Or deal with the barking problem forever because you didn’t want to use a bark collar temporarily?”
Duly noted.
Another thought I had was using the bark collar selectively to weed out some types of barks while preserving others.
So we strapped the thing on him.
It really seemed to work—at first. Whenever he barked loud enough, the collar would vibrate and he would freak, running around until he stopped at my feet, I guess for protection from the phantom neck vibrator. This was promising, until it wasn’t.
Two weeks in, he got used to it. I suspect he may have even liked it, getting a little neck massage each time he yapped. And that, my friends, was the end of it.
Now, in our new place, he’s the same old barking Archer. But not in the annoying, non-stop Chihuahua kind of way—in his cute, Archer kind of way, of course: only when called for, of course, and stopping when I ask him to stop, of course. (<-- lie).
But really, it’s not that bad. Like I said, I find it kind of fun. He’s a dog, isn’t he? People yell. Cats hiss. Lion’s roar. Dogs bark. ♦
Weekly Three
HEAR: “Vivir Mi Vida” by Marc Anthony
READ: “What to Do With Spring’s Wild Joy in a Burning World” by Margaret Renkl, a short essay. To me, Renkl is our modern Whitman, writing about nature with remarkable lyricism.
VIEW: Ernest Shackleton’s ship, Endurance, sunk in 1915 and has been found mostly in tact after 106 years.