[SABELLESMOM]

What llevel of barking are you personally comfortable at? When we lived in the country, I don't remember doing too much to prevent barking, unless it got totally rediculous. We lived in the suburbs for a while too. Barking was less of an issue for me there as well.

Now, we live in the city. Nice quiet neighborhood with fairly good size yards and gardens. While many peoples dogs bark, I don't want mine to be a nuissance. I also don't want to squelsch the real watchdog capacity either. Some dogs tend to be more barky than others and there's not anything necessarily wrong in that.

We actually were beginning to wonder if Sable even had a bark when she was a pup. So it was fairly easy to not have her nuissance barking outside. She was pretty confident, always as long as things were ordinary. Besides the Cocker was doing enough barking for her. I prefer they not bark at every falling leaf, wandering squirrel, or non essential pedestrian walking by.

With her being so quiet as a pup, it was more or less a natural for her to learn not to bark at things that don't matter. It almost seemed a natural succession. One or two reminders was all they needed, as they were never outside unless I was home. (well, the Cocker needs more than one reminder but not her)

Sable does, however, alert and raise quite a rukus when it's OUT OF THE ORDINARY, as was emphasized the night we had a prowler. SHE knew things were not right and, of course she's NOT a puppy anymore. She has "grown up" so much this past year. She developed a confidence and a balance within herself and I am very pleased.

Perhaps we enhanced the protective thing by allowing her to "herd" some wild ducks at my friends farm. She kept them in nice little clumps and kept "danger" away. It's like the "big picture in child rearing." There is so much that goes into it, it seems natural. The details are sometimes quite small, yet significant when you add them all together.