21/08/2026
A long but very important read!
I recently watched another clip from Dogs Behaving (Very) Badly, this time involving a German Shepherd whose barking had become almost constant. What concerned me wasn’t simply the methods used to try to stop the barking, but the complete lack of curiosity about what was actually driving it. Graeme Hall described the dog as “attention-seeking”, and almost immediately the focus became how to stop the behaviour.
This particular dog had reportedly been seriously unwell as a puppy. For me, that information is hugely important. Early life is an incredibly significant period for the developing mammalian nervous system. Illness, pain, reduced movement, disrupted social experiences, chronic stress or simply missing normal developmental experiences can leave gaps that become visible much later in life. We cannot know exactly what is happening for this individual dog from a television clip, but a significant early history should at the very least make us curious about development.
Instead, we get “attention-seeking”.
And I think we need to seriously rethink the way that phrase is used around dogs.
A dog seeking attention is seeking connection. Those aren’t two completely different things. We have turned “attention-seeking” into a negative behavioural label, when seeking proximity, interaction, reassurance and social contact is entirely normal for a social mammal.
Mammals are biologically designed around connection. The mammalian brain contains systems involved in attachment, caregiving, separation distress, social reward and emotional regulation. Social interaction affects neurochemistry and physiology; oxytocin, endogenous opioid systems, dopamine, the stress response and the autonomic nervous system all play roles in social bonding, safety and regulation. Connection isn’t some optional extra that we accidentally teach dogs to want. It is embedded within mammalian biology.
So if a dog is repeatedly trying to get a human being to engage with them, I don’t want to teach the dog that asking doesn’t work.
I want to know why they need me.
What is happening internally that means this dog is repeatedly barking? Is he overwhelmed? Is he struggling with frustration? Is he trying to reconnect? Is his nervous system struggling to come back down after becoming activated? Is there insecurity around connection? Are there developmental needs that weren’t fully met earlier in life? Is he communicating something that has repeatedly been missed?
Those questions matter far more to me than simply finding a technique capable of making the barking disappear.
Because behaviour is communication.
That is also why I find the recommendation of a Pet Corrector spray so concerning. A Pet Corrector creates a sudden burst of compressed air designed to interrupt the dog. But again, we aren’t addressing anything underneath the behaviour. We’re adding another external stimulus to a nervous system that may already be struggling.
If the dog is barking because he is overwhelmed, startling him doesn’t resolve the overwhelm.
If he’s insecure, it doesn’t create security.
If he’s frustrated, it doesn’t help him process frustration.
If he’s seeking connection, it doesn’t meet the need for connection.
If we’re looking at developmental gaps, it doesn’t repair development.
It simply targets the bit that humans find inconvenient: the behaviour we can see.
And this is where behaviour suppression becomes incredibly problematic. Silence isn’t necessarily regulation. Stillness isn’t necessarily safety. The absence of barking doesn’t automatically mean the emotion that produced the barking has disappeared.
This is something I think the dog world desperately needs to understand. We have become obsessed with what dogs do, rather than how dogs feel.
A dog’s behaviour is the end point of an enormous amount of processing happening underneath the surface. The nervous system is responding to sensory information, previous experiences, emotional state, social relationships, physiological state and the environment. The behaviour we eventually see is communication from that entire system.
So why would my first priority be to remove the communication?
What frustrated me even more was that when the Pet Corrector didn’t work, the next advice was essentially to ignore the dog when he barked and reward him when he stopped.
I fundamentally disagree with this way of approaching behaviour.
My work is not about dividing behaviour into “wanted” and “unwanted”, ignoring one and rewarding the other. I don’t want a dog making behavioural choices because they’ve learned which version of themselves gets a response from me. I want to understand the emotional need underneath what they’re doing and work there.
If a dog is repeatedly saying, I need something from you, ignoring them because we dislike the way they’re asking makes absolutely no sense to me.
If anything, I want to become better at hearing them earlier.
Perhaps before the barking there was staring. Following. Restlessness. Moving closer. Moving away. Increased movement. Tension through the body. Difficulty settling. Repeated attempts to engage. The barking may simply be the point at which the communication became loud enough that the human couldn’t ignore it anymore.
And then we’re advising people to ignore that too.
For me, that completely misses what relationship-based behaviour work should be about.
I don’t want to teach a distressed dog that communication is ineffective. I want to build a relationship in which communication works. I want the dog to discover that they can express discomfort, uncertainty, frustration or a need for support and the human will listen. Over time, when we consistently meet and understand those emotional and developmental needs, we can begin to see genuine changes in behaviour because the dog no longer needs the same behavioural strategy.
That is fundamentally different from making the behaviour stop.
Address the emotion, not the behaviour.
If we work with the emotion underneath, behaviour changes as a consequence. If we work only on suppressing, ignoring or manipulating the behaviour, we risk leaving the emotional need exactly where it was.
And that is why I find programmes like this so frustrating. Millions of people are watching someone presented as a dog behaviour expert demonstrate an incredibly simplistic model: identify the irritating behaviour, label it, interrupt it, ignore it, reward something else.
Where is the dog in all of that?
Where is development?
Where is attachment?
Where is emotional regulation?
Where is the nervous system?
Where is the dog’s history?
Where is the relationship?
And, most importantly, where is the question: why?
This is also why I think it is so disappointing that the BBC has now given Graeme Hall an even bigger public platform through Strictly Come Dancing. Of course, appearing on Strictly isn’t formally endorsing his dog-behaviour methods. But public platforms create visibility, familiarity and perceived credibility. Someone already presented to millions of people as Britain’s dog-behaviour expert becomes an even more recognisable household name.
Meanwhile, the dog world is desperately trying to move conversations away from suppression, correction and obedience-focused thinking and towards development, emotion, psychological safety, attachment, nervous-system regulation and genuine understanding of behaviour.
Dogs don’t need us to become better at silencing them.
They need us to become better at hearing them.
The barking isn’t the problem to solve. It is information about the problem.
So instead of asking, “How do I stop my dog doing this?”, perhaps the most important question we can ask is:
“Why does my dog need to do this?”
Because behaviour has meaning. Behaviour is communication. And when we stop obsessing over controlling the behaviour we can see and start understanding the mammal underneath it, that is where meaningful change can actually begin.
