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Training Video: How to stop your puppy barking for attention

Updated 20 February 2025

Read time: 1 mins

Pooch and Mutt's expert trainer, Jon, is here to show you how to stop your puppy barking for attention.

In our training video, Jon explains how barking is a natural instinct for dogs and they certainly won't grow out of it. After all, it is the way they communicate! But what can be trained is unnecessary barking that stems from bad habits. Jon goes into a few training methods you can adopt to keep unnecessary and attention seeking barking at a minimum.

How to stop your puppy from barking

If we teach puppies to bark on command, then they can understand the opposite behaviour. This will take a week or two to train.
Find something your puppy really likes. To initiate barking a toy is a good start but switch to food later as it is easier to be repetitive.
Frustrate the puppy with it... offer it and take it away, hold it just out of reach and repeat. A vocal dog will usually get frustrated and bark.

If this doesn’t work, ask someone to hold the puppy on a leash and try again. This level of restraint will cause more frustration and therefore barking.
You can begin to cue the barking with the command SPEAK SPEAK. When you do this be quick to reward your puppy when respond to the cue.
When you can see your puppy has a good grasp of this game, you should look to change the reward to food.
Once the speak command has been taught, tell your puppy to bark and reward them. Tell them again, but this time wait for a break in the barking, mark that behaviour with the command QUIET at the same time as rewarding with food.
Repeat this behaviour until the puppy recognises the difference between bark and quiet. Build on this game on a daily basis, moving the training from home to random times on walks.