Your Whining Dog – Is There A Cure?

What Makes Dogs Whine?

Whining is a form of communication and is often used by dogs to express their emotional needs. Understanding what lies behind your dog’s whining is important because it will help you decide on the best course of action. 

Because we often inadvertently reinforce our dogs for whining, the behavior can become a habit, or a learned behavior. 

I’ll give you some examples as we go. But what this means, is that whining may persist, even when the original cause no longer exists. And that’s where some training techniques can come in handy. We’ll look at those below too. 

Whining Caused By Pain Or Discomfort

This isn’t as common as you might think.  Most dogs are fairly stoic about pain and will often suffer in silence. But some dogs will whine if they have a tummy ache, or a full bladder and need to be let out. 

Some older dogs will whine if their joints are uncomfortable. And any dog may whine if they are injured or unwell.

So if your dog is whining spontaneously, and the whining doesn’t seem to be linked to any other obvious cause, it’s definitely worth getting them checked over by a veterinarian.

Fear Or Anxiety

Anxious or fearful whining is often situation specific. Dogs that dislike car travel may whine in the car for example, and dogs that are unhappy being crated may whine in their crate. A dog that is afraid of fireworks may also whine when the bangs begin. Fearful whining is often accompanied by rapid panting and sometimes trembling. 

Building up your dog’s confidence is a great way to help reduce nervous whining. Game based training can really help with confidence building and with getting your dog focused on you and paying attention to you. This all helps you to distract and reassure your dog when they have to be near to their fear triggers. 

There are also ways to desensitise dogs to those triggers. For example you can buy a recording of fireworks and introduce it to your dog at almost imperceptibly quiet volumes, building the sound up gradually over a period of weeks. 

You can also talk to your vet about medication that can help relax your dog on occasions when you know there will be fireworks, or if your car sick dog has to make an essential journey. 

If your dog is generally anxious about lots of different things,  then it’s also a good idea to have a chat with your veterinarian who,  if necessary, will be able to refer you to a canine behaviorist. 

Whining is often initially caused by frustration and triggered by a desire for resources or action. So for example, if the dog starts by whining when their dinner is being prepared, and gets rewarded by being given their dinner, the whining becomes a habit. 

Loneliness & Boredom

A lot of whining problems get started through loneliness and boredom. Dogs are a very sociable species, and many dogs don’t like being left alone for long periods of time. 

A dog that is bored and lonely during the day while the family are out may start whining even before they leave home. 

Hiring a dog walker to come in during the day and take your dog out for an hour or so, can work wonders for a lonely dog. Another alternative might be a place in doggy day care. 

Once you have broken the day up a bit for your dog, you can start to train them to relax about the leaving process itself.  A frozen filled kong can be provided each time you leave so that the dog has something enjoyable to do while you are out. 

Frustration

Frustration at not being able to get at something they want, is a very common cause of whining, and is likely to be linked to the dog’s internal excitement levels. And to their environment. 

This is a familiar scenario for those of us with dogs that double up as hunting companions. Hunting, especially organized shoot days, are the perfect recipe for frustration. Dogs from working lines tend to be quite highly strung and very keen to see some action!  Standing and waiting for their turn can often result in whining. And this is one of the most difficult things to cure.

My top tip for those of you training, what you hope will be, a quiet hunting companion is not to take your dog into the excitement of a shoot day at too young an age. Be patient and help your dog learn some patience first, rather than exposing them to too much, too soon. 

This kind of frustration occurs in pet dogs too, and common causes include making young puppies sit and wait for too long before delivering big rewards, such as a meal. Or making young dogs sit and wait while other dogs chase each other around. 

Some training classes encourage whining by making young dogs sit and wait their turn for far too long.  If your dog can’t do this, ask the class leader if you can walk your dog up and down a little way away from the other dogs. Keeping your dog moving when they are excited reduces the risk of whining. 

You can improve your dog’s ability to cope in this situation by teaching your dog to be patient and wait, in much more gradual stages. Making sure at every step of the way, they are able to wait quietly. If your dog whines during a sit-stay, then that sit-stay is too long.  Establish a time that they are capable of sitting quietly for, and build on that more gradually. 

Whining To Say Please

Request whining can be very cute in a puppy. What could be nicer than a puppy learning to ask to go out by whining at the back door?

Unfortunately this is a common way for a whining habit to get started. 

Basically, the dog whines when they want something.  Perhaps they see their collar and leash and want to go for a walk. Or they see you getting their food ready and they want to eat. Or you put them in their crate and they are not sleepy, so they whine to come out. 

And more often than not, the dog is given the item or the access that they are whining for. 

This strongly reinforces the whining and a smart dog will soon learn to apply the whining technique to other situations where the dog feels that their needs or requests are not being met! And to be ever more persistent in getting what they want through whining.

The solution to this is to teach your dog an alternative way to say please. Sit is a good one. And to teach the dog that silence is a great way to get reinforcement. We’ll look at that in a minute.

Some of the challenges of reducing an ingrained whining habit

If you have a young puppy, you are in luck, it’s pretty easy to change behavior at this age. If you have an older dog that has been whining for months, years even, then you have a bigger challenge on your hands. 

Although whining is often an involuntary response at first, it can quickly become a habit, and we all know how hard habits are to break. So its important not to expect overnight change. 

Despite this, great strides can be made in teaching any dog to be quiet using only reinforcement, provided that you begin by reinforcing very short periods of quiet, with high value rewards. 

I suggest you start by going through this checklist of tips. Try to be honest with yourself about the source or triggers for your dog’s whining. And address those before you attempt to train your dog to be quiet.  

When I say, ‘keep dogs busy around distractions’ I mean don’t ask your dog to sit and watch another dog having fun, or to watch or wait for something that they very much want now. It’s asking for a whining problem to start or get worse. You can read more about this in my article on teaching dogs to behave around other animals.

If your dog is using whining to get something, whether it’s food, access to your yard, or just your attention, you need to stop reinforcing this and reinforce an alternative behavior such as ‘sit’. 

Training To Be Quiet

And finally, when you have done all this, you can start to reinforce the dog for short periods of silence in situations where previously they might whine. You’ll need to ‘mark’ those initial short periods of silence with a word such as YES or a click from a clicker. And follow up each and every mark with a reward. 

For example, you can put your dog into their crate, count two seconds (say one thousand, two thousand in your head) say YES out loud, and let them out of the crate immediately. 

If the dog starts to whine before you reach ‘two thousand’ next time scatter some fantastic treats on the crate floor to keep them busy for two seconds, so that you can mark them for being quiet and let them out. 

Once the dog can be quiet for two seconds, you can start to increase the time to three seconds then four seconds. Once you get to ten seconds you can increase by slightly larger intervals. You can also drop treats through the top of the cage sometimes rather than letting the dog out. All the while increasing the time that the dog can remain quiet, but doing so in small steps so that the dog keeps winning.  

Good luck with your training and remember, nothing succeeds like success!