::A Geek in Korea::

As of now, the weather outside is too cold for Yoshi to stay on our veranda for extended periods of time. We used to keep him on the veranda while we went to work. He could look outside, and even if he made a noise, he couldn’t bother anyone walking by our apartment. Now  we need to keep him indoors as we go to work.

We purchased a cage in preparation for winter a few months ago, and started training him by keeping him in the cage overnight while we sleep. Yoshi no longer has any problems with his sleeping cage, but it’s much too small to keep him inside while we go to work. A solution was to choose a room and make a larger place for Yoshi where he couldn’t destroy anything.

The majority of the computer room was given over to Yoshi. His cage can fit under the large computer desk, and the rest of the room is now his playground while we go to work. We set up a barrier made from an unused clothes hanger turned on its side and taped together to protect the computer, which sits in the lower part of the desk. 90% of the floor is now owned by Yoshi, where I get a small space for my chair to write.

The problem with this new arrangement is that Yoshi is now sitting inside a room that shares the outer wall of the apartment. We are the first apartment on our line, so whenever anyone from our side of the building enters or leaves, they go by our door. When Yoshi hears keys rattling, he sometimes barks. This is a new thing. He’s been nearly silent for months, but now he’s barking at anything outside the door when one of us isn’t home with him. He’s usually quiet when we are both home, but when one of us leaves he barks. This is unacceptable, because it’s the one rule we’ve vowed not to break with the security guard. As long as Yoshi isn’t known as a dog that barks, no one cares that we have him.

There have be several ideas suggested. We’ve been punishing him when he barks, but this doesn’t work well. It’s harder to reward the absence of a negative behavior than to punish a negative behavior. We asked a vet about a training collar. Some collars spray a citrus smell that repulses some dogs when they detect a dog barking. We know someone that swears by his collar, but the vet said they didn’t work on some dogs. Tests with lemon scented items showed that Yoshi loved them, so we have no idea if this expensive product would work.Another idea would be to improve the sound insulation to this room, blocking up some of the window to block the sounds from the outside. I’d like to keep the window free to sunlight however, so I don’t think this is very possible either.