Howling In Response To Child's Laughter.

[iGuest 3]

Hello.

 

I have a 10 year old shorthair pointeryellow lab mix who has an extreme reaction to my daughter's laughter: he howls.

Around the time my daughter turned 2, the sound of her laughter or even talking loudly and excitedly would occasionally trigger a howling response from my pup.

Early on, his response was short in duration and could easily be corrected. However, over the past couple years, his response has become increasingly loud and for a longer duration. Sometimes he's fine, most times he isn't. It has become increasingly difficult to correct his behavior and often takes removing him from the situation completely to resolve the issue.

 

I should point out that her crying from a skinned knee or something that upsets her has no effect on him and does not produce any howling.

He has been around other children acting similarly for the majority of his life and has never had this type of response.

When he reacts, his ears will go back and his head will drop and his tail will tuck some. After a couple seconds, he will howl as if he's in pain or scared.

I've done some basic home hearing tests from about 5000hz -28000 hz and while he shows a physical interest in the sound, there were no negative reactions.

A couple things about my pup:

He's 10 and has been collar trained since the age of 6 months

He's had a very active life, zero health issues aside from stitchesstaples associated with a hard-workinghard-running hunting dog.

He's still active and for the most part, only has a couple of fear responses which are readily explainable. Loud, sharp noises (fireworks, etc) don't typically affect him but thunder will have him looking for us to be near. No howling or other undesired behavior. Buzzing, flying insects in the house will force him to leave the room but outside he has no reaction to them at all. (I attribute this to crate training when he was a puppy and either something biting him or scaring him at a very young age.)

 

The only similar response he has shown has been a bad "round" of separation anxiety that started about 12 months ago and lasted for about 6 months until we moved to a larger home. He would often howl in a similar fashion for about 5 minutes when we left the house. Since we moved 6 months ago, there have been zero incidents of separation anxiety.

 

He's on no medications aside from flea and tick (seasonal) and Heartworm meds.

 

In my opinion, it seems pretty clear he's having an anxious response to a physical stimuli and asking my child not to laugh isn't really an option.

I've had some limited success with correcting this with a training collar but my collar is failing after 10 years and he really hasn't needed it for the past few years.

 

Any thoughts or comments would be appreciated.

 

Sincerely,

 

Brian

 

 

 

[jlhaslip 4]

I am thinking that our member : Sheepdog needs to review this Topic and reply. They are our resident Dog person.