Excessive garden barking is a common challenge for adopters of Romanian & foreign rescue dogs, and it’s something that can be disruptive, frustrating, and stressful for you, your dog, and your neighbours.

As we transition into the spring and summer months that barking can become even more problematic with the increase in garden activity around you.

Neighbours have the audacity to come out and do gardening, dogs barking down the street, children playing, and even birds daring to fly overhead!

Meaning you're running from the house to the garden a gazillion times a day wondering why they have to bark so much (because your Rommie lives outside in summer right? 😁)

What's more - If this is happening a lot, it can have a knock on effect and become a contributing factor to other behaviour challenges, like reactivity on walks.

But your dog isn't just being difficult - this is deeply instinctive behaviour  

The majority of Romanian and overseas rescue dogs are naturally evolved descendants of street dogs (even though they may never have been an actual street dog themselves). 

They're genetically predisposed to be alert barkers. They're environmentally sensitive, and naturally territorial - the result of which is a dog with a lower threshold for barking behaviour.  

If it moves bark at it - if I’m worried about it bark at it - if it makes a noise bark at it - if I don’t like it bark at it - if it looks scary or weird bark at it.

They bark first because their default mechanism is;

🐕 'I don’t know what that is, therefore I want to make sure it knows I'm here.
🐕 'I'm ready to defend myself and my space if necessary'
🐕 'I'd like that to go away or keep it's distance until I can decide whether it’s a threat/not a threat, safe/not safe, going to hurt me/not going to hurt me, a problem/not a problem etc.'

Which means you can end up with a lot of barking!

Excessive garden barking can show up with any dogs - but is especially common with:

✅ New Arrivals
✅ Guardian breeds or cross breeds (Mioritics, Carpathian, Bucovina Shepherd types)
✅ Adolescent Dogs
✅ More fearful/nervous/anxious dogs

I asked my social media community about this recently and their replies were a lot 😂 The trigger lists were long, which tells you everything about why this particular issue can be so hard to get on top of. Because here's the thing - the back garden isn't a straightforward environment to work in.

It's not one trigger, it's dozens. Different every day. Different depending on the weather, the time, what the neighbours are doing. A standard desensitisation plan doesn't always cut it here - but what does work is a multi-faceted approach.