In England, that country’s Department for the Environment, Food and Rural Affairs is now offering a course in barking for dog owners, reports Nicola Woolcock for the London Times.

The course doesn’t teach people to bark. It teaches people how to interpret their dogs’ vocalizations.

The different noises made by dogs have been identified as grunts, whines, yelps, screams, howls, growls, coughs, barks, tooth snapping and panting.

While this cacophony might sound overwhelming to the untrained ear, dog owners will learn whether the sounds mean that their pet wants a walk, a wee or a fresh can of food.

The authorities hope that if people understand what their dogs are trying to tell them, they’ll find ways to keep their dogs quiet, and thereby reduce noise complaints.

The training is being offered by Peterborough City Council in an attempt to cut down on complaints about antisocial noise. The council’s pollution control team receives more than 1,300 noise complaints a year. Of those, 15 per cent relate to the barking of dogs.

Nationally, the figure is even higher at 25 per cent of all complaints.

Whether this training will help is debatable, although not because the idea doesn’t have merit. It does, in theory. It’s a topic covered in Outwitting Dogs, the dog training book I co-wrote, in fact. Dogs bark for different reasons, and sometimes you can figure out the cause by paying attention to everything from the bark’s pitch to how repetitive it is, to whether there are identifiable triggers that get it started. Then, once you know the cause, you can take steps to eliminate it, or train an alternative behavior.

But the real problem is: how do you get the people who have “problem dogs” to attend the class?

Maybe it will be mandated if a dog’s noise has resulted in a formal complaint.

But if not, it’s a good solution — to the wrong problem.

A lonely, poorly-socialized, or poorly-trained dog often ends up that way because his human is ignorant, busy, or clueless.

And ignorant, busy, clueless humans aren’t going to be the ones who show up to take a class in interpreting barks . . .