Please be kind.
My 9 year old border collie is driving us mad with her incessant barking. It has gotten much worse in the past year and a half since my other dog died. She’s well trained otherwise.
We’ve been to the vet multiple times worried she had something wrong with her but it’s not physical. They thought it was old age.
I spent the last of my redundancy pay on a behaviourist who said it was just old age anxiety and to distract, except we cannot distract 20 hours a day. She yips through the night too & unless one of us sleeps downstairs with her she does it all night. She won’t settle down upstairs to sleep with us although that option is always open to her.
She barks constantly to get into our back garden. Once out she barks constantly along the fence line even when there’s nothing on the other side although there is sometimes a fox, her mortal enemy!
She attacks the fence when nearby neighbours are cutting grass/strimming which is almost every day around here. I started to take her out the back on the lead to retain control but she just walks back into the house when I do that then resumes barking at the back door as soon as I’ve sat back down. No one has that much time to be up and down all day. I currently wfh for a local call centre.
She’s always barked aggressively at the window when people pass by but we had devised strategies to distract her that were working well until the past year.
We’re at our wits end. She’s such a lovely sweet dog otherwise but we expected she’d calm down as she gets older not gets worse.
So as not to drip feed she has two, hour + long free runs in a forest daily (it’s about 4km for us but more with the back and forth for her) and accompanies us if we walk to the shop, go for a family walk etc too. As well as out back access. She destroys toys within minutes, even kong.
The reason we have her in a non farm setting (although we’re semi-rural) is when she was a puppy the farmer was going to drown her & her sibling so we took them in having experience of border collies for years. So we were aware as a breed they barked but it’s the recent worsening of it that’s driving us mad. She is as fit and healthy as ever. She is slightly stiff after prolonged sleep but to be expected in older age.
If anyone has any advice that doesn’t require money as I have none left until I find a new more than nmw job (and that’s for a whole other post) I’d be grateful.