Barking is a normal dog behavior. Birds sing, cats meow, and dogs bark … sometimes a lot! It is unrealistic to expect that you can stop all barking, but you can at least get it under control. There are many reasons that dogs bark, some acceptable and some not.
When your dog is barking, the first step is looking at whether you have control over what is reinforcing it or whether you need to switch gears and look at calming them down first. Are they barking at YOU or something in their environment?
In the case of alert barking, fear barking, and excitement barking where the dog is barking 100% at something else, you don’t have to worry about rewarding the barking by giving them treats. Attention barking will look differently than the dog barking because they can’t stop themselves!
Is your dog capable of responding to a cue when barking such as going to a mat, doing a nose “nudge,” doing a “chin” rest, or sitting? If they are, jump right in to interrupt the bark by asking for a behavior. While the initial startle bark might still be hard to get rid of, you can work towards your dog learning to look to you and respond to your cues in order to earn rewards.
As soon as the dog barks, cue them to do a simple behavior. You may need to body block (get in between the dog and their trigger to block their sight!) as you ask for the cue.
As the dog responds to the cue, reward several times! It may help to do some slow cookie deliveries where you slowly move the cookie toward the dog to help focus them on the cookie motion and think about something other than their trigger.
However, in many situations, you will quickly find that your dog is not capable of thinking. They are reacting in the moment and not mentally able to switch gears back to you. Your priority in helping a dog doing this type of barking is to get them further from whatever is causing them to bark and to calm them down.
Sometimes getting distance from their trigger will be impossible. If your dog is barking at sounds in your house, you may not be able to even hear what they are reacting to. But if you are able to move your dog away from the window, or turn around and retreat in the other direction on your walk, that will be helpful.
If you can’t increase distance, your first goal will be to try and block visual access in whatever way you can. This may mean ducking behind a parked car so your dog can’t see the other dog. Or it might mean body blocking by stepping in front of the dog, keeping the leash length short, and perhaps even grabbing their collar to prevent them from getting around you.
The next step is to use your treats in a way that will help interrupt the barking and also lower their arousal levels.
Find it!: The fastest way to get a dog to calm down is through sniffing. Try scattering a handful of cookies on the ground, spread out a little, so the dog has to move their head around to try and find the cookies. Cue “Find it” each time you deliver more treats to the ground. This tends to be the most effective on grass or on rugs where it’s hard to see the treats on the ground, as the dog has to sniff more. But even if you’re using it on the sidewalk or a floor, lowering their head to eat will interrupt them from staring at their trigger.