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Dogs bark for many reasons. Their ability to bark is a way to claim territory. It is also a way to try and get your attention. While some barking may be just and “OK,” other barking may be annoying, or worse yet may cause complaints from neighbors. Training your dog to bark on command is a funny way to help address the problem, or 1/2 the problem. If you encourage your dogs barking when you hear him by telling him a command to turn on the bark, you then have a way to trigger barking. We now know he knows what the bark word is because we can easily encourage it. Now the other side, the important side as you may be thinking is to teach him to turn off the bark on your command. Pick something you know is a trigger for your dog to bark at, like the doorbell ringing. Give your dog a word to associate the barking, like “bark”, or “tell me”. Encourage the barking with a good dog and words of praise, a treat or a favorite toy is fine as well. Now ask your dog to be quiet. Tell him the word “quiet” without getting loud or angry and use something to address the barking at the moment of the command to stop. A water bottle is one way of telling him “quiet” and gives a quick squirt of water towards his nose. There are other methods as well, refer back to the tip on Attention. The key to this Bark command really, and all commands you teach is to first gain your dogs attention. Once you do, your dog will easily be capable of responding to your command to quiet down. We use a remote training collar, which allows us the easy ability to communicate to our dog what we both do and don’t want from him. His ability to make a quick link to the command you have asked him helps him learn very quickly.
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The key to this Bark command really, and all commands you teach is to first gain your dogs attention. Once you do, your dog will easily be capable of responding to your command to quiet down.