Barking is your dogs communication tool.
What is your dog communicating?
Territorial
Alarm/Fear
Boredom
Attention seeking
Greeting/Play
Neurotic - Compulsive
Frustration
Socially facilitated
Understand your dogs motivation behind the barking to properly address. A certified trainer can help to diagnose why your dog is barking. The approach to curbing excessive barking has to address the underlying emotion behind the bark for success
2. Early detection of a change in your dogs body language can help you anticipate the barking before it starts. Ears back, stress signals if fear is involved, stiff, dominate stance, etc
3. Block the view to any known triggers and proactively work to desensitize and counter-condition to that stimuli when your dog is below threshold
4. If the barking has already begun, distract them to get their attention, reward with a “good quiet” and reassure with a firm touch and calm, confident voice. Build confidence with easy cues such as touch or watch me. Increase their threshold and repeat
5. If your dog is using barking for attention, and you start to eliminate that attention when they bark, you may experience an extinction burst. This means your dog will try the previous behavior of barking to gain attention harder and more intensely before they fully learn it no longer works. This extinction burst could be a couple days or much longer depending on how long the previous behavior worked