In my girl's vocabulary, "No bark!" means "Look! There's a doggy friend! Yap yap to let it know you're here!" LOL. Using treats to distract her worked one out of every five times maybe but we had to be quick and keep moving because if we hung around, she wouldn't be able to stop herself. But even when we have the intention to let her sniff out her comrade after she's calmed down and was good about not barking, sometimes she still lets out a bark before we get the chance to ask if it's okay for her to sniff out the other person's dog or she'd bark once the other party starts getting vocal.
We've tested it with "No bark" while we're driving along and she's napping. She'd jump right up and look left and right out the windows looking for a 4-legged to maybe growl at.
We try to not wear that one out like my sister wore out the one with mentioning the cat's name and she'd fly right out of mid-slumber to look around for the cat. I lectured her about that and told her I won't be sharing any more fun trigger words with her anymore
What seems to have worked a little bit in curbing the amount of barking for us is when she does start barking before we can stop it or if she didn't listen to our command to stay quiet, we'd say, "No bark! Bad girl. We're going home." Then proceed to carry her a few blocks before letting her down since she LOVES walking. Sometimes we use that as an excuse to go back to the car and move on to the next destination to walk her or to just go run our own errands.
As we're carrying her, often, she'd not bark at the next dog she sees even though she twists and turns to get a good look at it.
It used to be really good before her puppy classes where she learned to bark at other dogs. When she used to hear dogs bark, she would NEVER respond and it would seem as if she didn't know it came from a dog. She'd continue napping peacefully or what have you until she actually SEES the dog. It was like out of sight, out of mind. But when she started her puppy classes, she was exposed to barkers supreme!
So she has since learned that there's always a dog where that loud voice came from!
As for barking at random noises. She's not into that. I think it helped LOTS when we first brought her home in the summertime, BOTH sides of my neighbours were undergoing major renovations. Hammering and sawing all day long. So like infant babies, you just need to get them accustomed to all sorts of noise.
We're still working on her barking at other dogs. We know when she's really trying hard to NOT bark when she just whines louder and louder LOL. That's when she's really trying to hold back her bark. One time we let the whine go on too long, it got loud enough that we knew she was going to let out a yap, and she did let out ONE yap as we were inside a pet food store quickly filling up with dogs and we had forgotten to carry her treats with us.
We are such bad parents, constantly getting amused at her expense.
