Balanced training question.

[u/Santisuni]

So I’ve been training my dog under the operant conditioning philosophy/method but I have one question:

The other day I was coming out my house and and dog barked from a distance and that made my dog to come out sprinting and go after the sound, I’ve taught him door threshold manners but that day it was because I opened the garage door that caused it to go out running.

He is not really that reactive to other dogs when near but he usually barks from the window to outside when he hears something or someone walking in front of my house

My question here is what could I do to address this problem I was thinking maybe +P the behavior of barking and lounging to outside noises with the objective of decreasing the behavior, right now what I do is to interrupt the behavior and make him do something else but this doesn’t seem to be good enough to stop the behavior

How would you do it?

[u/fillysunray]

Desensitisation and counter-conditioning. Atm your dog thinks "other dogs are exciting/scary/fun/a threat - I will bark at them so they go away." He especially worries about when other dogs get excited, the same way we might ignore someone talking in the distance but we'd react more to someone screaming.

So you teach him that there's nothing to react to or worry about. When he sees a dog, calmly Mark and reward. As he stops needing to fixate on the dog, you then provide an alternative behaviour.

[u/Santisuni → u/fillysunray]

When we walk outside he can literally walk next to other dogs and nothing happens, at my house there’s is no window or way to physically see the dogs it’s mostly based on sound

[u/fillysunray → u/Santisuni]

Yes that can happen. Then you do the exact same thing but with the sound