I think a trailing line may be a good idea! When buster is on his long line its almost like he doesnt know... So if he does bark on that, as soon as he starts dont say anything, no eye contact, just pick it up and take him inside. Barking sadly is a bugger to untrain as it is self gratifying.

Pls dont take offence by burrowzig's reply - If a neighbours dog barked lots it would annoy me too; doesnt mean they are having a dig at you.

PS Buster is a barker in the garden too, so I sympathise how frustrating it is. Its just a slow painfull process to get around!

You are doing great, keep up the good work

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Fairy smiling, smokes cheroot ...
Simply doesn't give a hoot.

he does bark inside at the doorbell. we haven't actually started the training on that yet, but I plan to ignore it and reward the same way as I do in the garden. Hopefully that will help once I start the doorbell training.

I haven't put a command to this because I decided to completely ignore any barking and not pay him any attention at all, because he is an attention-seeking barker, so looking at him, speaking to him would reward his behaviour.

I'm aiming for about 10 seconds of barking when he first is let out, and then silence after that. (not too much to expect is it?)

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I OWN A CHOCOLATE ROAN COCKER SPANIEL
RIP David xx Run free at the bridge. Love you always xx 19th February 2011
RIP Jack and Mickey xx Run free at the bridge. Love you forever xx 20th June 2011

he knows when he has a long line on too. I want to stick with this training method for several more weeks. If he is still barking too much, then I'll try the long line method, but I want to be consistent and not swap and change my techniques too much.

the point about burrowzig's reply is that he doesn't bark a lot since I started training. Yes, if he was barking for hours on end, then of course it would annoy neighbours (it would blooming annoy me too), but he only barks for anything from 10 seconds to 2 minutes at most at a time, and we only do one training session a day, so he's not out there all day to annoy people.

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I OWN A CHOCOLATE ROAN COCKER SPANIEL
RIP David xx Run free at the bridge. Love you always xx 19th February 2011
RIP Jack and Mickey xx Run free at the bridge. Love you forever xx 20th June 2011

I think your goal is entirely reasonable and attainable.

It might speed things up a bit if you work on the doorbell barking at the same time. Having a command name helps here. Dogs are wonderful at learning specific behaviors, but they tend to be poor 'generalizers', meaning that they don't automatically carry over learning in one situation to another. Repetition and reinforcement in a wide variety of uses of the command solidifies that. For one example, you may have seen him learn to not jump up on you for greeting before he learned not to jump up on you if you had something interesting in your hand. He didn't generalize the no-jump rule until he'd practiced it in many situations, right? Barking can be similar.

When I trained Jessie to stop window barking, I did use a command name (Enough), but otherwise you're doing almost exactly what I did with her. So yes, I think it will work eventually--it takes time. I think it took us a few months for it to be reliable and not need a command name at all--eventually she self-limited. But I think the command name helped me to transfer the window-bark training to other situations in which she was likely to give a couple of barks.

It doesn't have to be one thing or the other. He normally barks when he first goes out, right? So keep him on the lead for a couple of minutes, walk round the garden with him, do a bit of heelwork and a couple of sits, then drop the lead. If he starts barking, pick it up and take him inside. If he doesn't, you could unclip it after another few minutes of calm behaviour and play ball or whatever.

It's difficult to train a dog to stop barking the way you're doing it, because you're rewarding for stopping the noise, not for being quiet in the first place, and from what you've already said, he's on to you with this. Barking when first let out is a habit, (my Ziggy used to do it at when let out at night when we stayed at my mother's house, where cats and foxes went through), but if Ollie's as intelligent as you say, it shouldn't take long to break the bad habit and form a new one.