Here is the deal. Anka is barking on command, no problem. She picked up on it very quickly.

Now Anka is only 5 months old so we may be ahead of ourselves but need to know if I need to do anything now for the future.

What we want is when someone pulls up to the house is for Anka to bark. At least we think we do.

Right now she will go out and sit or stand between their car and the porch most of the time right on the sidewalk. She is quiet and will just watch. Most people are cautious but just ignore her.

How is the "show" trained or will she just develop her own and start barking? We know when people who should be coming are, we would like a deterent for the ones that just show up.

i think this behaviour can be established by having someone repeatedly pull up, giving the speak command, then treating when she barks, and slowly phasing out the command. when a car pulls up, look at her as though you're expecting her to do something, and she might pick it up sooner or later. if there's a better way i'm sure someone else will post it.

if you want her to bark at a knock on the door, ed has an article about this on his website.

but this other trick might work for you, because it certainly ingrained that behaviour in my dogs overnight: my dogs didn't bark at anyone unless i commanded, until one night my sister in-law tried to sneak someone rather scary looking (one of those "goth/emo" types, i wasn't sure which because i'm not up on those subcultures) guy inside. when my dogs saw that this thing was in their house and they had no idea, they flipped out.

since that night, they bark at absolutely everything. someone knocks at the door, a car pulls up and stops, someone stomps up the stairs and the door's close so they can't inspect... personally i'd rather not have this behaviour to this extreme, but hey, they're guard dogs now!

okay, rambling story over.

Hey Ron,

I think you definately need to know what you want her to do before hand. Im just saying that because you said "at least we think we do"
But for the future I would definately work on a "quiet" or "enough" command too so that you can shut off her barking.
And Im not sure what you mean by "show"? Can you ealborate on that a bit?
If you're refering to the dog alerting, that sometimes needs to be trained but some dogs do it naturally.
When i first got my dog he wouldn't bark when someone knocked on the door, he had no idea. So I set it up and had a friend knock on the door a few times. Once they knocked I'ld say "who's that"? over and over (I know you're not suppose to use a command more than once, but i was doing it to get Tucker worked up enough to bark)once he barked he got a treat and lots of praise.
It didn't take long before he knew that a knock on the door meant he should bark. Mind you Tucker is a pet, so if you're raising your girl as a working dog you might want to take some different advice from people that have working dogs.

Thanks for the advice.

The "at least we think we do" was kind of tounge in cheek.

As for elaborating on "show". Just a stand up and bark kind of "show".

Sit on your deck, get a friend to drive around the bloack and pull in the driveway, when the car drives in, give the bark command, wait untill the dog barks, and praise her and give the dog a treat.

continue this every night for a while and she should get the hint.