Lou, I definetly get where your coming from, but I don't understand how it makes any difference in what is going on around the dog if the collar is on. You can stop him from the bored barking but if he is wearing the collar and someone is breaking into your house then he will be corrected for it. Unless of course Dogtra came out with a Bark collar that can differenciate between a 'bored dog bark' and a 'thief breaking in bark'. (I am being a wisenhiemer here, but you never know with the way technology is today.)

But I am curious as to how you can get your dogs to bark while wearing the collar, if someone is intruding on your property. Say for example my situation, my dog barks at everone walking down the alley behind my house, she barks at the deer walking by my house, she barks at the neighbors standing out on there deck and sometimes I think she barks just because she likes the sound of her own voice. Now how would I get her to stop barking at all of those things, and have her still bark if a stranger is coming on the property all while wearing the Bark limiter on level 3?

The only time it really gets on my nerves when my dogs bark is when they fire off at people/dogs walking past the car when they are in their crates.

Is that a situation, Lou, where you feel than an automatic collar would be appropriate? I WANT my dogs to fire off when people come to the house, bears are in the yard or something suspicious is happening. Just not when they feel defensive about their crates/car.

That's a perfect time for a bark collar. I don't actually blame them for barking in their crates. I mean why shouldn't they be defensive, they can't go anywhere in a crate. Besides while your in the store this behavior gets rewarded alot quicker than the barking at the mail man at home. The dog very quickly starts to think that he is scaring away every person that walks by your vehicle. So it doesn't take long for this behavior to get out of control.

Where do you live that you get bears in your yard? Just curious.

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Lou, I definetly get where your coming from, but I don't understand how it makes any difference in what is going on around the dog if the collar is on. You can stop him from the bored barking but if he is wearing the collar and someone is breaking into your house then he will be corrected for it.

The difference is that the dog is in drive and won't feel the stim or at least won't feel it as much. This is common in Ecollar training, that you have to raise the level when the dog is "distracted" because they don't feel the working level. In this case the distraction goes far above the level of "bored barking."

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I WANT my dogs to fire off when people come to the house, bears are in the yard or something suspicious is happening. Just not when they feel defensive about their crates/car.

This sounds like a situation where you want the dog to become collar conscious. That is, he realizes when the bark collar is on, in the crate, and that he's not going to be allowed to bark there and when it's not on he can bark all he wants. But the dog's drive to bark in the crate may cause him to ignore the highest settings of a bark collar. It depends on how resistant he is to stim, how long he's been barking and how determined he is to do it.