Episode 165: Why Do Dogs Bark In Cars And How To Stop It

I have a 5 month old GSD. I picked her up when she was 8 weeks old and drove home. The trip was in January. The roads were 2-lane highways with heavy snow and no safe place to stop. It took 7 hours. She was in a crate in the back of my car because the crate wouldn’t fit in the front seat. She had never been in a crate (i don’t know this until we started home). She barked and cried pretty much the entire way home. I was by myself.
To this day, when she rides in the spear, she barks and is very agitated. She is in the cargo area with a barrier because her crate won’t fit. But she did this when she had a crate that did fit. Here is the odd thing. She wants to get ) to the car. She runs to the garage, runs up her ramp into the cargo area and is happy. When I shut the cargo area she sits and looks around. When I turn on the car and start driving she barks and is upset. She is better on the return trip.
I have been going with her to the garage and having her get into the cargo area. Then I do IYC. Games and sometimes walk around, come back and give her a cookie. I can stretch that out for a minute or two or longer depending on where i am positioned before she even gets up. She is relaxed and lying down. I close the cargo and open it. She sits up the. Goes back down. I start the car…she sits up and starts looking around. If I drive it even just out of the garage , she starts to bark.
I think I could give her a frozen stuffed marrow bone and drive her to a fun hike with no barking, but I’m not positive…should I try it?
She is a dog that learns easily, likes to play, is very food driven, and not fearful.
Help!

Our dog barks in anticipation of reaching our destination when in the car. Its excitement based, not anxiety or reactions to things outside the car. It started with whining when reversing, the parking sensor beep specifically. But now she starts in anticipation of the journey end – some sort of jedi sense given its for new destinations as well as known. My question is where to start in fixing this? By the time we are actually parking she is already going crazy – do we focus on the reversing? Or because its escalated by then do we focus on something else? We’ve listened to the #165 podcast, but it would be great to have some pointers on what to do if the trigger is a bit ambiguous (not every time we slow down/indicate etc will she bark, I guess its our body language? Smells? Something else?! That let’s her know we are almost there). I recently joined Recallers amd had a look at the chat forum on there and the available training video resources but I couldn’t see anything that addressed this. Thanks very much in advance for any pointers on what we should focus on to start fixing this. All we seem to manage to do so far is give her opportunities to practice the unwanted behaviour.

My dog is very anxious about travelling, though he is a lot better as we’ve done a lot of work for this – he tends to lay down in his bed now (he’s seat belted in). He will bark at people when we stop, mainly people wearing hi-vis. However, because my dog is an anxious traveller, he simply won’t take any kind of treats in the van. Any advice on how I can help him overcome this? Thank you.