I'm having a barking problem with my 4 and a half month old kelpie, Molly. She can be barky, and i know this is a breed trait, but i feel she is excessively so. She barks when my pack barks at the door fair enough thats understandable - annoying but i can work on that. She found going outside very frightening as a pup and barked at everything and everyone going past. Now she is more confident shes generally fine when running offlead with my pack, although very occaisionally she will run up to another dog and bark, but she wants to bark and growl at everything and everyone when shes on the lead road walking. I've done lots of road walking and in towns and pairing a person with a treat, (desensitising and counterconditioning using clicker training) which helped for a while but its now getting worse rather than better. I know there is a fear component in there, but when she actually meets the people she is nearly always fine, back to waggy puppy again. she's not really a huge people fan, she likes people and will greet them happily but she is very focussed on me, (which isn't a bad thing to be honest). When she's at training classes or with me at flyball shes fine. (Apart from occaisionally barking at another dog, but that i think is more excitement), and the minute she leaves the class and goes outside she starts barking again - at the same people that were inside, so its very context specific.
I've tried a dap collar which i'm sure helped. The last one ran out a couple of weeks ago and its got worse since then so i've just got a new one. I'm also concerned that being a very intelligent girl she has worked out that if she barks she will get my attention and i'll try and distract her, but unfortuately im to embarrassed and worried about it to ignore her. I'm concerned that she hasn't hit adolescence or maturity yet and so this problem has the potential to get a lot worse if i don't do something now. I've had a simialr problem before with my other pups of differnt breeds, but not to this scale, one is fine now and the other is mostly ok, but was found to have bad eyesight which explains why she occaisonally will bark but its very occaisional. some of the other pups in Molly's litter have had similar problems, but they are slightly more submissive in nature and don't seem to be quite so confrontational that Molly. She was probably one of the most outgoing and dare i say it pushy of the litter, but at the same time she has that element of fear as well and was very scared of cars when she first started walking, despite being introduced early on. (shes a lot better now but not perfect. )
Am i doing something wrong, is there anything else i could do to help? A friend has said she will just grow out of it but i'm not so sure and want to get on top of this now.