My girlfriend and I live in Milwaukee in an apartment with 4 units in the building. We recently adopted Starr, a 7-year-old shepherd-rottie mix (also maybe part keshaun, or however you spell it). She's the calmest dog in the world. She had horrible separation anxiety at first, but she's calmed down (now the anxiety's just at a moderate level). The things we have to do are to give her a kong toy (or a molecule ball), leave the radio on, put food away, and put the kitchen garbage can locked up in the bathroom. We also have to put up TWO baby gates on the stairs (stacked up vertically to a height of 3 feet) + the 8 inches of the stairs for a height of almost 4 feet) because she feels an impulse to "eliminate" upstairs when we're gone for more than an hour.

Basically, we've learned to live like this until now, when our landlord got a complaint of a "viscious german shepherd" barking loudly. She's the calmest dog in the world when we're home, but, as this report indicates (and as we've heard a few times when we've had to park our cars a block or so away), she seems to bark at passers-by.

We're right now torn between two ideas. One is to close the windows as a stopgap to muffle the sound while we do fake departures when we can. The other is to keep her confined within our bedroom (where she sleeps normally), where she can't see the sidewalk to bark at passers-by. The second option, if it works, would be the most painless, but we're worried that she'll try to escape from the bedroom like she tried to do with our front door and with my girlfriend's dad's door (causing lots of damage to the woodwork, as you can imagine).

Basically, I'm looking for other solutions besides these two, or to see if one of these two solutions is really the most painless.