Prevent Your Dog from Barking at the Front Door: Part 1

Prevent Your Dog from Barking at the Front Door: Part 1
Hi! I am Melanie McLeroy with Taurus Training for Expert Village and today we are going to talk about training dogs. We are going to talk about how to handle greetings at the door. One of the biggest complaints we as trainers get is that the dogs go crazy at the front door. Well, dogs almost always get positive reinforcement at a very young age when they go crazy, when the doorbell rings, somebody knocks, because they are always rewarded with wonderful things somebody at the door. So I am going to break this up into a couple of parts, first of all we want to deal with the noises at the door and then we will talk about people coming in to the door. So I am just hanging out in my living room with my dogs, the time to practice this is when you can set up the scenario, not when the pizza man comes. Now you may need to have your dogs on leash to have them under a little bit better control. I have reasonably good control over these dogs. So we are going to try it without the leash. So I am going to do two things here; I am going to desensitize my dogs to the noises at the door and teach them that a noise at the door means something different than there being a person outside. So I have got someone outside the front door and luckily I have got a window in my door, so it makes this very easy, I will give him a little signal, he will knock, what I am going to do is give my dogs a treat at the time they hear the knock, if I am not going to open the door, and reward them with the person being there. Now my dogs may bark that does not matter, it may seem that you are rewarding them for barking but we really just want the association. Knock on the door means something good comes from you, so they learn later to check in with you when they hear the knock on the door, then later the doorbell. The second thing they learn is that there is not that predictable event, so that is another reinforcer for them to pay attention to you rather than the excitement around the door. Now I have some treats stashed by the front door, which is a great idea, that way you can use every opportunity when somebody comes over to train your dogs. By the way every time you let them go crazy, it sets you back quite a bit. Now that is perfect. The person I have outside is knocking very quietly so it is less likely to get them to alarm. Now notice they are looking at the door, but this dog is looking at me more than the door that is exactly what I want to see, good, excellent, so they are hearing the noise and checking in with me that is exactly what I want. Now we are going to up and the try the doorbell. Now, notice I have started letting there be a little lag time between the doorbell and the treat, now I am getting excellent eye contact from both of these dogs, so this means that they are not alarming at the door, they become desensitized to the sound and they are checking in with me when they hear the sound that formerly caused them to bark, which is where I want them to be.