Kody is two years old now, and we’ve never really put in the time to focus on guests coming to the front door. All we’ve done is have him wait to go out when I open the door, which he does fine. Since we moved, Kody has actually become worse about guests at the door. The other thing we need to work on is general guest behavior.
My work with guests so far has been kind of random, but I realized a couple of days ago that I needed to create structured situations where Kody can learn to accept knocking at the door and guests. So while I had been going out to meet my friends before going to lunch or dinner, now I’ve asked them to knock on the door and come into the house. I’ve also prepared them for exactly what they should do. This will give Kody two to three times a week to practice, and today was the first day.
When my friend knocked on the door, Kody went crazy as he has recently. I just patiently waited for him to calm down and sit and wait. As I opened the door, if he moved, I shut it again. For many dogs, the door opening is a treat, and can be used to encourage them to behave properly. If they don’t behave, the door doesn’t open. This is why it’s so important to have willing test participants, because it probably took at least five minutes to let them in. Then when my guest came in, I instructed them not to interact with Kody. Kody sniffed like crazy. I pointed out to him how excited Kody was and that was why we needed to get him used to having these opportunities before adding the excitement of interaction.
After some serious sniffing Kody started his wild excitement barking. I put the leash on him and used the timeout method. I told my friend to watch and see how after the timeout Kody would sort of struggle to bark but not bark because he wants to stay out with us. When dogs do this, they make the cutest sounds and we were both laughing very hard. Kody did start barking again a little while after that, I gave him a warning, and then put him in another brief timeout which worked great. The great thing about knowing how to use timeouts is that once you do, they work almost instantly. I’ve never had to do more than two timeouts.
After that, we were going to lunch so I asked Kody to “go in” (that’s the command) his crate, which he did almost immediately. I was so happy about that. I thought it might be a struggle because of the guest. But we had given Kody plenty of time to get used to him.
I think the future times will be better much faster. There are some other things we need to work on such as a little bit of jumping up that I didn’t worry about today, but that I think will be easy enough to deal with. It felt so good to be completely in control of the situation and know exactly what to do and when. It was also fun to be able to predict what would happen. I feel really good about being able to give Kody more opportunities to be around people. He absolutely loves to just be able to spend lots of time sniffing them without the bother of them moving around so much. It will be good for both of us.