I was able to cut up some hot dogs and talk to the guys and he was so good. Then I went and threw hot dog bits to him to reinforce how great it is when guest come over.

Its nice to have such positive and stress-free experiences.

Kody is still a bit of a hand full, and there are still situations now and then that confound me. Last night Kody asked to go out a couple of times but then didn’t want to go out because it was raining. I don’t blame him, but I wasn’t sure what to do? Did he have to go to the bathroom really bad? I guess if he did, he would have gone out, but I can’t help but worry.

The door knocking is moving slowly but surely. When someone knocks at the door I just have to freeze in place until Kody is calm, only then will I move to get his door treat. If I move before, he won’t stop barking, my movement seems to encourage him. If I stop, he calms down, comes to me as if to say, “Why aren’t you reacting to the door?”, and then runs to the mat and will stay calm while I answer the door.

Well, he’s looking at me to go outside right now, let’s see if he goes.

So today, before I let the guest in I got a little rawhide swizzle and called him to his mat. He definitely went to his mat for that. I gave it to him and asked the guest to come in (I knew who it was) and Kody just stayed on his mat and chewed his toy. It was perfect. We’ll get it down.

I just thought it may be that he doesn’t like to be laying on the floor when people are walking around him. I’ll move his mat more out of that way and see if he likes that better.

But a similar thing happened tonight. He went to show me he needed to go out, and then when I acknowledged and got the leash, he ran to the couch. He didn’t run when I approached and was happy to get his leash on to go outside. So he seems to prefer getting his leash on when he’s on the couch.

He seems in general not to want to sit around by the front door. I don’t know exactly why that is, but it’s not really a big deal. Things are going pretty well.

This cute black and tan dachshund was being trained not to bark when people come to the door. Coincidentally, Kody and I are working on the same thing now. Kody is making good progress. I knock on the door from the inside and click and treat. At first he would bark a lot then quickly get quiet, but he would still be nervous about the implications of the door being knocked on. Now he’s getting into the game and today he didn’t even bark the first time I knocked. We play this game every time we go outside, and he’s starting to finally see it as a fun game, which is the whole idea. Tomorrow we have a guest coming so that will be a good next step for him.

Likewise, when we’re working on greetings, I also watch my friends very closely. The friends all have their own issues I have to work with. One wants nothing more than to just give Kody a great big hug and lay down on the floor a let Kody lick his face. Of course, this would make Kody pee almost instantly. So I’ve explained to him that his presence is the greatest gift to Kody and he shouldn’t look at or talk to him because the scents on him are enough to keep Kody’s mind fully occupied.

This friend is as bad as Kody. He just can’t control himself, he lets little exciting signals to Kody slip out. He’ll speak in an excited voice. Despite my instructions, instead of just glancing at Kody, he’ll look at Kody and get locked in a stare, which is very intimidating to a dog. Then I’ve got this situation where Kody and my friend are locked in this crazy stare and I have to say, “Stop looking at Kody!” And my friend seems to have to gather all his strength to break the stare and then I can tell he’s still magnetically drawn to stare again. I have to watch him like a hawk, although now he’s getting better about realizing he does this and stopping himself. He’s as hard as the dog to train!

In my friend’s defense, this sort of human behavior is common. Most dogs that owners take out into the public are there because they’re greet humans well. Because of that, that’s how most humans think all dogs behave. Humans really have no idea how to interact with dogs. What’s worse is they don’t trust a dog’s owner knows what they’re talking about. Lets face it, most of us don’t know, but whether you agree or disagree, you have to defer to the dog owner’s direction. Even if they don’t know what they’re doing, they may know when their dog is about to bite you.

When we’re out on a walk people want so badly to bend down. Somehow we all got this idea that for a dog to “get to know you” he has to smell your hand. That’s not true! A dog can smell your legs and be fine, your hand doesn’t have to get near a dog’s mouth for him to smell you. In fact the dog probably wants to smell your shoes more because those have all the fascinating stuff you’ve picked up from other places.

It’s an interesting road. It takes every bit of my last two years of experience to be able to begin to handle these situations. It really doesn’t help that it’s considered rude to tell another person not to look at something or how to adjust their body. Training humans is a difficult skill to develop.

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.