Door Manners, The Basics

Let’s admit, we’re starting off on a challenging foot here. After a year of on-off lockdowns, it’s not like many of us have had a lot of guests to practice with. But at some point, normal life SHALL resume (next week would be lovely?) and guests will actually enter our homes again. For many of us it’s been a year of cracking the door open while a delivery driver runs away having left your parcel on the doorstep, and that’s about the closest we’ve come to getting in real life practice of door manners with our dogs.

But it’s also a great time to rehearse, without the risk of a guest coming over and the dog practicing getting overexcited and not being quite the angel you’ve told your friends he is.

Remember - what the dog gets to practice, the dog will continue to do. Particularly when it’s reinforcing. Jumping up at people is FUN for a dog, especially when that person squeals with delight and greets them despite your pleas for them to ignore it! Even if the guest is a golden statuesque totem pole of ignory-ness, jumping is fun. They get to be closer to what is arguably the best part of a human (their face) and who could blame them? We aim for their lovely heads when we stroke them, perhaps they’re aiming for the same! I’m sure it’s one of life’s daily woes for them that our heads are usually so toweringly far away and un-greetable.

My personal remedy for jumping is simply to move forward into the dog. It quickly becomes less fun and less self-rewarding, and they tend to move on. But, crucially, guests should not be training your dog. Partially because they usually can’t - through no fault of their own; we’re all guilty of suffering partial deafness when walking into a house and being greeted by a furry bundle of joy which makes any instruction volleyed towards us basically impossible to hear. But mostly, a guest shouldn’t be training your dog because it’s not their responsibility.

Now that we have taken responsibility for our dogs and realised it’s up to us to make sure the dog can greet politely, we’re going to do 2 things.

1: Put a lead on the dog.

Now drop it. Voila! You have just successfully added an extremely overlooked and useful training tool to help supervise your dog. No more grabbing at the collar or, if they’re not wearing one, trying to usher them around the house like a drunk crab. Right here you have something you can easily grab hold of that will assist you in moving the dog if and when needed.

2: Train a solid bed command.

If your dog is crate trained even better, as this will enable your dog to stay supervised without your direct attention and give them a space to calm down before coming out to greet your guest. (Don’t let your dog out of the crate until they are calm. This may be a while, that’s ok. You want them to come out with a nice energy, not to dart straight out all wired up ready to rugby tackle your guest).

Training a bed command is one of the most useful behaviours to teach and the command itself should be used liberally as a means of ‘please go here so I know you’re safe, comfy and out of the way while I do something important’.

Teach your dog to go to their bed and give them a tasty treat for doing so. If they go to get off, block them and/or supervise them with the lead you have left trailing and put them back on. Then tell them to come off and treat them for doing so.

This will take a lot of repetition initially. You need to teach both on AND off so that you can ‘release’ the dog and they don’t decide to release themselves when your aunt who’s nervous of dogs pops over for a cup of tea.

Practice, practice, practice and see how many steps away from the bed you can take. Always go back to reward them on the bed when doing this, then release when you’re ready. Practice more, build up distraction levels by jumping around, making funny noises, dropping things. Once you feel this is solid, move onto the next stage.

The door.

Grab a family member and tell them to go and stand outside in the cold. Depending on how frustrated you’ve gotten with them during the lockdown, you can leave them out there for as long as you wish. When you’re ready, you’re going to ask them to ring the doorbell. Cue barking and rushing about from the doggo. You’re going to leave the door shut and the family member outside (a little longer can’t hurt, right?), then pick up your dog’s lead to supervise them back to the bed. Once you feel they will stay there, head back to the door and start to open it. If your dog moves, go over and put them back on the bed. Keep doing this until you can get the door all the way open and your shivering* pretend-guest can step over the threshold and pretend-greet you. You can start these fake greetings in a calm manner, but be sure to work up to “OH HELLO ITS SO GOOD TO SEEEEE YOU!” For when that noisy family member comes to visit (you know the one I mean), you want to make sure your dog can handle that level of excitement from a human. Take turns being the pretend-guest and the host so that everyone gets to practice how to put the dog on the bed for a real guest.

*If you desire, you may advise your loved one to wear a coat to avoid this.

Proofing.

The final step is proofing. I’m not talking about taking a video and sending it to me as proof that you achieved it, although actually, that sounds lovely, please do that. I’m talking about proofing the behaviour. Which is essentially practicing over and over and trying to make it more challenging for the dog. Will your dog stay on his bed if the person at the door squeaks? What about if they hug you? What about if they drop something?

When we’re allowed house guests again, I want you to practice the same. Open the door, greet the guest, and move the dog back to the bed if you need to. Explain that you’re working hard to train the dog so that they can be in awe of your dedication, and tell them to please ignore your dog until you’ve asked your furry beast to come off the bed, or out of the crate, whichever it is. If your dog is still too excited when they’ve been told they can approach the guest, put them back until they’ve calmed down, rinse and repeat.

As with everything in dog training, this takes work, repetition and consistency. Happy door manners training!

Written by Jen, Head Walker and Dog Trainer at Fetch Club.