Door manners

Now that Pro spends most of his time hanging out with us in the living room, we have discovered his appalling door manners. When someone comes up the stairs and knocks, we get intense over-arousal, barking and barging toward the door. It definitely could be dangerous for him to go careening toward visitors like that, so we're starting to work on his door manners.

My plan is to have his default behavior to be to go into his crate when he hears someone at the door. He already does this when he hears the word "chewie"- that's where he gets to have his rawhide chews. We had a funny incident last week where Pro managed to get into the unlatched bin where we keep the chews. He grabbed the whole bag of chews, ran to his crate, dropped the bag outside the crate, and ran inside to get his chew handed to him! So he has lots of good associations with is crate and is used to going in on his own.

Tonight we tried working on htis, but I hadn't put together any kind of plan, so it didn't go especially well. At first, he started out off leash, so when Mark knocked, he tore out to the kitchen all in a tizzy to see who was there. So then we tried the same thing with him on leash so I could guide his behavior better. We also started with him in the living room, and Mark knocked softly. Pro still went way over the top, but of course our first awkward repetition got him revved up and he stayed revved. We did a couple more reps, but it had gotten off to a tough start so we stopped. We'll definitely have to work on this more. Also, he needs to have his harness on for this- pulling on his collar doesn't help his stress level.