Royal’s Response to “Polite Door Greetings”

Royal here, once again to give you the dog’s perspective. This week, I’d like to comment on Jenn’s blog “Polite Door Greetings” where Jenn explains how to start managing your dog’s behavior around the front door and with guests. This seems to be one of the top complaints you humans have about us dogs. That we behave in a so-called “inappropriate” way around the front door. But if you think about the whole thing from your dog’s point of view, you might begin to understand why we get so excited or scared or absolutely lose our marbles when you get guests.

First of all, you humans need to know that many of us dogs take the activity around the front door very seriously (see picture above of Bernie monitoring the gate which led to the front door.) If fact, lots of us see it as one of our many “jobs” to monitor all that action.

Sometimes it is a human we know at the door, sometimes it is new human, sometimes it is something exciting like a box or foodstuffs!!  It’s unpredictable and fascinating. And that door requires constant monitoring and supervision if you ask me.

Some dogs take their job of front door monitoring more seriously than others, and some dogs can handle the responsibility more than others. And I will admit, that some of us “completely lose it” because we get overly excited or overly fearful about what comes through the door. And then you get upset and yell at us. And the worst time to expect us to listen to you is when we are really excited and you are really excited. Not good.

The good news is that there are lots of things to do to change the behaviors you don’t like into ones that you do like. You just need to have vision of what you want, and a step by step plan.

Jenn’s going to give you some more tips next week, which I will comment on of course. Stay tuned!