FE540: Knock-knock: From Chaos to Calm

101 (or maybe 3) THINGS TO DO WITH A DOORBELL

(NOTE:  Everything below will also apply to the sound of someone knocking at the door)

The doorbell.  Ugh.  If anything can cause the most canine pandemonium with the least amount of effort, it’s the common doorbell.  Dogs are not the only ones affected by that sound. It generates an immediate response in us, too.  We jump to attention because “They’re here!”, or “Who’s that? I’m not expecting anyone…”  Either way, it prompts us into action.

In other words, there’s nothing relaxing about the sound of a doorbell.  It announces an imminent event. It’s never “nothing”.

Except when it’s on TV.  In which case, it means nothing…. But many of our dogs don’t know that, as is evidenced by a sudden bark-fest with dogs flying off the couch and trotting around the house with googly eyes and ears pinned back.

So what can you do about the doorbell?  It can be difficult to teach your dog a calm and polite door-greeting behaviour when the doorbell sets him off so dramatically (in a good way… here we’re talking about dogs who are happy and excited to greet someone at the door, rather than fearful or aggressive).  There are a few ways we can address this:

1. Management

Disconnect the doorbell.  Or cover it up with some tape, or maybe a note that instructs visitors not to ring it.  Problem solved… at least partially.  But you’ll still need to deal with the unpredictable TV doorbell.

2. Habituation

This involves teaching your dog that the sound of the doorbell no longer signifies anything important, and therefore he doesn’t need to respond to it.

Because this class doesn’t address any fearful or aggressive behaviours with regards to door greetings, we won’t need to help our dogs change a negative association with the doorbell into a positive one.  This would involve desensitization or counter-conditioning.  But we don’t need these two, because the dogs in this course are happy and excited to greet people, not fearful or anxious.

Habituation, however, can be very helpful in this situation.  See below for some tips on how you might apply this.

3.  Creating a new cue

This is my personal preference.  You can convert the sound of the doorbell into a handy new signal that means “now is the time to do the thing I taught you to do when someone enters our home”.  That’s what a “cue” is – it doesn’t tell your dog what to do, it just tells him when to do a particular behaviour that he already knows.

Which is why we always need to first spend time teaching the behaviour we want, making sure to reinforce it heavily so that our dog thinks it’s a very good idea to do that behaviour.  Then we add the cue, which in this case is the doorbell, or the sound of someone knocking.

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