Teaching a Trio of Dogs to Calm Down When People Come to the Door

For this Omaha dog training session we taught three excited dogs (From left: Riley a 2 year-old Great Dane mix, Sadie a 13 year-old Border Collie and 8 month-old Husky Murphy) to calm down when people knock on the door.

Knowing that the dogs were super excited when guests come to the door, I asked the guardians to stay back and let me director. I stood outside the door after I not to and she open the inside door. My goal was to wait for the dogs to settle down before even reaching for the handle.

It took a couple minutes but eventually the dogs started to settle down and so I reached for the door handle. As soon as they saw me do so, they got all excited and started jumping and barking at the door. At that point I stopped and waited for them to settle down again. I repeated this process multiple times until eventually when I did open the door and come inside, it was a non-issue.

I re-created my entry strategy again later on in the session which you can watch in the free dog training video below. Helping dogs learn to stay calm at the door is easy with this positive dog training approach.

Stopping dogs from getting over excited when people come to the door is all about breaking the activity into small steps and helping the dogs practice each one by itself over and over again until they are behaving how you want. Doesn’t matter if you are doing Border Collie training, Siberian Husky training or Great Dane training, taking things slowly helps all dog breeds learn faster.

Just like humans, dogs are going to make more mistakes when they’re out of balance and being over excited certainly falls into that category. Because I took my time, the dogs learned to calm themselves down at the door on their own. As a dog behaviorist, this is my preferred method to fix behavior problems because the dog discovers the new behavior or action on its own, not because the human is micromanaging them. This sets the dog up for success for the rest of its life.

I also offered the guardian several tips and suggestions that should help with a number of other dog behavior problems she was having between the trio. Increasing their exercise, adding structure and rewarding desired behaviors will all go a long ways towards helping them develop more self-control and stop getting so excited when guest knock on the door.

To help the guardian remember all the positive dog behavior advice I shared during this in-home dog training session, we shot a roadmap to success video.