With Christmas just around the corner, and with the iminent arrival of friends and relatives, it might be worth asking yourself, does my dog jump up on your visitors when they arrive? If your dog does display this aggressive behaviour when people come calling, check out this short clip to find out how to deal with this situation safely and calmly.
Dogs & Visitors - how to stay calm and in control.
Dog Listener Tony Knight shows you how to stay in control of the situation when visitors call and your dog reacts. This works for all visitors (and dogs) and is especially useful when visitors bring ...Video Transcript
Hi folks, Tony Knight Dog Listener here, and this short film is for any of you out there who dread the sound of the doorbell of visitors coming to the house, because the dog loses the plot. You can't get the visitors in, and hold the dog back at the same time, and the dog's jumping all over them, they're getting paw prints down, and they're never going to visit you again...you know what I mean. it's not exactly tHe calmest procedure. Here's a short film to get people in, and your dog sorted, nice and calmly, with your pulse rate down, and under control.
When the doorbell rings, or it could be a knock at the door, if you're dog reacts, you stay calm! What I'm going to do with gypsy, I'm going to go to the door and I'm going to ask my visitors to wait, now they're not going to go anywhere, or say "No if you don't open that door in 10 second we're off", and then I'm going to put Gypsy in another room, now it could be a bedroom in this case, or it could be a garage, it could be a laundry.
Now I'm going to let the visitors in, and there is Jo with Parker. Now I'm going to get Jo and Parker to sit down, and then I'm going to bring Gypsy out.
Now if you bring your dog out and it's pulling like crazy to get to the visitors, that's an indication that the dog think that he has to get there first. As you can see, although Gypsy is not really reacting to it, I'm just going to to a little bit of stop, start, and change direction,and take my time to feel that I actually got there first. Not what I've done is create a nice little bit of space between me and Gypsy, and Jo and Parker. What I'm doing here, is just making sure that if something spooks her then shes not to close, as you can see right here she tries to get there because Parker has moved, now I've got control of her because I've got the leash on.
You can create more space than this if you like, in fact I'm going to do that in a moment, you'll see Gypsy's not to keen on it, but the important thing is to have that space there, and once you have the space, and control you know the visitors aren't going to get jumped all over. If the dog's came, it stays.
If the dog overreacts, or gets really agitated, then without a word, you simply pop it back into the other room and wait for it to calm down again. You can see she is not really happy about that, but I'll just be gentle with her, all I want her to do is to relax in company. Now what I've also done is explain to the visitors is to pay no attention to Gypsy initially until she's calmed down and left you alone, because after any separation or even when visitors turn up, the status must be re-established with dogs. They need to know where they fit in.
This initial, almost lack of contact is actually communication with the dog, the dog realises it's not a problem. Now Jo is happy for me to let her off, and now Gypsy can go and explore. And before you know it, you've got a dog that's calm and relaxed, even when stuff is going on around it which is doesn't understand, for example, puppets. She's looking at it and thinking "is that a problem?", she's looking at me and because I'm fine with it, that helps her calm down. Good girl Gypsy!
Trust me, the sooner you can get this under control, the sooner you can start to invite your friends and family back. Without them fearing what's going to happen. You're going to be much happier about introducing them to your dog, and vice versa.
Well I hope that's made sense, thanks for listening, see you again another time.
