Door Manners

PSA - if your dog rushes through gates and doors, they aren’t trying to dominante you. We don’t need to go out first in order to be the alpha and establish a pecking order.

However, thresholds like gates and doors do serve as really accessible ways to practice impulse control around exciting things, setting you up for more success down the track. How many times a day do you take your dog in and out of various thresholds throughout their day? All of those could serve as great training moments.

Thresholds are generally the portals between areas of greater calm & areas of excitement - higher arousal. This could include the door to the backyard, the car door to the walk, getting out of the crate, or jumping off the back of the motorbike in the paddock for work.

If we cannot achieve calmness and get a thinking dog at the threshold before heading into the higher excitement area, we are going to struggle to get calm once fully in that more exciting area. We’re starting at 100 and have nowhere to go.

We are also building that impulse control muscle that just because we REALLY want to go do what’s on the other side of this threshold, we can wait and think before acting on that excitement. Then when faced with less controllable variables in future - that dog your dog wants to go say hi to, that bull he’d like to herd - they’ve already practiced this muscle and it’s not as big of a leap to think around that exciting thing too.

Every little practice, every little bit of reinforcement for behaviours and attitudes we want to see - it all adds up to the bigger picture which is a confident, thinking dog.