Dog Training - the Overzealous Welcoming Committee

You come home, bags of groceries in hand, fumbling with keys, finally getting the door unlocked and opened. You walk into your house and find yourself battling your dog(s) for those precious few square inches of territory you need to place your feet. As you trip and stumble across the room, yelling and lightly (I hope) kicking or prodding with your toes to get Duke or Fluffy (or both) out of the way, you are continually at risk of falling and breaking the eggs - or your hip.

Believe it or not, this behavior is often simple to correct. Since dogs tend to build the habit of being excited and uncontrollable every time a family member comes home, regardless of whether you've been away for thirty minutes or thirty days, you can create the good habit of having a calm, submissive greeting from your pets very quickly by doing a simple exercise several times a day.

Leave your house and go for a walk; do not take the dog(s), the whole purpose of this exercise is defeated if the dog goes with you! Not a long walk, just around twenty minutes. It's good for you. When you get back, open the door and walk inside. As you do so, stick to the following rules:

Do NOT look at your dog(s)
Do NOT speak to your dog(s)
Do NOT touch your dogs

That's it. You don't need to reprimand them, and you don't need to praise them. After a couple of weeks of repeating this exercise several times a day, your dog(s) will be calm, submissive, and not bouncing around under your feet or jumping up at you when you arrive home.

In order to keep the bad habits from coming back, just continue to follow the rules of completely ignoring your dog(s) when you arrive home until they are calm and in a relaxed state.

Dogs get into this psychotic "Oh-my-gosh-I'm-so-insanely-happy-to see-you-again-and-thought-you-were-never-coming-back-again" state due to our mistaken human assumption that our dogs need us to be as excited to see them as they seem to be over meeting us again. Don't apply human emotion to your dogs. They live now, not in the past, and not in the future. What matters to them is what's happening now. So if you act like coming home to them is a big deal, they will develop a habit of making a big deal of it. And dogs make a big deal of things by yapping, jumping, tangling themselves in your feet, and trying to lick you to death.

Ignoring them when they are in that crazy rambunctious state will soon make the whole episode of you coming home a happy, but normal occasion that requires no canine gymnastics.