Welcome to the case study for how I cured my dog s doorbell barking in just 21 days. My name is Chet Womach, and I am the founder of TheDogTrainingSecret.com, a website dedicated to giving people simple to follow formulas for creating incredible dog obedience, without using harsh, aggressive, punishment based methods. In this case study what you re about to discover is the exact step by step process that I follow when I have a dog, like the one you re about to meet, with a doorbell barking problem. A process that regularly cures dogs of doorbell barking in a matter of weeks, if you ll just put 15 minutes a day into the process. More specifically, this is a case study for not just how I cured my dog s doorbell barking, but how I actually turned our homes doorbell into a cue for my dog to hustle over to his bed and lay there quietly while I opened the door, without me having to give any commands whatsoever. I should also mention that this entire Case Study is available in a fully filmed version here, where I hired a professional videographer to follow me around for 21 days and document the exact step-by-step process for how I trained him what I call the Doorbell Down. It's hands down the best way to cure doorbell barking, as I most recently proved again, with this guy This is Griffin on the trip where we brought him home with my Son, Jimmy. Griffin is a 6 year old Chocolate Lab with a rough background. The poor guy has been both shot in the face by a farmer who didn t want him getting into his chickens, and run over by a truck that crushed his shoulder. So needless to say he wasn t exactly taught good manners as a pup, and as a result had SEVERAL horribly annoying behavior problems and barking at the door was absolutely one of them. Yet as you ll soon see, with the right training plan, this is absolutely fixable, and I was able to fix it in 21 days. And to be honest that s pretty slow. Most dogs can learn this much faster, especially if you follow this checklist in this case study. But before I share that with you we need to cover a couple of ground rules so you understand why this plan was so effective. First, I wanted to let you know that if you would like to take what you learn in this case study a step further and see step by step video examples of our 7 other different processes for curing barking, you can find them all inside our Stop Barking Secrets program. And second thing I wanted you to understand is that as great as dog s are, and as much as we love them, they are HORRIBLE at a couple of things that us humans take for granted.
Dog s Get Confused When We Tell Them To STOP Doing Things By far the cognitive skill that dogs are worst at most of all, is understanding how to NOT do something. That kind of reasoning ability simply doesn t exist for dogs. They can quickly grasp what they should DO, but grasping what they should NOT do is like trying to paddle up stream with no paddles its VERY slow going. So if you ve got a barking dog, and you tell him to be quiet (ie. NOT bark) the reason your efforts have been unsuccessful up until this point, is because its SUPER darn hard for your dog to understand, ESPECIALLY when you re trying to ask him to stop barking when he s super riled up at the doorbell in the first place. So it really isn t a mystery that so many people struggle with getting their dogs to STOP doorbell barking. Which begs the question If You Can t STOP Your Dog From Barking What s The Solution? You Gotta Give Them A Simple Choice Figure 1Dog's Do Best When They Just Have Two Choices
When it comes to getting your dog to actually obey you in intense situations like a doorbell ringing, You REALLY have to break it down where your dog has ONLY two choices. To either keep being bad, or to do a clever type of second choice. And what I like to teach my clients to do instead of trying to teach their dogs to STOP barking is to train dogs something they CAN do that isn t barking, with what I call, an Incompatible Behavior. Incompatible Behaviors Are The ANSWER! An incompatible behavior is a behavior that your dog cannot possibly do, while he continues to barking at the door when he hears the doorbell ringing. A really illustrative example of a great Incompatible Behavior for a barking dog might be, to train a dog to close his mouth. (I ll show you how to do this in a second) You see, by training a dog to close his mouth on command, he cannot also simultaneously bark. That s what makes it an Incompatible Behavior. So when we train a dog an incompatible behavior like this, we force the dog to choose WHICH behavior he wants to do. And because I ll show you how to RIG the game, so your dog will pick the behavior you want Notice how the Dog Can't Be in This Position With An Open Mouth. This is what I mean by incompatible him to do instead of being naughty, this approach can be used for fixing almost all of the problems dogs can have out there. Keep this concept of why we re training Incompatible Behaviors in mind and you ll see in a minute why this was so effective at stopping my Chocolate Labs Doorbell Barking. That being said, here s the 6 step process I used for curing Griffin s Doorbell barking. Step #1: Choosing My Incompatible Behavior The first thing I did when I set out to finally put an end to Griffin s doorbell barking was to decide on the Incompatible behavior that I wanted Griffin to do instead of barking at the door. In Griffin s case I chose the incompatible behavior of Laying on a Bed with his Mouth Closed. Now I chose this for a couple of reasons.
Reason #1: By Giving Griffin what is basically a TARGET to go lay on (his bed), this allows me to move that target around my house. And as you ll learn later, this makes it MUCH easier to slowly teach griffin to go and find his bed when we get to the later parts of the training. I promise it ll make more sense in a second. Also As a secondary benefit, if I want to go to a family BBQ, I can bring my dog s bed, and it gives him a place where he s trained to stay out of trouble. But that s a topic for another day and gets into other types of obedience training. But I wanted to let you know that if you leave the bed part out, it ll hurt the rest of your trainings progress down the line when it comes to fixing other problems your dog has. Dogs Have More Success When You Can Give Them CLEAR Targets Most people don t realize this, but dogs TEND to want to bark less while lying in the down position. In fact, some dogs barking can be cured simply by giving a DOWN command. It doesn t work all the time, but it always helps to at least reduce the barking even when it doesn t cure it. Reason #3: When a dog is in the down position for a longer period of time, they are more likely to lower their head to the ground, and when they do so, it closes their mouth (see where I m going here?). So when we teach our dogs to do down stays with their heads on the ground we end up achieving that Incompatible Behavior I mentioned earlier. We just had to get clever about how to pull it off. Dog's In The "Down" Position Become MUCH Less Likely To Bark For a whole list of clever incompatible behaviors and how to train them, check out my Hands Off Dog Training DVD Series here. Step #2: Making Your REVERSE Training Plan It s always important before I ever set out and start training that I really map out the whole process I want to train. Because while I told you the FINAL incompatible behavior that I set out to teach Griffin to stop his barking thinking that s the only behavior I m teaching him would be a really incomplete answer. So I really like to think of all the things I want my dog to do before he does that final behavior. This gives me a list of behaviors that I now know I have to teach Griffin if I want him to be able to perform the Go To Bed Command when the doorbell rings.
So I needed to come up with the FULL list of behaviors that I needed Griffin to learn to quietly hustle to his bed whenever he heard the doorbell ring. To do this, I simply listed out the steps of what the finished behavior was going to look like. And in this case I came up with three major behaviors: When Griffin hears the doorbell and goes to his bed (even if it s out of sight) When he gets to the bed he lays down on it When he lays down he stays head down until released Once I had this list what I always do is turn it in REVERSE ORDER so instead of it reading like it did above, it now reads like this: Train the head down stay until released Train the go lay on bed command Train Griffin to go to his bed when he hears the doorbell (even if its out of sight) I now have a reversed list of behaviors I need to start training And I do this because, training in reverse order is the fastest way to train your dog to be quiet when the doorbell rings. And in case you re wondering here s why: Training In Reverse Creates a Domino Affect
I m sure that at least once as a kid you ve set up a line of dominoes and watched as one tiny movement on one end, triggered every domino to set the next domino in motion down the line right? Well when we are training in reverse order, we can create the same thing in dogs! Where training one behavior triggers the dog to automatically do the next one. I first learned this trick when I started out my career as professional animal trainer (which was actually a job where I was Trick Training Parrots if you can believe it or not). And the lesson I learned was that whenever you are trying to train a behavior that has multiple behaviors CHAINED together. Where we aren t just asking the dog to do one thing like SIT, or STAY, but what we re really asking him to do is go to bed, then lay down, then stay (a 3 behavior chain) that the key to getting an animal to easily understand how to hook all these behaviors together, where one behavior automatically triggers the next, without having to be told three separate commands, is to simply train the behavior in the reverse order that you want it in. So what then happens, is once I got Griffin to the point where he knew how to stay on his bed with his head down; we spent so much time making that behavior This Is Me With The Bird That Taught Me The Power Of Training In Reverse Order Where He Learned 21 Complex Tricks In 60 Days By Following This Principal perfect, and he was so used to the rule being head down on his bed, that once we moved past that point and started to teach Griffin how to GO to his bed on command, he would automatically lay down with his head on the ground without being told a second command. Because we d already made it a habit and were using the Domino Affect to make it more reliable. HOWEVER, this ONLY happens if you train in REVERSE order. You can train it in NON reverse order but it takes way longer as the dog doesn t intuitively understand the next step he s supposed to do. So please, please, please, make sure you train this in reverse order.
Step #3: I Taught Him The 20 Minute Stay Griffin Working On An Away Stay. Notice the blue food bowl in the background and the head down position. In teaching the stay I made sure I did a couple of things. I started in the most distraction free area of my home and at the most distraction free time. This photo is taken in the morning, where I d sit and read while having some coffee. I didn t want to be working on stays while the doorbell was ringing or my children were dropping food in front of Griffin to start. I would get up earlier in the morning and work on every day getting him to stay a little longer and a little longer until he had a 20 minute stay. As you can see in the above picture I started this around his food bowl. (it s in the back of the picture) TRAINERS TIP: Do NOT simply make every Stay Training Session take longer and longer. This ends up increasing a dog s resentment for the training and can often burn them out. Once your dog can do at least a three minute stay start to vary the time requirements of the stay. That might mean you only require a 10 second stay one time, then ask for a 3:10 second one, followed by a 90 second one. I mixed it up, because I know that if I don t, the dog learns to predict when his time is up. If I never become predictable he holds his stays longer and better, plus this way my dogs don t grow to resent the training. Step #4: Slowly Increasing The Length Of The Stays One of the biggest mistakes I see people make when teaching the stay is that they work on making too much progress too quickly, and they skip what I call the 3 D s of reliability.
The first D of Reliability: Duration So when we start off I like to first work up to a 3 minutes stay. This tell me that the dog is at least understanding what s asked of him. So I first made sure that Griffin could hold a 3 minute stay 9 out of 10 times in a row before I added the second D : DISTRACTIONS. Now a note on adding D s When we add them, expect your dog to have a harder time. So with griffin when we got him to the point where he was holding his stay for 3 minutes. When I started adding distractions he needed several reminders for how to hold his stays. One of the ways we handle this is by starting with lower level types of distractions that the dog has a better chance of succeeding with, and then slowly adding in the juiciest, most distracting distractions of all until he can handle the distraction we re really after the doorbell, for three minutes with you right there in front of him. With Griffin I just instructed my kids to constantly keep ringing the doorbell every minute or two why I worked with griffin until he could hold the stay for three minutes 9 out of every 10 times I asked. Then it really started to get fun, because I could tell Griffin was really overcoming his reactiveness to the doorbell. But to finish off the behavior I really needed Griffin to be able to hold that down stay even when he couldn t see me. So that s when I started adding the third D, Distance. Adding The 3 rd D : Distance Figure 2This is a screen capture picture from the video where I filmed how I trained this whole process, NOTE: Griffin can't see me behind the wall, and his head is in in the INCOMPATIBLE position of being on the floor. When it came to adding distance it went pretty smoothly by first just spending some time being on the opposite side of the room as the doorbell was ringing while he was in a stay, and then when he d get it
right and hold the stay the whole time, I backed up to the point where Griffin s vision of me was about Half Blocked from view. And then finally I took a few steps back after about 3 days and he was holding three minute stays without me in the room while the doorbell was going off. The whole process took about one week. Which meant it was time for step 5 Step #5: Training the Go To Bed Command Notice how I have positioned the bed in a location where Griffin HAS to walk over it to get to me. This is ONE trick you can use for dogs who don't understand how to go to their bed. This was done on day one of Griffin's 'Go To Bed' Training After Griffin could hold that down stay on his bed after a week with the doorbell ringing I moved onto the second behavior that I wanted to add to this Doorbell Down Routine, the going to his bed when he heard the doorbell. You want to make sure you do when you train the Go To Your bed command is to make sure you train it with both of the types of motivations, Towards and Away. (I m using Towards in the above picture, where Griffin s desire to be with me automatically puts him on the bed). Most people only really work on towards, meaning calling their dog to them while they stand next to the bed, and the dog spends the whole time coming towards things he wants. This is the easier one to train, but the thing we are working up to was trying to get Griffin to go away from what he wanted the person at the door and go lay down on his bed.
Because the towards motivation is easier, I taught it first so Griffin understood what I was asking, but as soon as he understood that he was supposed to go on his bed I made sure I spent half of his training time getting him to go away from me and to his bed. We started doing this with me standing just 3 or 4 feet away, and then eventually just like with the STAYS we kept adding the three d s again. How To ADD Duration & Distractions To Go To Bed Commands For duration on a Go To Bed command, what I did was set a time frame in my head for how quickly I wanted Griffin to be on his bed from the time I gave the cue. In the beginning I was very generous and allowed lots of time. But he started to get lazy about it after a few days so I made sure that I kept making him have to get to his bed faster and faster in order to earn his reward. And if he was too slow he didn t get one and had to do it over. This trains the dog to HUSTLE to the bed. And I wanted to engrain a hustle to your bed mentality, so that it s there when the doorbell rings too. For Distractions we also did it very similar to how we added distractions to the stays, where I would have my kids do things like run in front of him with his toys right after I gave the cue to go to his bed. At first that was too much so we had to build up to that point, but we kept trying to be more and more intense with our distractions in every way we could think of, until we got to the point where we started ringing the doorbell after I gave him the cue to go to his bed. And of course, we only kept making it harder and harder when Griffin got it right 9 out of 10 times until we were ready for distance. That s the WHOLE key of every having a shot at this working with your dog. You CAN NOT ignore the 3 D s! So what did I do from here? I repeated the same process of continuing to tell him to go to his bed from a little bit further every day until after about 3 days he would leave the front door and go and find his bed even with the doorbell ringing. It was so fun to watch Griffin finally have this under control, and after nearly three weeks of the doorbell ringing he was completely desensitized towards it, and I spent the last 4 days doing what I call Cue Transferring.
Step #6: Transferring The Cue From ME To The Doorbell If you ve never transferred a cue before what it means is that you take a command your dog THOUGHT was what he was supposed to follow, and you make your dog do the same behavior with a different command. And the cool part is that these can be anything. And what I have found really helps you get TRULY impressive obedience in dogs is to use what s called Life Cues where we train the dogs to do things based on what they SEE happening in their environment. TIP: This is how dogs like Service dogs or seeing eye dogs have such good obedience by the way, because they are trained to look to their environment for direction on what they should be doing, and don t need their owner. So you probably have guessed this already, but the life cue I wanted to train Griffin to obey was to automatically go to his bed, the second he heard the doorbell ring. And because I had used the three D s at all three phases of the training that I had chained together, I ended up with a dog who had a rock solid behavior of quietly HUSTLING to his bed in the other room
every time he heard the doorbell ring, without me even having to give the cue because he was now at that point where life cues were going to distribute the reward. And that s It! That s how I cured my dog s doorbell barking in 21 days. Hopefully you can see that to see big changes in your dog s behavior you have to follow a step by step process, and that when you do you can see dramatic results. And if you d like to get the live training footage that details the step by step process for how I trained this behavior, I share all the details of how I did it inside my Stop Barking Secrets program that you can check here.