If your dog goes bonkers every time the doorbell rings, may I suggest this?
Over the weekend I picked up a wireless, plug-in doorbell for $15 at Home Depot. I bought it because our new house has a funky entrance that forces visitors to enter our small, enclosed porch in order to get to our front door. Rather than having strangers half way into the house before they could ring a bell (and startle the pants off of me), we got a wireless doorbell and installed it on the outside of the house. This allows people to stand on our front steps and ring the bell – without entering the porch/house – and gives me a second to tell Boogie to go to his room and chill out while I deal with botherers vistors.
Turns out, this little gadget has a bonus function: my dogs don’t recognize the chime as the doorbell! So when someone rings the new bell, Frick and Frack don’t bark. My mom also has one of these bells and she reports that her dog doesn’t bark at the wireless door chime either – so it’s not a fluke. Two out of two DINOS families recommend it.
Granted, desensitizing dogs to the sound of the regular doorbell and teaching them to stay calm is the way to go about this issue. But hey – it’s not such a bad thing that the new bell doesn’t register, in their ears, as a doorbell. Of course, that will change with time as the dogs make the connection that the ’new sound’ = people at the door. In the meantime,we’re working with a clean slate.
So, if your dog turns into a hot mess at the sound of the doorbell, this cheap solution just might be what you need to help them make some progress. The kit I bought only had 2 different tones to choose from, but other more expensive kits, give you the option of 8+ chimes to pick from. So in theory, you could keep changing the sound and your dogs will be totally mystified for years.
And for anyone that has a weird front door set up, like me, this is a great, cheap solution because YOU get to decide where visitors stand when they ring the bell. Buy yourself some extra time and put your doorbell somewhere really convenient – like next to a pay phone at the end of your driveway, so visitors can call first and tell you they’re about to ring the door bell. That should give you enough time to tell your dog to “go to his mat”, right?
And if you get one now, it’ll be just in time for all those cute intruders Trick or Treaters!
So go for it – put an end to all that doorbell drama! Mary J. Blige understands, don’t you Mary?
