How to Stop a Dog From Barking at the Doorbell and Knocking

You stop it by ringing your own doorbell a hundred times when nobody is there. Two to three weeks of planned drills, plus a place command that gives your dog a job to do instead of barking, and most dogs go from a two minute freakout to a couple of woofs and a walk to the mat. You will not fix this by correcting real guests, because real guests happen twice a week and by then your dog is already at ten out of ten.

Two things are happening at once. The doorbell has become a trigger through pure repetition, and the barking works, because a person appears every single time. You need to break the first and give him something to do about the second.

Kill the trigger by overusing it

A doorbell only means someone is here if it always means someone is here. Make it meaningless.

1. Get a cheap wireless doorbell button, or use a recording of your bell on your phone, so you can trigger it from inside the room.
2. Sit with your dog. Trigger the bell at low volume if your device allows it. Say nothing.
3. When he reacts, wait. Do not shush him. The moment he stops, mark and pay.
4. Repeat twenty to thirty times in a session. Two sessions a day.

Day one, expect a full bark on every rep for the first ten and shorter bursts after that. By day three or four, most dogs will look at the door and then look at you, which is the whole game. Around day seven you can turn the volume up. Around day ten, add the knock, because knocking and the bell are separate triggers and fixing one does not fix the other.

The number that matters here is total reps, not days. Somewhere between one hundred and two hundred low stakes repetitions is where the bell stops carrying information. Ten reps a day for a month works. Two hundred reps crammed into one afternoon does not, because you will just keep him over threshold the whole time.

Give him a job, which is the mat

Silence is a hard thing to train because it is the absence of a behavior. It is much easier to teach a dog to go somewhere. If he is lying on a cot fifteen feet from the door, he is not at the door, and a dog who is lying down barks a fraction as much as a dog who is standing and spinning.

• Teach place separately first. Send, down, stay until released, with no doorbell involved. Ten minute sessions, twice a day, until he holds it for three minutes with you moving around the room.
• Then pair it. Bell rings, you say place, he goes. Pay him on the mat. Every time, for the first two weeks.
• Build the duration on the mat. Walk to the door, touch the knob, come back and pay. Then open the door to nothing, come back and pay.
• Add a person. A neighbor or family member on the other side, in on the plan, willing to ring and wait sixty seconds while you reset your dog.

Eventually the bell itself becomes the cue to go to the mat, and you can stop saying place at all. That is the finished product and it takes most dogs three to five weeks to get there. It is worth the effort because it also solves the door dashing problem at the same time.

What to do while you train

You will have real deliveries in the meantime. Manage those, do not train them.

• Disable the bell if you can. Turn off the ringer on your video doorbell, put a note on the door asking people to text instead. This is a two week measure, not a life change.
• Leash him for expected arrivals. If you know a friend is coming, have him on leash next to you before they arrive, not after.
• Do not yell. Shouting sounds like barking. To your dog you have just joined in, which is why the volume goes up instead of down.
• Do not use a spray or shock at the door. You will teach a dog who is already aroused that the arrival of visitors comes with pain, and some dogs turn that into real aggression toward guests. I use e-collars in my own work and I still will not use one on a door trigger with an aroused dog.

When barking at the door is actually fine

I am not trying to get you to a dog who ignores the door. Two or three barks when someone arrives is useful information and it is normal dog behavior. What you want is an off switch. Two barks, then quiet on a word, then a walk to the mat. If your goal is total silence you are going to spend a lot of frustrated months fighting instinct, and you probably do not actually want the dog you are trying to build.

If the barking has fear in it

There is a difference between a dog who barks at the door with a loose wiggly body and a dog who barks with a stiff body, hackles up, and a bark that drops in pitch. The second dog is not excited, he is worried, and the mat drill alone will not fix him. That dog needs distance from the door, guests who ignore him completely on arrival, and a much slower ramp. If he has ever made contact with a guest, get hands on help rather than working from an article.

The through line for door barking, window barking, and yard barking is the same skill: a dog who can stop on a word and settle instead of escalating. My free Stop the Barking blueprint lays out the drills in the order I run them with clients, and you can download it. Download the Stop the Barking blueprint

Ready to train your dog?

Every drill in this article comes from the WorldWide K9 Academy course library. If you want the full step by step system, start with the $5 intro course.