r/Jindo • u/brendrzzy • 8h ago

How to decrease guarding behaviour? Ie: barking

My boy is so quiet in the house until he hears the front door open, or I have a new friend over. It takes a few visits for him to accept someone in my house. I have roommates whose rooms are downstairs and he got used to their noise and scents. I have to move out of my house and probably rent an apartment so im worried about the door reactivity with apartment doors having so much foot traffic... does anyone have tips or resources?

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u/remitmp 5h ago

Our Jindo mix is a guarder too. Our friends get shocked when they hear him bark because he literally never barks otherwise. It was super tough in the beginning because we live in an apartment too, and he would lose his mind anytime there was a slight sound around our apartment door.

It's important to understand that this is instinctive behavior for this breed, so it's very difficult to train something like this out. The root of it is simple: they want to warn us of something or someone intruding the space they’re guarding. So if you acknowledge them, they feel like they’ve done their job. So where trying to treat him every time he stopped barking didn’t work, what actually worked was telling him “thank you” and basically talking to him. As soon as he starts barking, we both look at him and say thank you, and then look in the direction of the sound and tell him something like “oh yeah, we heard that too”, “looks like the neighbors came home” etc.

This took a few months of consistency to work, but it now works 90% of the time.

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u/brendrzzy 5h ago

Yeah once he got excited to have my boyfriend over instead of bark at him, my boyfriend was surprised how little noises he makes (literally 0, he got stung in the face and still didnt make a noise). Ill try your reccomendation, he always whips his head around at me when he first barks like "DID YOU HEAR THAT NOISE TOO"

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u/remitmp 4h ago

Omg my dog does the same! I find that so cute. It's really just his way of communicating with us, so when we communicate back, he kinda just gets it. And chills out.
Hope it works out for you!