You rang?
November 10, 2014 10:43 AM   Subscribe

Now that it's getting colder, I won't be leaving the back door open all the time for the dogs to go in and out. With my Dane, this is not such an issue, but with the Beagles it kind of is. I would like to train them to do something like ring a bell attached to the door when they need to go out.

Has anyone tried something of this nature, and if so, what did you use / how did you train the dogs to make the signal? Obviously this is for overnight / when I am (hopefully) sleeping.

I usually go to bed pretty late, and always let them out first, but it would be nice to have a back-up plan in case I fall asleep on the couch or miraculously manage to sleep through the night.
The Beagles in question are both rescues, generally very well-behaved, and are not crated at home, although I did use some crate-training initially with them to get them on the right track.
posted by PlantGoddess to Pets & Animals (9 answers total) 2 users marked this as a favorite
 
Here you go...

But, honestly, it wasn't that hard with my pup. Without any training at all she learned to go to the door and move the blinds (this was a sliding door to the deck with hanging blinds), I would always respond by letting her out. I also had her invisible fence collar hanging on the door handle, she would frequently bang that a couple of times with her nose to get my attention. She sort of taught me as opposed to me teaching her.

Buy a set of these, or just hang whatever you have that makes noise from the door handle.
posted by HuronBob at 10:53 AM on November 10, 2014 [1 favorite]


First, it is totally practical to teach a dog to ring a bell to go out. Just get them to touch the bell and then open the door for them until they get the idea. (I've seen bells sold for this purpose although they may not be loud enough to wake you up.)

I'm just wondering that you WANT your dogs to wake you up to go out. My dogs (except for when sick) have been able to hold it in overnight without any problems. They have also figured out their own way of getting us to the open the door (without a door bell or special training on our part). The current one has a "talking voice" - he goes 'ruff', 'ruff, ruff', gradually getting louder and more insistent until we pay attention. The one before discovered that when he coughed, we would worry that he was getting ready to throw up (a problem when he was a puppy) and then hustle him outsold so he started doing a very polite cough on purpose to tell us he wanted out. I guess it is fair to say that they have trained us to let them out on demand.
posted by metahawk at 10:53 AM on November 10, 2014 [3 favorites]


Pretty much as written. (Those bells are quite nice -they're from Bevin Bros, the last bell manufacturer in the US.)
posted by zamboni at 11:01 AM on November 10, 2014


I started this by simply ringing the bells myself whenever we went outside. We did that for about a month. Then we spent another month or so asking if our dachshund wanted to go out, and then we stood by the door and pointed to the bells until she rang them. Then she was pretty much good to go. Our problem was getting her to stop ringing the bells whenever she got bored and wanted a change of scenery, as we were in an apartment and couldn't just let her out to romp. But after 6 months or so she figured it out on her own. She missed the bells when we moved into a house with a dog door.

At night we put the dogs in our walk-in closet and gated it off so they couldn't get up and wander around/cause trouble, and that solved the problem of them asking to go out in the middle of the night.
posted by lilac girl at 11:16 AM on November 10, 2014 [1 favorite]


We pulled a jingle bell off an old Christmas decoration, and hung it with ribbon over the doorknob. I can't remember exactly what the training involved, only that it turned out to be much easier than expected. I think we maybe smeared a little peanut butter on the bell, and then when Merlin made it jingle we'd immediately let him outside? He caught on really quickly, and he's not always the best learner.

The bell system lasted about 3 weeks before we took it down, because we wanted it to mean "I have to go potty," and instead Merlin thought it meant, "I want to go outside!" He had us letting him out every 20 minutes just to play.

Now we just know his usual schedule for needing to go: first thing in the morning, again around midday if we're home or else right when we get home from work, 30 minutes after he eats supper, and right before bed (with bonus trips outside when we walk him or go play in the yard together). If your dogs have had free access to the outdoors, they might need to go more often at first, but you'll figure out their schedule before long.
posted by vytae at 11:17 AM on November 10, 2014 [3 favorites]


You beagles are the cutest! But if they're as hard to train as mine... I've left the tags on her collar so they jingle whenever she's up and moving. That, in combination with the sound of her nails on the tile/hardwood floors, is enough to trigger my sleeping brain into full alert mode because what comes next is a puddle on the floor. So maybe you can fix some sort of bell to their collars? That might not work the best with two dogs, I realize.

Also what vytae said, we have ours on a schedule so that she knows when she goes out every day - twice in the morning, afternoon, after dinner, before bed. It works great for us, until something throws her schedule off (looking at you Daylight Saving Time).
posted by geeky at 12:20 PM on November 10, 2014 [1 favorite]


My dogs (even the (markedly) less intelligent of the two) learned to ring a bell to go outside in 2 (beagle) and 5 (dopey but cute lab) repetitions.

I waited until one or both of the dogs seemed to want to go o-u-t, and I walked them over to the bell (sleighbell style, hung from a string on the doorknob of a closet near the main entrance/exit). I'd take their nose, nudge the bell, and happily call out, "OUTSIDE?! OUTSIDE! $dog1 $dog2, let's go outside." (which is what I normally did to call them over).

The problem is that this wasn't the back yard door, this was the front yard, where I'd have to take them out on leash. They rang that bell all the 'effing time. I tried kenneling for 5-10 minutes if someone rang the bell, but didn't have any need, but they either didn't catch on, or they didn't care. After a week, I gave up and took the bell down.

It was really cute watching one of them nudge the bell and look over all happy at me.
posted by nobeagle at 12:52 PM on November 10, 2014


I am another person who has found that there is a risk with this technique that dogs will take a bell intended to mean "I have to pee!" to mean instead "I would like to go outside! And now inside. And now outside again! ooh, I got bored..." I tried training it, but my dog decided that it was faster for her to come over, sit next to me, and whine at me until we went out.

The thing that I've done to counter the "it's time to go out and play now, yes?" reaction from dogs is that when we go out because the dog asked, we're going out for ONLY five minutes on lead and then back in, and we're not going anywhere very interesting. The dog can use the time to pee or sniff aimlessly around, but if the dog doesn't go after five minutes, we go back in again and don't go out for another half hour. Sometimes that helps.
posted by sciatrix at 1:47 PM on November 10, 2014


Response by poster: Thank you all for your answers and suggestions!
I am going to cautiously implement some of the suggestions here-Zippy (the one with the orange coat) is too clever by half, and will surely figure out a way to take over the world by means of a bell...
They do have jangly tags, and little dances they do already to let me know 'it's time'...but as I said before, was just looking for a backup system :)
Any further suggestions are welcome!
posted by PlantGoddess at 9:50 PM on November 10, 2014


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