How to Set the House Rules Before Your New Dog Comes Home

Make the decisions before the dog walks in the door, write them on one page, and stick it on the fridge. This is the cheapest training you will ever do and almost nobody does it. Every rule you decide in advance costs you one conversation. Every rule you decide after the dog has been doing the opposite for three weeks costs you a month of retraining and an argument with your family.

The specific rules matter far less than the fact that everyone is running the same ones. A dog allowed on the couch by a consistent household is fine. A dog allowed on the couch by two people and shouted off it by a third is the dog with a problem.

The nine decisions to make

• Furniture. Couch and beds, yes or no. If yes, decide whether it is by invitation or open access, because those are different rules and both work.
• Where he sleeps. Crate in the bedroom, crate elsewhere, or a bed in a room. Decide this before night one, not at eleven at night while he is screaming.
• Feeding. Where the bowl goes, who fills it, how many meals, and whether anything comes off the table. The table one is the rule that gets broken first.
• Doors. Whether he waits at doorways and which doors count. Front door and car door are the two worth being strict about.
• Greetings. What happens when someone comes in. Four feet on the floor before any attention is the standard I would pick, and it has to apply to visitors too.
• Who walks him and when. Actual names against actual times. Vague agreements to share it collapse in week two.
• Rooms he can be in. Especially kitchen while cooking, and any room with a small child in it.
• Who does the training. Everyone can maintain cues, but pick one person to teach new ones so the criteria stay consistent.
• What word means what. Off versus down is the classic. Pick one word per behavior and write it down.

Getting the household to actually agree

Say the rules out loud to each other before the dog arrives, not in a group text. The thing that produces failure is not disagreement, it is people quietly assuming they know what was decided.

1. Sit down for twenty minutes. Everyone who lives there, including teenagers, once, before the dog arrives.
2. Go through the nine. Write the answer for each one as a short sentence in plain language.
3. Name the one rule each person expects to break. Everyone has one. Naming it out loud roughly halves the odds of it happening.
4. Agree what happens when someone slips. Not a punishment, just a reset. Whoever notices says the rule out loud and both of you move on.
5. Set a review date at two weeks. Some rules will turn out to be wrong for your house. Change them deliberately at a set time rather than drifting.

The fridge sheet

One page, printed, on the fridge. Nine lines, one per decision, in the shortest form that is unambiguous. No dog on the couch. He sleeps in the crate in our room. Nothing from the table, ever. Sit before the front door opens. No hands on him until all four feet are down. Then a second short block with the words you are using, so nobody invents their own.

Keep it up for the first month. It stops being about the dog after about ten days and starts being about reminding the people, which is what it was always for.

The rules not worth bothering with

• Long rituals before every meal. A sit is plenty. A five step routine before every bowl turns a good thing into a chore.
• Making him go through doors behind you, always. Fine as a manners cue, meaningless as a hierarchy statement, and not worth an argument.
• Rules nobody will enforce at eleven at night. If one person is going to let him up on the bed when they are tired, either make it legal or accept you have a problem in the making.
• Anything that requires everyone to be perfect. Pick rules that survive one person being lazy, because one person will be lazy.

What the first week looks like when you did this

Quieter than you expected. The dog is not being tested by four different sets of expectations, so he settles into a pattern in about four or five days rather than three weeks. Housetraining goes faster because the routine is fixed. Jumping never really establishes because nobody is accidentally rewarding it.

You will still have a hard week. New dogs are hard weeks regardless. But the hard parts will be the actual hard parts, night waking and housetraining and a dog who does not know you yet, rather than problems you built by accident in the first ten days.

The rules are one piece of the first week, and the rest of it comes down to routine, crate work, and not overwhelming the dog. My free first seven days blueprint lays the whole week out day by day. Download the First 7 Days blueprint before pickup day.

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.