I like seeing excited dogs, I really do, but not bouncing off the cabinets in my kitchen or jumping and leaping on the way to the car. As much as I love Paisley, her bark can peel the paint off walls, so we've been working on training controlled excitement. Since the dogs get fed at the same time every day, they know when I head to the kitchen what's coming. While Shira and Rox are excited, they're not spinning and barking like a wind up toy. To combat this, I determined that barking slows me down. Silence (jumping and spinning is ok, just no barking) makes me go faster. For any bark that happens while I go into the kitchen, I stop and wait. When Paisley is quiet for a count of 5, I move. When I started this I looked like I was marching down the aisle in some bizarre wedding, but Pais learned pretty quickly. There was no verbal communication, no "quiet" or "no" of any kind. Her bark simply made me stop. She had to be quiet while I put the food in the bowls, if she barked I stepped away from the counter and waited. This worked because Paisley's barking had become a habit. We all have them and some of us try to break them, but you need a plan to break it correctly. Behavior has an Antecedent (the cue to do the behavior, like seeing a red light which moves your foot to the car break,) the Behavior itself and a Consequence. The Consequence can be good or bad, it's simply the result of the behavior. When you want to change a behavior, you keep the Antecedent and the Consequence. We see this work with quitting smoking. You have a cigarette after morning coffee, which helps you relax. To break the habit, you keep the coffee and find some other behavior that will aid in relaxation. With mindful repetition, you simply replace one behavior for another. Keeping a dog quiet usually takes some time because we need to understand what the Antecedent is. This can only be done by paying attention to our own behavior. We do a lot of the same tasks every day at the same time, in the exact same way and our dogs notice. In my feeding ritual, the moment I got off the sofa the barking started, but it escalated as I moved closer to the kitchen and reached a fevered pitch when I approached the food bucket. Paisley still got the Consequence (dinner,) but it just happened slower if she was barking. Is Pais less exuberant about dinner time? Nope, now she's just quiet about it.