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Hi Sherri,
We also just adopted a 3yr old female recently. Fortunately
she's not a jumper, but she does love to escape and to bark. We did several
things that really helped. The first was to build a fence that surrounds the
main door of the house, so that if she gets out through the door, she's still
enclosed. We use our back door as the main exit, which is through the mud room
and is enclosed by another door, so she has to go through that door first in
order to get to the exit. You may not have a similar situation, but perhaps you
could use a gate somewhere to slow her down for awhile. We also do not ever let
her push her way past us to go through the door ahead of us. She always has to
sit and wait to be invited out. Finally, we have also found that going for long
walks down the road one to three times a day satisfies some of her "wanderlust".
As for the barking, and for training in general, we have found
that the "Gentle Leader" harness works wonders. Our local humane society lent us
a video about training with this device and we find that Mendi is very obedient
when wearing it and it does not work on pain as other devices do. It simply
directs her attention to us and reminds her that we are in charge. She wore it
in the house for a couple of days so that we could train her to bark only when
appropriate and she wears it on her walks and when out in public. She still
feels the need every couple of hours to go around the house and bark at each and
every window just to make sure we are safe. :) Once or twice a day I give
her a good session in the back yard where she is free to bark all she wants.
Between the Gentle Leader training sessions, the long walks, and simply coming
to an understanding with her (we have many talks!), her barking is now under
control. Of course if anything is off in the household routine she is more
nervous and barks a lot, but that is her nature.
I hope some of this is helpful. Our Mendi has proven to be
very worth the effort in training. She is responding very well and she is a joy
to have.
Good luck!
Nancy Chadwick
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