And i don’t think it is. The mail carrier has no way to know about the safety of your dog, your dog, or even yourself as a dog owner. And no reaon to trust your statements. As mentionned previously, it’s a rare dog owner who stated that his dog was dangerous before it actually bite someone. Also, do not forget you’re probably not the only barking dog owner on her route, and that she multiplies her risk of having something bad or even very bad happening to her with each of them she trusts.
Anyway, even if the mail carrier is unreasonnably fearful, it’s still up to you to provide a seemingly safe environment. You chose to own a dog, and as a result you have to bear the resulting inconvenience. Not her.
She’s perfectly right to put her safey well above the comfort of every dog and dog owner who happens to be on her route.
By the way, a dog able to open a latch is very common in my experience. I judged my parent’s last dog (or more exactly the last of my brothers’ dogs who ended up living at my parent’s place) as not very bright because it never figured out how to do that.
We can hear our mail lady coming by her squeaky brakes. Even in the winter.
Velma, maybe your mail carrier could honk his/her horn as they neared your house and you could close the front door.
That’s the same site I read. I took “accepting mail at the front door” to mean opening the door in the presence of the mail carrier, like to sign for a package or collect the mail while she is still there. That idea I perfectly understand, that opening the door to the dog is not ok. But I could be wrong and maybe it does mean the dog has to be out of the room all the time.
Stainz, the dog only barks when she is actually at the door, usually when she hears the mailbox squeak open. If I get a chance I will talk to her again about moving the mailbox.
Shirley Ujest, the way she delivers is she parks down the street and then walks up and down the street. I don’t know if I would notice her honking from the end of the road, especially if I am downstairs or something. Why can’t mail trucks play music like the ice cream man? They could play “Wait a Minute Mr. Postman”. That would be good.
I’ll have to look into the security doors - the ones I have seen seem pretty ugly but maybe we can find something. Maybe I should just put a big net over the door, so when the dog jumps on it she would go sproinging back.
Dogs are kind of like kids. You won’t find out that they can open the screen door or or the backyard fence or the microwave ( my dog’s working on that one now- he’s got the storm door down pat, and we had to put a lock on the fence to keep him from being able to open it ) until you find out they’ve done it. Which might be too late for the mail carrier, so she has to assume it’s a possibility
I would recommend that you do. I have the stupidest dog on the face of the earth, a Shar-pei named Yoda. Yoda is so damned dumb that he really didn’t associate his name with his self for about 9 years of his life. He is no trained helper dog and seriously is probably about the equivilant of a human IQ of maybe 50.
We moved into a new house a few months ago and I shut a door behind him to keep him in the room. He jumped up onto the door and turned the handle in the process and busted right on out. I’d never seen him that that EVER in the 10 years he’s been with me. It’s not that he was so smart that he figured out how to open the door, it was just a happy accident. I’m willing to bet that the carrier in the OP has seen the exact same thing happen with big, strong storm doors. They have latches that can probably be pushed with paws and opened right up, especially by a barking agitated dog.
We got one for our collie/aussie mix, and it worked great… for about 2 weeks. Now when she hears someone at the door she barks from another room but stops by the time she gets to the front of the house. It’s kinda weird, but it means that our visitors aren’t confronted by an aggressive-seeming dog.
Thanks, SusanStoHelit. I’ll point it out to my parents, and see if they’d be interested in it. The dog’s a miniture poodle, though, so it really is more about stopping the barking than making him seem less agressive.
For us, the big dogs tend not to be the barkers or agressive seeming. Just that little (adorable) brat of a poodle. I like to claim it’s because he’s my sister’s dog.
As a datapoint, my dog is getting crotchety in his old age, and barking when people are at the door. (Their only danger would be him pawing them to death looking for petting.) He never barks at the carrier when he deposits our mail in the garage. I’d bet that this would work.
