I recently evaluated the Doggieshield®, which is designed to prevent dog damage to your door (from scratching, pawing, and all other terrible, destructive behaviors). The Doggieshield® is basically a durable, synthetic piece of plastic that is designed to easily adhere to your door, and was invented to be easy to install without the use of screws or adhesive tape.
Upon opening the package, I found the instructions pretty difficult to follow (this coming from someone who only owns IKEA furniture). It would have been helpful to have a picture of assembly instructions; rather, I had to go to the website to look for a visual aid. Despite that, I still couldn’t find instructions on the website, and limited information was available. Feeling like an idiot (I swear, I have 13 years of education), I couldn’t get my straps to adhere around my door. I found the instructions hard to understand, and found the product to have an overall home-made field [parts of the product (straps) were protected in Saran-wrap, while the instructions were printed from a poor quality home printer]. That said, kudos to the company for inventing it… I’m sure for those with more technical prowess, it may be easier for them to install. This product might be ideal if you have a bad dog and are going to visit your family members (who love their doors more than your dog), then yes, this would be a good travel gadget to bring along. As for me, perhaps I’ll have my boyfriend assemble it instead.
Finally, while this is a relatively cost-effective way of preventing major damage to your door, it doesn’t fix the underlying problem – inappropriate dog behavior. I’d honestly focus more on using appropriate positive and negative feedback to get a dog to stop scratching at the door. In other words, a classic mistake that pet owners make is to “reward” the dog when he’s scratching at the door, destroying your nice property in the process, or forcing you to buy gadgets like the Doggieshield to begin with. When you reward your dog by opening the door, you’re basically training him to scratch to be let in. Instead, you should only open the door when he’s not scratching, teaching him that this action doesn’t result in the reward of being let in or out. But I digress.