Posted by Jeanne on August 3, 2009
How to Stop your Dog from Jumping
Most trainers agree that the most effective way for you to weed out unwanted behaviors (like jumping) in your dog is also the easiest: all you have to do is simply ignore him whenever he jumps up. The idea is to give him the cold shoulder: withdraw all attention, even negative attention (so no yelling, shoving, or corrections).
Here’s how to implement this training technique: whenever your dog jumps up on you, turn your back straight away. Since dogs understand body language a lot more clearly than they do the spoken word, you’re going to be using your posture to convey the message that such behavior isn’t acceptable here: fold your arms, turn your back, turn your face away from him and avert your eyes.
This is where a lot of people make a mistake: they confuse ignoring the behavior with ignoring the dog. You’re not ignoring the behavior – i.e., you’re not carrying on with whatever you were doing as if the jumping wasn’t happening; you’re ignoring your dog. You’re still going to react; but your reaction is for you to actively ignore him.
The cold shoulder is a really effective way of communicating your displeasure to a dog – he’ll catch on very quickly. Without the encouragement of your attention and your reactions to his behavior, he’ll calm down very quickly indeed.
When to praise
When all four paws are on the ground, then – and only then – you can praise the heck out of him!
Don’t be confused by the proximity of the positive reinforcement to the negative – dogs have a very short “training memory,” and are only capable of associating a reaction from you with whatever behavior it is they’re exhibiting at the time of that reaction.
So, it’s perfectly OK for you to react with wild enthusiasm the very second that his paws touch the ground, even if you were cold-shouldering him the split-second before.
Posted by Jeanne on July 27, 2009
Why does a dog jump?
The main reason that most dogs jump up is simply out of excitement: it’s an enthusiastic greeting, reserved for times when adrenaline’s running high and the dog’s happy about something.
Many dogs don’t jump at all, apart from when their owner returns home after a relatively prolonged absence (like the average workday). If your dog is leaping up on you in these circumstances, there’s no sinister motivation at work here: he’s literally jumping for joy.
A less common, but more serious, reason that some dogs will jump is to exert their dominance over you (or over whomever they’re jumping on). Dogs are pack animals: they live in designated hierarchies of social rank and order. When a dog needs to assert his dominance over a lesser animal, one way of doing so is to declare physical superiority, which is usually done by “jumping up”: he’ll sling one or both paws over the other dog’s shoulders.
You’ll be able to tell the basic reason for your dog’s jumping simply by considering the circumstances surrounding the event. If he only jumps up in periods of great excitement (like during play-time, or when you return home from work) then he’s clearly just demonstrating an exuberant frame of mind.
If the behavior occurs in a variety of situations, then it’s more likely that he’s expressing dominance over you, which is a more complex issue – the jumping’s just a symptom of an underlying attitude and communication issue. Essentially, you’ll need to make some serious adjustments to your overall relationship with your dog, and brush up on your alpha-dog techniques (tip: Secrets to Dog Training has some fantastic resources on coping with a dominant dog – there’s a link to the site at the bottom of the page).
Four paws on the ground, please!
How you react to your dog’s jumping plays a big role in whether or not that behavior gets repeated. You’re going to need to make a prolonged effort to be consistent in how you choose to deal with this problem: for your dog to stop jumping, he needs to be taught that it is never ever acceptable for him to do so.
This means that you can’t allow him to jump sometimes, but forbid him from doing it at other times. Your dog can’t understand the difference between a playful and an irritable mood, or your work and play clothes: all he understands is that, if you allow him to jump up on some occasions, he’ll try to jump up on you whenever he feels like it, because he doesn’t know any better.
More on this subject next week…