jumping on guests

This is the number one problem I want to correct with Jake this year!When our guests come in they get hit with a,"love to see you","I'm so excited","pet me,see me,all attention on me" Dog.A big dog,about 70lbs now so when he jumps you feel it.Jake is one years old now.Would love to hear suggestions.

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Permalink Reply by Becca & Lucy on January 2, 2011 at 7:56am

Lucy is a very jumpy dog and LOVES people! Our trainer suggested putting on her lead when guest come over to stand on her lead (w a little slack) so when she jumps she corrects herself. I keep her on the lead and ask people not to give her attention until all paws are on the ground. If she is still having trouble, I ask them just to ignore her totally until she calms down. I keep the lead on her and then normally she will go to her spot and go to sleep after about 15 min or so.

One thing too that seemed to work over the holidays too was to get right in fro t of Lucy and snap my fingers and shhh her and point. I would not allow her to get in our guests personal space. This has actually been working better for us lately bc she knows what I expect. I think she dos well with this bc we started off with the lead first.

HTH

Permalink Reply by sandy b on January 2, 2011 at 8:09am

Shelly, thanks for posting this problem and thanks Becca for your answer. Max is also a jumper but in his defense we are a big part of the problem for letting him jump on us when we come home. I know,bad parents but we've never had a dog that is soooo glad to see us. He is 35 lbs, not 70 lbs but still you can definitely feel it. I like the idea of stepping on the lead, so will try this.

Permalink Reply by Kimberly Daisy Kalli on January 2, 2011 at 8:12am

We are working on the same thing with Daisy. We are working on improving her sit/stay (on a leash) when guests come... but then she acts the same way when I release her. I'm trying a few new things to work on that problem. In the meantime, I have been asking guests to totally ignore Daisy when they come in. When they sit down they can pet her, but only if she has 4 paws on the ground.

Permalink Reply by Adina P on January 2, 2011 at 8:43am

If I know guests are coming, I have Boca crated. Then once the guests have settled in, I bring her out on leash. We walk in an official 'heel' out to the living room and then I have her sit and stay. We may do some repeated heeling back and forth (nothing that lasts more than a couple minutes) and then I heel her to the kitchen and keep her there with a baby gate. So she gets to watch and have time to chill out before I release her among the guests (which could be a half hour later).

I know myself and there's no way I could focus on socializing with my guests AND focusing on precision with my dog's training. I would miss a correction or have poor timing or something that would negatively affect Boca's training if I were to try to train her AND chat with my guests. So I keep these practices brief and then put her away until she's chilled out. Sometimes if the guests are only there briefly, I may not bring her out to socialize with them.

I think working it this way (not at the door) helps a dog learn calm behavior around people visiting their house. Keeping it brief de-escalates the excitement and then if you can control things so puppy does NOT get to jump up then that behavior is reduced because all their interactions are controlled and under command and it starts to get more comfortable and normal for them to greet politely.

I also believe that you need to be careful that when guests come that her sit stay is strong enough. Perhaps you can take a video of you and her working on sit stay when guests come and maybe we can spot some things that might help you progress.

You could also work on the length of her sit stay. And work on down stay--which can be drawn out to much longer length of time (it's hard to sit stay for most dogs more longer than a few minutes--unless they've had a TON of obedience work and practice).

Permalink Reply by Adina P on January 2, 2011 at 8:32am

My new philosophy on problems is "Train the dog and don't let him do that!"

In other words a dog who is jumping, I can guarantee does not have solid training on basic obedience. Because if he did you could tell him "Jake, SIT-stay" and he would sit and stay until you told him otherwise. So this means Jake needs more training in basic obedience so he is reliable and minds commands. In the meantime it also means that you can NOT let him jump. I'll talk about that later.

When it comes to things a dog does wrong or things you want a dog to STOP doing ... what works BEST is putting a lot of training teaching a dog what you DO want him to do in the situation. So how WOULD you like Jake to greet people? I find training a strong sit stay the best way to deal with jumping.

I have an 8 month old medium sized labradoodle who is GREAT at jumping, but with some concerted obedience training we have made some excellent progress. But she's not done yet and we've been training for 3 months (minus the last month due to difficulty going out in snow and ice and freezing temps (we do the majority of our training outside of the house so the dog gets lots of practice obeying everywhere not just isolated at home).

First, you mentioned that guests get hit with Jake's excitement when they arrive. This implies that he's free about the house and ABLE to jump on them. That would be the first thing to change. He can't be allowed to be free to choose jumping because he will choose to jump. He needs to be behind a gate, or on leash or in some way contained or controlled by you. Because he won't have the self control to not jump until he's had considerable training on how to behave.

Next, he needs the training to learn specific ways to respond to guests. I recommend basic obedience--not just teaching how to sit and stay on command, but moving on to advanced levels where you train him to ALWAYS sit and stay on command no matter what he's faced with. That's the part of training that often gets missed. Doodles are smart so they learn what words mean quickly, but often people stop there and don't train the commands to a high degree of reliability. It's not that he's too excited...it's that he hasn't had training to where he can manage his excitement.

Here are some past discussions with tips and suggestions and stories about what some of us are doing:

I tend to differ with others on the idea that you should spend your time training your guests on how to behave. I differ on this because it's nearly impossible to train friends and family. When they come visit me they are not coming for a lesson in THEIR behavior. They are coming to see me and visit with me. So I believe it is MY responsibility to train my dog in obedience and/or prevent my dog from assaulting them...not to force my friends into being trained by me. That said, I do sometimes ask them for help in training... but I don't expect them to do it correctly or to be constantly on guard. I do tell them early on, before my dog is done training, that if they don't want to be jumped on there are some things they can do...but then it's up to them. If they really hate it, they can implement those techniques, but in the meantime I will start training and not let my dog off leash for greetings (if I can help it) until they have mastered ON leash greetings.

Permalink Reply by Becca & Lucy on January 2, 2011 at 8:53am

Adina I love that! I wanted to add that Lucy is a mini and a baby still. We started working with her day one. Lucy will be the biggest dog I have ever had! (We are guessing 35 to 40 lbs) She is currently 18.5 lbs. I do believe its my job to train the dog. I love that these babies are SO smart and catch on quick! I also know that if I don't keep this up that this smart girl could take control of our house quickly! That is why training was a must for me. I would love to take this girl as far as I can go with her training wise!

My motto these days are practice, practice, practice! :)

Permalink Reply by sandy b on January 2, 2011 at 9:19am

Adina, thanks for providing the links to past discussions, they are very helpful. I also like your comment - it's not that he's too excited, it's that he's not had training to manage the excitement. That hits home. These are great discussions and more than ever I realize how lax we've been in training.

Permalink Reply by Jane, Guinness and Murphy on January 2, 2011 at 10:54am

We still have this problem, mostly with Murphy who just turned a year. We've been training sit/stays at the door for about a month. I put the training collar on Murph and leash him, then we "practice" with someone coming to the door. If he breaks his sit/stay he gets a correction...if he doesn't he gets a treat and gets to move forward toward who is at the door. He never gets to greet unless he's calm. If he starts to get excited again when the greeting starts, he's right back to his "six feet away spot" and we start again. This works pretty well when it's expected guests and it's only one or two people. It doesn't work when there are several guests. He can't manage that level of excitement yet, and I'm too distracted to handle it well. We learned that at XMAS. So, if there's multiple guests, we do what Adina is doing. He's gated in our upstairs bedroom until he gets used to the idea that there are visitors in his house, and then we bring him out (when he's calm) on the leash.

Permalink Reply by J and Riley (and Luna) on February 5, 2011 at 8:11am

Have you tried managing things from the human side? It could be that the guests are making the problem worse.

Our guests are always instructed to avoid eye contact and talking to the puppy until she has four paws on the ground and is calm. They patiently wait to pet the puppy until a few minutes have passed. Luna then gets the reward of a happy greeting from the guest.

This method has been working very well, and she has gone from crazed happiness when someone enters to a few minutes of "YAY!" then relative calm for the remainder of the visit.

I'm sure some of it is just her maturing (she's only 6 months old), but I think it may be doing some good as well.

Permalink Reply by Karina on February 8, 2011 at 1:08pm

oh i can relate. most of the time Rosie is doing much with jumping. she loves my father in law so much she goes bronco for him. i now have a rule that when she behaves like that, i ask people to not look, talk or acknowledge her. That get a few degrees off her energy and i keep her on leash and supervise each interaction with our handy selected "aiii" word that my husband and I selected as the "no" word. i love the dog whisperer and watching him for years sometimes help me get through tough points.

Permalink Reply by Jennifer and Jack on February 8, 2011 at 3:35pm

I just want to say thanks to your great advice, today when the girls came to clean my house, I put Jack on a leash like you all suggested. He did not jump once on them. I let them be normal and do their thing, I let Jack greet them by sitting down next to him.

Within five minutes his leash was off and he was well behaved the whole time they were here. From now on, a leash is going to go on him during the introductions.. He was great.

jumping on guests

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