Stop your dog from jumping up on people (nicely)
By Chet Womach
I had the cutest thing happen to me today. I went
to go bring my dog in from the back yard, only to
find out that he was quite happy to remain outside
to play with a little white Maltese puppy that had
dug under our fence to come play.
I knew the dog and it's always been super sweet,
so I wasn't worried about the two dog's playing
nicely together. In fact I try to let all our
neighbour’s dog's come over to play as often as possible
so they won't all bark at each other but that's a
topic for a different day.
I wanted to share this little story of our neighbour’s
dog today, not to talk about digging, but because
after a little white dog digs a whole under a fence,
it tends to be extremely muddy.
And I was reminded just how quickly a puppy who has
not yet been trained to not jump up on people, can
quickly soil a brand new pair of pants.
And that's what happened to me today. As soon as
I went outside to see just how this Maltese had
escaped into our yard, it ran up to me and very
excitedly started to jump up and claw it's muddy
paws all over me.
But instead of getting mad I decided to teach the
dog a lesson... a nice, and helpful lesson.
I quickly ran inside, changed into a pair of beat
up jeans, so not to cause any further damage to
the ones I was wearing... and ran back outside to
teach this Maltese a little lesson in not jumping
up on people.
Now I know some people try to tell you to swat the
dog every time it jumps up, or knee it in the chest,
or to pull up on it's arms as a way to cause
discomfort, and get the dog to stop jumping up.
But that's FAR from the best way to teach a dog to
stop jumping up.
You see a dog jumps up because it's excited, and it
wants your attention. So we just have to make sure
that we give the dog what it wants (attention) after
it has asked for it in an appropriate way.
And we need to do this in a way that makes sure we
completely stop giving attention to the dog when it
does jump up.
The combination of giving the dog zero attention
when it jumps up, and lavishing it with praise
when it sits patiently at your feet is the easiest
way to do this.
This method took no less than 3 minutes to teach
to my little neighbours escape artist. I would
simply reach down in an excited manner so the dog
would get over excited and want to play, and would
continue to play with the dog until it's
over-excitedness (if that's even a word) led to the
dog jumping up on my leg.
At the exact instant the dog jumped up, I quickly
stood up, removed eye contact off the dog and
stood as still as a stump, showing no emotion.
When the dog got bored waiting for me to resume
playing with it, I would immediately go right back
to playing excitedly with the puppy.
It didn't take long at all for the dog to realize
that the second his muddy little paws touched my
pant legs the play session was over, and in 5
minutes we had the behaviour fixed.
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