Teaching a Cute Dog to Stop Lunging at People Who Move

By: David Codr

Published Date: December 9, 2019

Blondie - Teaching a Cute Dog to Stop Lunging at People Who Move

For this Santa Monica dog training session, we showed 8 year-old Poodle mix Blondie’s guardians how to click for looks to help the dog feel good and positive about people and dogs.

Dogs that lunge and bark at people who move or make loud sounds is the dog’s way of saying they disagree. Many people think that correcting or punishing a dog for that behavior will stop the problem. It almost never does. And if it does, it usually only stops the lunging as the dog channels its frustrations into other, often worse, behaviors.

As a dog behaviorist, I have found a more effective way to stop a dog from lunging at people is to change the dog’s perception of its rank or authority level while simultaneously building up the dog’s confidence and self esteem.

I recommended the guardians take turns teaching Blondie a new trick or command each week for 8 consecutive weeks. Its easy to find many of these, complete with instructions on Youtube. This will accomplish several things for the dog; boosting her confidence, increasing her respect for the humans as leaders / mentors and giving them ways to redirect or distract Blondie.

I also wanted to share an exercise to stop a dog from lunging when people move unexpectedly. I share the tips to stopping a dog from lunging in the free positive dog training video below.

Teaching a dog that its not nice to lunge at people can be challenging as half of the fix is changing how the humans act around the dog. Enforcing rules, adding structure and rewarding desired behaviors combined with the exercise in the above video will be needed to stop Blondie’s habit of lunging and barking at people visiting her home. Fortunately you don’t have to be a professional Poodle mix dog trainer to do this.

To help the guardians remember all the positive dog training tips we shared in this in home Santa Monica dog training session, we filmed a roadmap to success summary video that you can check out below.

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This post was written by: David Codr