Training a Young, Excitable Dog to Calm Down

By: Sam Kanouse

Published Date: April 10, 2018

ChelseaChloe - Training a Young, Excitable Dog to Calm Down

In this Omaha dog training session we worked with Chelsea, a one-year-old Labrador Vizsla mix and Chloe, an eleven-year-old Corgi, who needed help learning how to calm down and gain self control.

After I arrived I chatted with the guardians about their main dog behavior concerns. One of their main concerns was that Chelsea had a hard time calming down and was barging through the doorways and jumping up at guests when they arrived. To help stop door dashing I decided to teach her guardians how to give her the sit command before going through doorways to help her gain self control and emotional regulation. To see how I accomplished this, you can watch the video below.

As you can see in the video, I used competition between the dogs to reward good behavior; when Chloe was sitting by the door I allowed her to go outside first to teach her that she was doing the correct behavior that I was looking for. This is a great dog training strategy, to allow the better behaved dog to get rewarded first because it usually helps the other dog do the behavior quicker the next time around.

By the end of the session both dogs were starting to sit to ask for attention, calming down and looking to their guardians for direction. To keep up with this good behavior the guardians will want to continue to use our Petting with a Purpose technique to reward them for good behavior and use our Escalating Consequences to disagree with them. We wrapped up this dog behavior session with Chelsea and Chloe’s Roadmap to Success video, which you can watch below.

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This post was written by: Sam Kanouse