Teaching a Pair of High Energy Dogs to Calm Down and Stop Jumping on People
By: David Codr
Published Date: May 24, 2018
For this Omaha dog training session we taught 6 month-old German Shorthaired Pointer Bert and his 2 year-old Brittany Spaniel roommate Gus to stop getting excited and jump up on people when they come home.
Knowing that Bert liked to jump up, I called ahead and had the guardian put him on a leash so I could show them an easy way to train a dog to stop jumping up on people. You can watch me demonstrate this technique to stop dog jumping
Stopping a dog from jumping up is all about helping the dog practice the behavior you want them to offer and ignoring or stepping away when they do something else.
After going over the different ways to stop dogs from jumping on people, the guardians brought out Gus and we sat down to discuss their day to day routine.
I discovered that the dogs were under exercised, but that would be the case with just about anyone with this pair, especially Bert. He is the definition of a high energy dog. They also didnt have any rules and were able to tell the humans when to pay (pet) them.
I suggested a few ways to burn off his excess energy, that they start an exercise journal for a month and then turned my attention to a few bad habits the humans were displaying. Once we wrapped that up, I knew I needed to connect the dots as there were things the humans were doing that were confusing the dogs.
Anything a dog is doing when you pet it is what you are rewarding. This is important for the guardians to note as they frequently petted the dogs when they climbed up on them, jumped up or nudged for attention.
I showed the guardians a way to pet the dogs that will not reinforce bad behaviors and will instead motivate them to do desired things to get the humans attention.
To help the guardians remember all the positive dog training tips we covered in this in home dog training session, we shot a roadmap to success video.
Categorized in: Dog Behavior