How to Stop a Jumping Dog

Larry Parr

Many dogs get excited when seeing a new person and they jump up on that person as a form of exuberant greeting. And while the sentiment might be laudable, the fact is that a jumping dog can cause a great deal of harm, especially to older people or to very young children. A dog with dirty paws is seldom welcome jumping on almost anyone.

The problem is, even as the dog is jumping up and making a pest of itself (or worse) most owners use a fairly gentle voice to tell the dog to stop and get down and they may even pet the dog as they are telling it to stop the behavior.

In other words, most owners encourage their dog to jump up on people. All the while they think they are telling the dog to stop jumping, what they are actually telling their dog is “The more you jump the more rewards you’ll get!”

In this case you are not giving the dog a confusing command, you are telling the dog to PLEASE continue jumping on people.

Unless that’s what you want to be telling your dog, it’s obvious that you are going to have to change your behavior if you want your dog to change its behavior.

First, ONLY correct your dog WHILE it is in the act of jumping up. If you attempt to correct your dog even a few seconds after it stops jumping you’ll be doing more harm than good.

The easiest way to change the behavior of a jumping dog is to remove all rewards for jumping. The easiest way to do that is to encourage everyone to turn their back the moment the dog begins to jump. Everyone needs to spin around, fold their arms, make no eye contact and say nothing until the dog relaxes.

When the dog settles, then give it a SIT command. If the dog sits reward it with attention or even a treat. If it jumps everyone should immediately turn their back once again.

There is no need to yell at the dog for jumping. If yelling worked then the problem would have been solved long ago.

The trick is to be consistent. Everyone must turn away every time the dog jumps. There should be no eye contact and no word should be spoken until the dog settles. Once the dog settles then it may be praised.

By removing all rewards for jumping and replacing the rewards with no attention, the dog should learn fairly quickly that jumping will result in a “negative” reaction and – as long as the “negative” reaction the dog receives for jumping is consistent – the dog’s behavior will be modified in a remarkably short time.

There are two excellent dog training programs which I can personally recommend to you. One I have personally used, and the other my sister-in-law used and both programs worked miracles.

You can read all about the program my wife and I used to train our three dogs HERE.

Read about the program my sister-in-law used to train her old hound dog HERE.

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