Do you have a dog that likes to jump up on family members or strangers? In today’s Animal Behavior and Dog Training Tidbit video, “How Do You Keep Your Dog From Jumping?” I discuss some tips on how you can keep your dog from jumping up by teaching your pup “what to do” and instead of shouting “no” at him.

If you prefer to read about “How To Keep Your Dog From Jumping?,” below is a lightly edited transcript from the video.

Hi, I’m Terrie Hayward from Positive Animal Wellness thanks for joining us again.

Today I’m going to talk about a question that comes up quite frequently and the question is “How do I keep my dog from jumping up?”

I would submit that the first thing that we want to do is reframe that question. Instead of asking what we want to do to stop or prohibit a type of behavior, we want to think about what do we want the dog to do instead.

Specifically, instead of keeping my dog from doing “something,” we want to teach them what to do instead and then make that behavior really reinforcing. Let’s say we have a dog who’s jumping up. What type of behaviors could we ask them to do instead? We might ask them to settle. We might ask them to lie down. We might ask them to sit or we might just go ahead and reinforce four paws on the floor.

After teaching or capturing the desired behavior we need to reinforce it! In doing so we’re reinforcing an incompatible or an alternative behavior instead of jumping up. That means we’re making the new or different behavior much more worthwhile for the dog.

The final piece, is that we want to use management while we’re teaching and reinforcing an alternative or incompatible behavior to jumping up. We want to set the dog up for success. That means we might use baby gates, for example if we have a dog that’s jumping up on the couch. Or we might use baby gates so that the dog can’t access a particular room.

If we have a dog who’s jumping for greetings, again, we’ll use management and we might have the dog on a leash or within a gated area so that they can’t get to the person and practice that unwanted behavior of jumping.

We’ll use management while we’re working on reinforcing and teaching incompatible alternatives that we can reinforce and that we want to see continue to into the future. Thanks for joining us!

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