Episode #25 Jumping

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So the puppy training podcast episode Number 25 Jumping. This podcast is for those looking to train their own dog, whether as a family companion service or a therapy dog. And I'm here to help you every step of the way. This is the puppy training podcast, and I'm your host. Amy Jensen. Hello, friends. I hope you're having a fabulous week. I hope your puppies they're doing well. I'm curious what you're all working on this week. I know boots are little service Dog puppy in training is practicing, getting his own leash and fixing it. Did you guys know that your dog can fix his own leash? You can simply say fix, And if they've stepped over and it's tingled under their leg, they'll lift their paw and the leash is back to normal. It's not nice. I think it's amazing what dogs could. D'oh! Not such a simple little thing, but sometimes I think we get stuck on. I just want my dog to sit, stay and come, but it's really awesome, branching out and training them to do some really cool things. So I challenge you this week. Train your dog to do something new find a trick. Find something that you think is cool and go do it. It motivates you to train, and it helps you have fun at the same time and build a bond with your dog, all things that I love and recommend. I want to give a shout out to Noel. Thank you for setting in topics for the podcast. I really appreciate your guy's ideas, and I want to know what you want help with. So if you have a good topic that you want me to address on the podcast, send it to info at Baxter Bella dot com. And I might do that one next week. Who knows? I also want to send a shout out to Tally and let you know that Boots is in the middle of adolescence as well. In fact, he has hit it full force. I swear we woke up the other day and I'm like, Where did my dog go? So I have boots, my service dog in training. He's definitely hit adolescent stage and tally. I know your dog has just hit the stage as well. Thank you for reaching out to me. I am actually going to teach a class on adolescents October 16th as part of my members only program and puppy prep my online training school. So if you're not a member, you have time to join. There's a couple weeks, but we're gonna teach a class on adolescents and answer all of your questions then. So I hope you can tune into that. I would love to see everyone there. Now let's get to the topic of the day, which is another hot topic in dog training. Jumping. I get asked a lot or frequently. How do I stop my dog from jumping on me on my guests when they arrive in my home? Maybe when we're out for a walk and they get really excited and they see people, So that's kind of a lot if you actually break that down. That's talking about several different scenarios and when your dogs in different places. But I do have some ideas for you on the general topic of jumping and how to best handle it. So from a training perspective today, I'm going to give you some first management ideas. I always start with management first because we don't want that behavior to get stronger and we don't want our puppy to keep practicing the unwanted behavior while we are training the new behavior. Because it does take time to replace that behavior, especially, um, if your puppy's been practicing this for a long time. So the longer your puppy's been jumping, the stronger that behavior is and the more time it will actually take to change it. So in the meantime, we employ management strategies to get rid of the practicing and to prevent that from getting stronger. Somebody give you a few management tips today, but I'm also going to help you choose an alternative behavior and help you figure out how to start training that. So again, in training, we manage the situation as best as we can to minimize the practicing of the unwanted behavior. And then we choose an alternative behavior to train and just recognize in the process of training. It does take some time and some practice patience, persistence, all of those good things. And then we just don't want probably to be practicing the naughty stuff while he's learning the new stuff. So we manage it and then we train an alternate behavior and life improves so Here's the night is for you. Let's say that you have a dog who jumps on guests when they come to your home. How would you manage that? What are some simple things that you could do to prevent your puppy from practicing that jumping number one? We could restrict access. This would be a good management strategy for the guests coming to our home because it's easily doable. So with our guest comes, they knock on the door, we answer the door weaken. Simply put our puppy in a crate. We can put them in a small bedroom or a bathroom with the door shut so that they don't even have access to the guest. If you want your puppy to be out and about and to see the person, you could do things like attach a leash and step on that leash so that your puppies comfortable standing. But if he were to jump, he wouldn't be able to elevate himself because the leash prevents it. Now let's talk about the alternate behavior that you could train. So when a guest comes to your home, number one were restricting the access to the guest. We're not letting our puppy practice that jumping. But what do you want to look like? What do you want your puppy to do when someone comes to your home instead of the jumping? And that's where we always start after the management is, we have to really have a clear picture in our mind of what we want our dog to do, and then it's easier to start making a training plan for it. So, for example, let's say that the guest arrives and I decide that I would like my puppy to go lay on his bed. And then I want him to stay there until I either invite him to come say hi where I released him after the guest has left. So that is something that is very trainable. Weaken definitely get our dog to go to his bed when a guest arrives and remain there calmly until we release him. So I would start by having a bed placed somewhere near my front door. I would assign someone in my home to answer the door. I would take over the puppy on the bed, and I would lower my puppy to the bed once the doorbell or the door knock happens or the guest comes, and I would simply feed him food rewards while he remains on place like I like him to be. And then when the guest leaves, I can simply release him from the bed and stop feeding treats. And the day goes on, or the other scenario would be that the guest arrives. I have my puppy on his bed. I'm feeding him treats and the guest says, Hey, May I picked your puppy And I think that's a great thing to do. Sure, So I would tell my puppies Say hi and I would use food with a very young puppy. Keep that food right on his nose to motivate him. I'm gonna lure him right over to the person. I'm going to get him into the sit position. I'm gonna feed him treats while the person pets my puppy. The treat. Stop when the person has done petting. And that's what how you start practicing it Now that is, from a very young age. That's probably with an eight week old puppy on up to maybe 12 to 16 week old puppy that you're doing this process now. You're not going to have to lure forever. In fact, the faster you can get rid of the food lore that better. We want our puppy to learn the behavior, learn that he goes to his bed When a guest arrives, he stays there till we invite him off. When we invite him off, he sits to be greeted, but we're doing that by giving him food rewards for doing the good behavior. So after you've done the teaching of the behavior after you've lured him into place and you've lured him over to the person to sit once he knows to do that behavior, then you could simply ask for the behavior and the rewards come out after he does it. So after he goes to his bed, yes, he gets a treat after he sits to be greeted. Yes, he gets a treat, and he's going to get multiple treats. That's fine to keep paying out. To keep him in position, we're gonna pay for position. But then, once the person leaves or we're done with this exercise in the treat, stop and they go away. So the puppy learns. I do what I'm asked. I go to my bed or I sit to say please and I get paid for it. So there's a difference between luring our puppy and pain or puppy for behavior. It's very important that we get them off the Laura's soon as we can, but we can continue to pay for the behavior that we like to keep it strong. All right, so can you see how this scenario has improved greatly? We went from a puppy who would jump on the guests when they arrive to now, we have a puppy who's learning a very different behavior. Our puppy has learned that when the guest comes in, we go to our bed. We remain there. We get paid for staying there. We also may get invited off of the bed to go say hi to the person. As long as I keep my paws on the floor and I sit, I'm going to get another payment. And as long as the reward that the puppies getting for this new behavior is better than the rewards that you possibly got for the old behavior than success will ensue. So if our puppy was getting lots of attention from people and that he finds that more rewarding than the food that we're paying him with, and there could be some issues there, so we want to make sure that our rewards are very high value in this scenario. We also want to make sure that if you don't have a helper around who can answer the door, that you have a way of managing the puppy on the bed. So if you can't do that, if you have, you don't have anyone at your home that can help you at the time. Then I would simply go back to the management tools, and I would put your puppy in a crate or put him in a small bathroom while you answer the door and address the guest. Because again, we don't want the puppy to practice the jumping anymore. So from here on out, if this is a goal you have for your puppy, we want to stop the practicing. We want to be able to greet people at our door and talk to our guest if needed. So if we don't have a helper around in this initial stage of training than it is better to just manage the situation and put your puppy where he can't practice the behavior. You could also again, as we mentioned earlier, put him on a leash and then simply just step on the leash to prevent him from jumping. But by all means, please manage it so that he's not strengthening the jumping while we train this go to bed behavior. Okay, so that gives you guys an idea. Hopefully, hopefully now you can take this and apply it to other areas. If your puppy is jumping on you when you come home from work, if your puppy is jumping on the counter to try to steal food, really, the process is the same. We figure out what's motivating our puppy or what's the trigger? What's helping him want to do this or what's causing him to want to do this? What's the reward that he's getting for it? And we want to start with management by taking that kind of stuff away. We don't want him to be able to practice that behavior. We want to, you know, clear the counters of food. And if he's wanting to say hi to us and he's wanting attention, we need to take all attention away. We don't want to give him attention for jumping. Maybe there's some kind of barrier where he can't get to us when we first walked through the door, something like that. So we have to first manage it, be really creative, and you're management. But I know you guys can do this. Figure out. How do I prevent him from practicing the jumping, whatever it's for? And then think, How do I want this to look instead? If you know, I walk through the door and my puppy usually jumps all over me, What would I like? That greeting toe look like? And then you make a training plan for it. This is where I come in, and I would love to coach you through this training process. I do this on a daily basis with clients all over the world. They call me. We set up a live coaching session. They we flip our phones around. I see them with their puppies, they see me with boots, and I coach them through how to train these different types of scenarios. So if you're interested in more help, visit www.baxterandbella.com/learn-more and check out my program. See what I have to offer. I would love to see you inside and help you train your puppy. You guys have a wonderful weekend. Happy training. If you have a question about anything you've heard on this podcast or any other puppy training questions, visit my site BaxterandBella.com to contact me.