Stopping Your Dog Jumping On People

We all want a dog that is friendly and welcoming and gets excited to see us coming home. This is of course usually a welcome trait. However it can go too far when dogs jump up on visitors or guests without invitation and annoy them or cause worry. If this is happening to you with your guests, then you need to educate yourself in training your dog to stop jumping on people. It is not too difficult to do, and if you follow a few simple guidelines, you and your dog will be much happier and get along better in no time.
Understanding why your dog behaves like it does is the first step to changing its behaviour. Jumping on people is an activity that most dogs learn when they are little older than puppies. This is because this kind of behaviour is actively encouraged in puppies. Everybody finds a jumping puppy adorable. On the other hand, with bigger, older dogs it can actually be actively dangerous, particularly with children or older people. For this reason, it is important to make sure a puppy learns not to jump up on people before it is too late and they are big enough to do some damage.
Luckily, it is quite easy to stop a puppy jumping on people, just because they are so small. Take the puppy away from the person, put them down and tell them to keep off – this will make it clear they should not be doing it. With time it will become obvious to them that you are not going to tolerate them jumping on every person that comes into the house. As long as you follow through on this every time, they will soon pick it up. Dogs require constant repetition of a message in order to pick up the point of their training. If you do not follow this rule every time your dog jumps on someone, you risk confusing the dog and losing all the good work you have already done.
Even if your dog is grown, this should work. It can, however, be a little bit harder. We all know that “old dogs can’t learn new tricks”, and though this might not be quite true, it is harder to change ingrained behaviour. Since they have been allowed to jump on people all their lives, it is no surprise that they will not change this habit overnight or at the drop of a hat, but only with considerable work. One way to do this is to simply ignore the dog when it jumps on you or others. This is because when a dog jumps on you, it is usually simply seeking attention. Once the dog realises that it is getting no attention or feedback from jumping on you, it should stop this behaviour.
You should make sure that visitors to the house know this as well. Their reaction to the dog jumping on them should be exactly the same – straight out ignoring it. Dogs rely entirely on routine and repetition to learn messages – if they do not get this from everyone else as well as their owner, it simply will not go in. Nevertheless, following this simple advice, you should easily stop your dog jumping on people.
To learn more about how to stop a dog from jumping on people, check out how to stop dog from jumping up or obedience training for dogs