Episode #31 Greeting Guests

Does your puppy jump on people to say hello? Do they simply get WAY too excited when a person approaches? Here are three simple strategies you can teach your puppy today to prevent the jumping and train an alternate behavior.

Transcript

speaker 0:   0:00
This is The Puppy Training Podcast Episode #31: Greeting Guests. 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.  

speaker 0:   0:19
Hey, friends, I am so happy to be here with you today. I'm gonna talk to you about how to help your puppy greet guests more appropriately. I have three strategies that you can use. They're very simple, straightforward strategies and games that you can play with your dog. If you have kids in your home, they'll love these games as well, so I'm excited to get to that. I want to thank Makayla for being a listener and a subscriber to my site. She submitted the topic for this week, so I want to say thanks, Makayla. This is something that a lot of a struggle with with our dogs, whether we have a puppy or we have an older dog, a lot of times they see a person and they just get super excited and they don't know how to handle themselves and so that's where we come in and we try to change how they behave when they see a new person and how they react, and that's where the training comes in, that we teach them a better way or a better thing to do when they see someone.   

speaker 0:   1:10
The first one is, I teach all brand new puppies to sit-to-say-please, and that's my little motto is sit-to-say-please if they want anything. If they want me to toss a toy for them, if they want a treat, if they want attention, they want me to pet them, anything my puppy's wanting, I want them to sit-to-say-please. That's how they can communicate to me that they want something in a nice, appropriate way, and I generalize this behavior to lots of things, one of them being greeting people. If a guest comes over or we're out on a walk and we see another person and we're approaching them or they're approaching us, I simply train my puppy that when we see a person and I'm stopping to talk to them or I'm stopping for any reason, that my puppy's going to sit. If he's wanting to greet this person, the way he can communicate that to me is by sitting calmly, and then I'll say, 'Say hi', and he can go over and greet this person. But the sit is the initial communication that he's asking nicely to greet someone. The sit-to-say-please is a behavior that any dog can learn at any age. Even brand new puppies are capable of learning this behavior. They're like a clean slate or wet cement, we're shaping them into what we want them to be as an adult dog, so there's no better time to start than with that brand new puppy on getting them to sit-to-say-please.    

speaker 0:   2:24
Another method that's pretty simple to use and very effective is dropping food on the floor. Let's say that you are with your puppy and a person is approaching. I would start to scatter little treats on the floor as that person walks up to me, or if I'm walking toward that person I can scatter a little trail of treats so that my puppy's nose and his attention is focused on the floor. That helps so that when he gets to that person, he's actually focused around the shoe area and not up at the person's eyes, where he's gonna want to jump to greet that guest. Just keeping the high-value rewards on the floor is helping our puppy focus in an appropriate area versus trying to jump up on that person. You can use this in any scenario, if you're approaching someone or if they're approaching you, maybe you open your door. There's somebody there who's knocked on your door ringing your doorbell and they're gonna enter your home. I would anticipate that entrance and I'm going to, number one, have your puppy on a leash so that you can manage the situation and not let him practice the unwanted behavior of jumping, but once he's on that leash, it's very effective to just drop a few treats on the floor and let him sniff those out and really just pay attention to the ground. That keeps all four paws on the floor, there's no jumping involved, it's very, very effective. Even kids can do this game. Teach your children how to drop a little food on the floor when their friends come over to say hi to the puppy so that the puppies focused on the ground and not jumping on them. Children are so enticing for a puppy to jump on because they're shorter, they have faster arm movements, their voices are higher pitch, they just generally escalate the excitement level in our puppy to another whole level, so we need to help those kids learn how they can get the puppy to sit-to-say-please, or put these treats on the grounds of the puppy stain focused on the floor. Those two methods, the sit-to-say-please, the dropping the treats on the ground, are very, very effective, and even kids can learn how to play those with the dog.  

speaker 0:   4:20
The last one is a game, and this is a game that's on my Web site. I sent this out as part of our Tuesday training tip today, and if you'd like to receive these weekly training tips, feel free to visit my site, www.Baxterand.Bella.com, and then you can just subscribe. There's a little button that pops up that you can type in your email, and then every week I send you a free training tip or a game or a suggestion. If you're interested, check that out. I sent this out to my readers this week, it actually went out this morning, and it's called 'Talk to my Hand'. You need two people. You'll have a handler, and the other person is the greeter. The handler's job is going to be to keep the dog on a loose leash all times and have a treat ready to feed immediately when the dog looks at them. The greeter's job will be to hold the same type of treat as a handler in a closed fist so the dog can smell it but not get to it. If the handler has chicken in his hand, then the greeter also wants to have chicken, and make sure that you're holding in a closed fist so the dog can smell it but not get to it. The greeter is going to walk up to the dog and use the treat hand as a target. I want you to place that hand at the height of the dog to prevent the need for him to jump. You're gonna hold that hand nice and low, right on the dog's nose, at that nose level, so that the dog is not enticed to jump up, but is rather focused down where your hand target is. That hand becomes the target. You're going to use your other arm to prevent eye contact with the dog. What we're trying to get here is that the handler is going to have a reward, but the dog's going to be focused on the greeter's hand, the reward in his hand, and the dog will probably try to look at this greeter to get the reward, but we want the dog to look back at the handler, and that's how the dogs ultimately going to get his treat. Basically, you're waiting for the dog to look at his handler when his efforts to get the treat from the greeter's target hand are unsuccessful. The second he looks back to his handler, the handler gives the reward, and I want to repeat that game. Let's go through that again, it's a little bit confusing in the instructions. The handler is going to have a food reward. The greeter is gonna have the same food reward, and the greeter is gonna put the hand as a target for the dog. As the handler and the dog walk toward the greater, the greeter puts the target hand down low. As soon as the dog looks back to the handler, it might be a few minutes because he's going to try to get the treat in the target hand of the greeter, and possibly try to look at the greeter to get the food and won't be able to figure out for a little bit why he's not getting that food reward, but the second he looks back to the handler than the handler feeds the food reward that he had. This teaches the puppy to see a guest and look back to the handler, which is what we want. Any time you're puppy sees a person, he's gonna look back to you, and then you can reward him. By taking that attention off of the greeter and putting that attention back onto the handler, that prevents the jumping and it becomes a nice, polite greeting because all four paws are still on the ground, and that's ultimately what we want.  

speaker 0:   7:20
Those are three quick suggestions for you guys. I hope that helps, especially if you have a puppy that's rather jumpy or excitable when greeting new people because it is exciting to see new people, and it's hard for our dogs to not to want to say hi. We just need to train them to do a better behavior when they do see a person. Again, try these things out. Try the sit-to-say-please. Any dog could do this, and I recommend that that's just a foundational behavior for all puppies and all dogs. If your puppy doesn't already sit-to-say-please, there's a challenge for you this week. Teach it to them, expect it for everything. The second game, dropping food on the ground. When you see a guest, just scatter little bits of food on the ground and let your puppy go to work on the ground. It takes his eyes from the person to the floor and keeps his paws on the ground, which is what we like. Then that last game, talk to my hand. Go ahead and try it out. Find a helper that's willing to work with you this week and see how it goes for you in your dog. Let me know how it goes, I would love to hear back from you.  

speaker 0:   8:15
That's all I have for you this week. There's one thing that you could do to really help me out that I would really appreciate is to leave a review. If you like this podcast, if you enjoy listening to the tips that I offer each week, if you could go and leave a review, I would really appreciate it. That helps me spread the word and get this help out to everybody who needs it. I wish you guys the best, happy training, and I'll talk to you next week. If you have a question about anything you heard on this podcast or any other puppy training question, visit my site BaxterandBella.com to contact me.