Luna is 7 months old and doing really well with her training. She has always been incredibly high energy and with help from a brilliant behaviourist we've progressed well with rewarding calm behaviour at home and (with slower success) out on walks when pigeons/squirrels/rabbits create excitement at a distance. The thing we really want to see more progress on is her behaviour around humans (it's total excitement not aggression or fear which is great) - I can see green shoots of improvements, but I'd love to hear how everyone else has tackled this in the past with success. I've got better at walking away from people when we are out, so that we can contain her excitement at a sensible distance, but it's having guests at the house that's the most challenging. I've recruited about 8 friends/family to each come to visit over the next few weeks as training aids. I ask them to keep standing when they come in the kitchen, fold their arms and completely ignore her with no eye contact. She'll literally leap around them like a salmon snapping at them but will eventually give up when she gets no attention. If she then goes up to the guest and keeps all 4 feet on the floor then I give her a treat. We tried it today and she eventually lay down at my friend's feet. We haven't been able to progress to people sitting at the table yet, or the guest actually giving her any attention. I'm guessing we need to build up to that. Does this sound like a sensible approach? Our behaviourist gave us the advice to keep her on a lead and to have everyone sat down with her kept at a distance, but in practice that seemed to get her even more excited. Clicking for calm also got her too excited and she'd start to chain together the click with jumping up. Any thoughts on whether we can do anything different or reassurance that we should persevere with what we're doing?
Oh this sounds exactly like my 9 month old! And it's exhausting, all my friends turn their backs but she refuses to give up. I find myself eventually dragging her off them, so I would be very interested in your replies too, sorry I can't help though.
Hi @LoopyLuna and @Saffy/isla I would teach you dog an incompatiable behaviour. That is, if your dog is down, then it is not possible to be jumping up by defintion. You will have to teach a down stay (or go to mat which is slightly different) first without visitors. And for duration.do down in back garden. Then front garden. Then when near a bus stop with people in a queue. Later on when children are playing soccer. Use distance to keep your dog's arousal level low. After all the proofing when you know a visitor is coming to your home ask the visitor to wait outside. Put you dog on lead. Cue your dog down. Ask the visitor to come in. Because you have raised your criterion of performance, down with distractions in your home, you can put the behaviour on continuous reinforcement. Count in your head 1 thousand then say yes and give a treat to the dog if she stayed down, then another 1 thousand, yes and treat. The idea is to reward the dog for staying down. Do it for say 5 seconds the first time. Give your release cue. Treat. And then take your dog to her crate or garden.. It cannot be expected the dog will learn the behaviour in one go, and we don't want to allow the dog to jump up on the visitor, since that is a behaviour we do not want to reward inadvertently. If your visitor is still there in say 10 minutes time. Bring the dog out on lead. Cue down. Now count in your head one thousand two thousand. Say Yes and treat, keep on doing that for 5 seconds as long as dog remains down. Give release cue and and quietly back to crate or outside in the garden. Over time gradually increase time the dog stays down in 5 second increments. Gradually also increase the amount of time between each yes and treat. What you are aiming for is that visitor walks in. You say down. And the dog stays down for say 3 minutes. The excitement of the visitor wears off while the dogs just watches. Give release cue. And the dog can say hello calmly. If she looks like she will jump, then get the down cue in before it happens. Yes and treat.
I would also recommend what your behaviourist did: Keeping her on a lead and having people sit out of reach of her, but I would combine that with doing Look At That with the guest. See the separate thread on Look At That: https://thelabradorforum.com/threads/look-at-that.22184/ The problem with her leaping around the guest and the guest ignoring her, is that she is able to make physical contact with them, and in itself this is powerfully reinforcing for the dog. The person is what they want to get to, and leaping all over the person is what they want to do - so she is kind of getting what she wants, if you let her do this. The reason she gives up eventually could just be that she has gotten her 'fill' of this person and leaping at them and the person is no longer novel - which doesn't mean she will be any better the next time someone comes over...! Plus it takes just a flicker of eye contact or smile from the guest to reinforce the behaviour and it is really almost superhumanly impossible to ask helpers to ignore the dog (when it is leaping on their stomach etc!) and not even look at them briefly or smile at the situation. So instead, I'd keep her on lead and work at Look At That. With this type of dog you don't even need to do this in the house specifically because usually the jumping up is just as bad out and about meeting people, so it's exactly the same skill. A good training class which covers jumping up would be really helpful and give you a lot of chances to practise...
Hi @Jo Laurens and @Michael A Brooks thankyou both so much for such helpful and informative posts. I am going to work at this with Isla and hope I can do it correctly, I realised I am not doing the proofing, Isla sits very nicely waiting when someone knocks on the door but leaps up as soon as I open the door, I've even been closing the door as soon as she gets up, sometimes 5 or more times before allowing the guest to enter but once they're in she's up immediately. I can now see where I've been going wrong, hopefully I've not confused her to much. Thanks to you both.
Ah, great point and thank you very much for that advice. Thankfully only 2 of our 10 training volunteers/victims have come over and had the leaping salmon experience so far , so we'll adapt it for the next time we have a "stooge" over to the house. I'm not very familiar with LAT so I'll have a read with interest and pop back if I have any questions Do I look for an Obedience style class for this? I'm doing force free gun dog classes which covers obedience and focus etc, but this sort of "manners" doesn't tend to be the focus You're not wrong there!! She's very easily excited by attention. My friends have been amazing though considering she's absolutely gorgeous and the temptation to look at her must be high. I opened the front door to my friend this week after I'd briefed her by text, and she had turned up in old jeans, no floaty clothes and she already had her arms crossed and her eyes looking up at the ceiling in anticipation Superstar! Really good point though, so we'll change things up with the training approach and see how we get on. Thanks so much for the advice
Thanks for the great advice @Michael A Brooks , we will give the down stay some more focus. She is proving to be quite a steady dog in training, but typically this is when food is the ultimate treat (she's not that excited by toys or training dummies yet). As soon as a guest comes over, they are the ultimate treat and food tends to just add to an already exciting situation. We've had a few occasions trying this when she'll get so overwrought that she'll end up on her back biting the lead when she's not allowed to get to the person. I think the key is probably going to be practicing with the guest at a distance/behind a gate so she's not too over threshold from the start. Wish us luck - I'll let you know how we get on, and how many of my friends she's managed to hump in the process
Hi @LoopyLuna Of course, I wish you a measure of luck. Note trainers also create luck by setting up the dog to succeed. I am not sure whether the following will work because I don't have the opportunity to read her body language and modify the plan on the run. But it may be worth trying. Ask you neighbour to come over. Ask your neighbour to sit on the far side of the room. Get your dog to stay for say 5 seconds. The guest then bids farewell. If your dog stayed without getting up then she gets a jackpot of treats. Have her on lead or house line so that she does not get an opportunity to jump all over your guest. My thought: Perhaps expecting a long stay is just too much for the dog, and the expectation of being able to greet the person just over-arouses her so much she stops listening. Next session, the guest sits one metre closer to the dog. Don't increase the duration just yet. Gradually get the neighbour closer and closer over the sessions. Once you can get her to be controlled with the guest close to the dog, then get the neighbour to sit further away from the dog and start increasing duration in 5 second lots. In the front or back garden allow your dog to play with the neighbour. Say play with a ball. Have the dog on long-line so that you can prevent jumping on the guest. If she attempts to jump on the neighbour, then the game stops. Why the last step? The message you are trying to get her to take on board is that neighbours will play with you in the right place as long as you don't jump on them, but once inside leave them be, if you have been told to stay.. In time, you can give her the release cue, when the guest is inside, If you suspect she will jump on the guest, then get in the down cue before it happens. All this training will certainly involve buying a good box of chocolates or wine for the neighbour!
You don't really want a competition obedience class, as that's not going to cover no jumping up either - but a manners class or a pet dog obedience class, probably will. Whereabouts are you based?
My pup is the same age is the same way. If someone comes in our house he’s a mad jumping bean! Teach your dog “place” until he calms down and loses the adrenaline. This has helped us a lot and I know labs this age are very boisterous. Teaching staying on a rug or whatever won’t happen instantly but mine learned this pretty quickly. He also still tests us by sneaking off hoping we won’t notice once in awhile. I use this to take a shower so he won’t destroy the house. Last week while taking a shower he ripped my comforter apart. He had fun, but no more free roaming when in the shower. Best of luck with Luna.
Just thought I'd give a bit of an update on how we're getting on. I've had another 2 fake guests come to the house and we tried the down and stay. I tried the lead for the first few minutes, but she got so wound up by it that I eventually took it off, but kept her harness on and relied on her response to a sit or down command. I expected to have to remove her from the room after the first 5 seconds etc as per @Michael A Brooks advice above, but amazingly she kept her focus on me and stayed down (kibble played a big part in this!!). I gradually moved her closer to our guest to test where her "I'm gonna burst with excitement" limit was, and eventually she was lying on my guests' feet! A step too far was when I gave my guest some kibble to give to Luna in order to say hello. She became a leaping snapping turtle again, so I took her back to the start and began the whole process again. We'll work our way up to that more slowly over the next few weeks. All in all, she did great and it's given me a great boost of confidence. My friends did say at one point "what's all the fuss about??!!" Thanks for the great advice everyone.
Hi @Loopy luna I wasn't claiming to remove the dog after 5 seconds. I was suggesting you remove your assistant, if the dog had stayed calm. Then get the sssistant to do another entry. The thought was to train for short durations of stay so that you had the opportunity to positively reinforce the dog's calm behaviour heaps of times in one training session. And only over time when you had built up duration to say 30 seconds should you move closer to the distraction. The general rule is work on distraction first, and then deal with duration and distance. But if your approach is working then well done. All roads lead to Rome.
Don't do that! There's no need for your dog to 'say hello' to your guest, and 'saying hello' in dog terms, for your dog, is leaping all over the guest. Focus on training the dog to ignore the guest and focus on you, which means not encouraging any dog-guest interactions... Sounds like you've got this working well!
I think this is a pretty universal problem for young dogs since they naturally get so excited whenever they see new people and dogs walking around. This is definitely still a work in progress for my 19-week-old, but I’ve been trying a certain method lately. She loves to fetch and will naturally want to chase any ball I throw. She also knows heel and stay. So I do a lot of heel-stay-fetch sequences to get her to wait for me to let her go chase. If she waits nicely but still attentively at where I threw the ball, she gets a treat. She needs to stay until I actually say “fetch.” If she breaks the stay, no treat for returning the ball. I tried this to get her used to controlling that urge on command. So now we often stand halfway down the driveway together. When people walk by, she naturally wants to bark and run up to them. But she’s been getting better all the time at pointing people out, controlling barking, heeling and staying under pressure, and doing LAT/LAM back and forth. And if it’s someone I know or they start being friendly with me, I try to approach them with her in heel until I tell her to say hi. That last part definitely still needs work but it’s getting there. Long story short, I think the heel/stay/fetch routine works. Now that I write this out, I’m thinking maybe throwing first before the heel command would even better imitate the spontaneous passersby.
One problem here is whether she knows why she is not getting the treat. Will she "reason" that she failed to get a treat because she did not stay or you did not like the way she fetched. I would use a long line so that you can prevent her from getting to the ball when you had not said fetch. Or use an assistant. The assistant picks up the ball if she breaks. Otherwise it is good idea to employ something she likes doing in teaching other cues.
