Dogs Jumping Up

Dogs Jumping Up

To one degree or other, dogs are fairly emotional creatures and you can often tell how they’re feeling from their outward appearance. It should come as no surprise then that unless the dog in question has his lips drawn back, baring his lovely array of sharp white teeth in a ferocious looking snarl, that when a dog jumps up, he’s usually pretty pleased to see you, or your guest or the shiney new car just pulled up on the drive.

A dog that jumps up can or cannot be a problem, depending on who’s at the receiving end of a set of muddy paws. For the dog, it’s no problem atall, he simply want to get close and that’s the best way he knows. The victim of the gouged skin and/or clothes, or children sent bowling across the kitchen may have other ideas!

Like a lot of behaviour issues with our dogs, many of them are the results of lessons we have taught our dogs without realising it. It’s nothing short of adorable when a fluffy snub nosed puppy makes his clumsy leaps towards our knees and we almost always scoot forward and rub his ears and return the greeting with hugs and kisses. Message to puppy- Jumping up gets me hugs and kisses; jumping is a good move!

That beautiful, fluffy, snub nosed puppy will, whether we like it or not grow into a slathering hairy monster, and as it’s usually our obsession with the bathroom scales and not his, he will never reach a point of realisation where he says to himself, ok then Biggles, enough’s enough, you’re just too big and heavy for all that now- people are getting flattened.

It will then become the job of the owner to point out that dogs jumping up on people, cars and furniture is no longer acceptable. How effective this exercise turns out to be will come down to how bothered you are by your dogs insistence that vertical take-off is the only way to go. The owners of many small dogs actually quite like their little dogs launching themselves into their arms or upon their laps, and consider it a sign of affection. Fortunately, with dogs of this size, not much damage is usually done to furniture or cars, and only the smallest of children are likely to be knocked down.

However, it’s not often that a total stranger will welcome four flying toy sized paws with the delight that you might.

So, the message to you, the responsible dog owner who wants other people to like your dog as much you do, is to teach your dog the ‘off’ command. This command will come in vital when you are not with in arms length of your dog, and from an outsiders point of view, to watch an excitable dog at play, that immediately responds to the ‘off’ command, instantly delivers a huge amount of respect for the owner, and a lessening of any fear that may be associated with being around a loose dog, irrelevant of whether the dog is jumping up at them.

If a toy dog is not for you, and you’ve gone for a larger type, then the ‘off’ command is a vital part of owning your bigger breed. When a large breed stands up on his back legs and plants those big paws on your shoulders, his head could well be higher than yours, and if he happens to do that to a small person, then there will be big trouble. Even if your big dog has incredible powers of balance and doesn’t knock his subject over, the damage potential to skin and clothes from such large paws and nails is too much to risk. You have no choice but to teach this to your dog and teach it well.

Why Do Dogs Jump Up?

Dogs jump up for a variety of reasons, mostly related to excitement and enthusiasm and when adrenaline is at high levels. They like to greet their owners at the door when they return after a long period, such as a day at work and are literally jumping for the joy of you returning. Many dogs don’t jump up atall and show their enthusiasm by such furious tail wagging that almost as much damage gets done to the ornaments!

If it’s occasions like these that your dog is jumping up, then there’s no sinister motive going on, however some dogs use this activity to exert their dominance over you. This issue is less common than jumping for joy, but it is significantly more serious.

The reasons behing how and why this is a dominance behaviour stems from when dogs lived in packs and just like the chickens, they have a pecking order of hierarchies and strength is one way of sorting this out between each other. A dog that needed to assert it’s dominance over another dog of a lesser standing, would demonstrate its strength by jumping up and planting one or both paws over the shoulders of the other dog.

Now that you’re aware that there is more than one reason for jumping up, you may well be wondering how you can tell which is which. If your dog only jumps up at you and others during times of fun, games and excitement; then chances are, no big trauma, it’s just happiness. If his jumping up happens at different times, when there is not much going on for example, then it may be that he’s trying to play the dominance card and this becomes a more complex situation.

The fundamental thing to bare in mind is that for this situation to be put right, there will need to be some fairly major changes to the relationship between you and your dog.

The biggest effect on whether this behaviour can be moderated is reliant on how you react to your dog’s jumping up, and whether you can make the prolonged and consistent effort required to sort out this problem.

Your dog is going to have to learn that jumping up, from this point on, is not allowed, under any circumstances. You will not be able to let him jump up sometimes, but not others. Your dog just doesn’t have the perception to realise that you have your good clothes on instead of your dog walking gear, and although he may pick up on bad tempers in the house, he can’t tell if your irritable or ready for a tussle in the garden.

The message he will get is it’s okay to jump up sometimes, is this time one of those times? Oh, ok, not now.….what about now?

Stopping your dog from Jumping Up.

The easiest method of stopping your dog from jumping up, which is also the most effective, according to most good trainers is to simply ignore your dog whenever he jumps up. Simply give him the cold shoulder and withdraw all attention, and that include negative attention; which is any form of correction, pushing him down and shouting at him to stop.

Follow these simple guidelines to see how it’s done.

·Whenever your dog jumps up at you, simply turn your back on him, immediately. (Body language is understood much more clearly than any form of spoken words by animals in general, so you are going to communicate with him using your body.)

·Simply fold your arms, turn your back on him, turn your face away from him and look away from him, not at him.

·It’s important not to confuse the ‘ignoring the dog’ with ‘ignoring the behaviour’. Using this method, you are not ignoring the behaviour, you are reacting to it- by turning away. It’s just not the reaction your dog was after or expecting. Life is all about actions and reactions, for us as well as animals, and when we do things, we receive some kind of feed back or reaction. If the reaction is unpleasant, we tend not to repeat the action, if the reaction is favourable, then we have hit on a good thing and feel duty bound to repeat it. Your dog wants to interact with you, so he jumps up. You ignore him and turn away, the dog doesn’t get his interaction. Very quickly he will see the cold shoulder as unpleasant.

·When he doesn’t receive the usual reaction he gets from jumping up, be it pushing and shoving, being hauled away by the collar, lured away by someone else with a cookie etc. he will calm down very quickly.

WHEN ALL FOUR PAWS ARE ON THE GROUND

·As soon as all four paws are on the ground, praise him to bits. Don’t worry about the closeness of time between the cold shoulder for bad and the praise for good. The training memory for dogs is very short and they can only process the reaction to whatever it is they are doing at the time. (That’s why it’s pointless shouting at them when you come in from work and find your best shoes chewed up in the kitchen. They will just learn that you coming home is not a nice thing.)

For more information on understanding and solving canine behavioral problems, you’d probably be interested in checking out Secrets to Dog Training. It’s a complete how-to manual for dog owners, and is packed with just about all the information you’ll ever need on dog psychology, canine communication how-to’s, practical advice for dealing with problem behaviors, and detailed step-by-step guides to obedience training. You can also get a free 6 day mini course on dog behaviour delivered straight to your email inbox from here, and get a free report exposing some of the myths behind some dog training practices from here.