5 quick steps to get your dog to stop jumping NOW!

I last discussed the 3 steps to training your dog in 3 days and that pertained to the 3 “C’s.” That where Criteria, Consistency and Confidence and applying them to daily life you can train your dog in 3 days.

You can also apply the 3 “C’s” to get your dog to stop jumping up on people.
Here are 5 steps to getting your dog to stop jumping by using the 3 “C’s.”

Step 1: You are going to want your dog to know a basic “sit” command, as that will be your default behavior instead of the dog jumping.

Step 2: With your dog having a good understanding of the “sit” command, you will now re enforce sit for everything, before eating dinner and sitting at the door before going out or coming in. The more you re enforce your dog sitting, the less they will want to jump up, because there is nothing good that happens when they go to jump.

Step 3: Now that your dog is sitting more and getting more re enforcement for sitting rather than jumping it’s time to introduce having people greet him. You will want to have your dog on a leash in a controlled environment, such as your house, have the person approach your dog. You will need to remind your dog that sitting is what you want by giving treats every so often.

If the dog starts to lift their feet off the ground your “guest” will need to stand up turn around and walk away. You don’t say anything, just let the dog settle down and then put them in a sit. Go ahead and do the exercise again, have your “guest” approach your dog and give your dog treats if they remain in a sit. You can have your “guest” pet your dog if they remain in a sit.

Step 4: You are going to want to practice step 3 for a few weeks on leash till your dog 85% of the time walks up to the person and automatically sits. Then you will add having the person knock on the door. This will add excitement to the mix, which is usually when dogs want to jump.  Keep the dog on a leash and let them decided if they will jump or stay on the ground. If they keep all 4 on the floor reward, if not ignore the behavior of jumping, have your “guest” turn around and walk away. Repeat when the dog is back in a sitting position.

If your dog fails this step 3 times in a row they are telling you that they do not have enough confidence to move on to this step, go back to step 3 and work on that for a few more repetition. Then try step 4 again.

In the 3 “C’s” this step would be maintaining consistency in your criteria on what the dog must do in order to get their reward.

Step 5: If your dog is completing steps 1-4 with 85% accuracy or better then you will want to proceed to step 5.
In this step you will be having your dog off leash when your “guest” knocks on your door.  Here you will want to see what your dog’s decision is, to remain with all 4 on the floor or to jump.

Take step 5 and now generalize it to different areas, different amounts of excitement and different environments. The more you have your dog remain with all 4 on the floor in all situations the better your dog will understand that the criteria is now set at no matter what is going on all 4 on the floor.

This step would be considered the test or confidence phase of the 3 “C’s”.