Seasons Greetings!

Guests Are Coming!
How Do I Teach 'No Jumping'?
Greetings are often a challenge for so many dogs. I am frequently asked by people "How do I teach 'no jumping'?" Some of the challenges are jumping at the front door or on family members or guests - especially guests arriving for holiday celebrations this time of year and jumping on people on walks. 

The TRIP Toolbox 
TRIP stands or Train, Reinforce, Interrupt, Prevent. These are like tools in your training toolbox. Here's a bit more about the method:

Train Alternative Behaviors
One of the best ways to teach no jumping is to teach your dog what to do. It is easier to teach what TO DO than it is to teach what NOT to do. In class when I ask what do you want your dog to do instead of jumping the answers are "be calm" and "have all four feet on the floor" but it usually takes a little probing to get people to think about the action of sitting as an alternative behavior. Most dogs have had a lot of practice sitting when asked!

Train "Sit to Greet"
In our Polite Greetings class we teach a variety of greetings but the first is always "Sit to Greet" and "Sit for Passers-by". We've been teaching this for years. It still takes practice for a dog to be able to sit calmly when exciting things are happening. That is a part of growing up and learning self control.

How to Train "Sit to Greet"
Practice leads to confidence!
Practice sit when it is easy at first, when no one is at the front door. It may take a few minutes at first but once this is well practiced and well rewarded, it should become easier for both you and the dog.
Practice sit often - every time you go to the door you are in training mode. Taking the time to ask your dog to sit will make it a habit and that will get you closer to your goal of being able to sit when aroused. 
Practice Reinforcing Sit Often - if sit pays executive wages, then sit becomes a valuable behavior to your dog. Over time, if your timing is good, then you can use praise, patting and fewer food 'paychecks' if your dog begins to think sit is it's own reward.
Practice being consistent - It isn't really fair to allow your dog to jump on Uncle Dave or Cousin Bob and expect them not to jump on little children, elderly people with fragile bones or people with holiday finery or white silk suits.
Practice sit until released. Release your dog after a few seconds at first then increase the time slowly rewarding often.
Practice sit with everyone in the family. If one of the family members is impatient or doesn't ask for a sit at the door, they are training the dog what to expect.
Practice with set up situations. Ask a friend over for dinner or appetizers and use it as an opportunity to train the dog. 
Practice in the Real World. On your walks you can stop when someone passes you or someone wants to greet you or your dog. 
Practice sit with duration, (aka "stay") rewarding your dog for holding the sit frequently as they are sitting.
Practice with progressively more difficult distractions. Your dog will not be ready for prime time right away. If you are trying to do this two days before your New Year's Eve party or Thanksgiving at your house you may want to use management instead.

Reinforcement: Timing Is Key  
Ask your dog to sit, then use a marker like the word "Yes!" to tell your dog when they are doing the right thing and after you mark it, then you can praise, pat and then get you food reward it AFTER you mark, praise and pat. This seems like a very small thing, but if your reward is in sight before you ask for a sit, then your dog is going to think the food in your hand is a part of the signal to sit. If they are used to seeing food, then what happens if you don't have food bribe in your hand? The dog won't know what you mean and thus will not sit. Cue first, praise, pat, then the paycheck always comes last.

Interrupt Poor Behavior
If your dog is jumping on someone, you will need to interrupt the poor behavior by gently taking your dog's collar and pulling them down and away from the person or dog that they are jumping on. 

Prevent & Manage
When you don't have time to train, management is your friend. Management works well for puppies and adolescent dogs, as well as untrained dog but if you want a stellar companion dog, you will need to set aside some time to train. 

If you don't have time to train, you can manage the situation. It really helps the dog learn impulse control if their choices are limited while they are learning. You can limit their choices by putting them on leash, even in the front hall. We often tell people to keep a leash and rewards near the front door. You could also give the dog something to do - like chew on a bone or go fetch a ball.

If you haven't yet trained your dog, your other options are to put your dog in a safe place - on a leash, in a crate, in the back room, outdoors, in the car (well ventilated and safe) or take them to a friend's house or a boarding kennel. 

Distractions, Distractions!
Can your dog sit around distractions? Can they do it in a house? Can they do it with a mouse? Can they do it in a box? Can they do it when they see a running fox? We call distraction training our Dr. Suess lessons. As your dog gets better and better at sit, you can add a little bit of distractions at a time. Here is a list of some common distractions:

• Your movement: slow & fast
• Your distance from your dog
• Noises, like plastic bags crinkling, dogs barking, squeaky toys
• Toys or food on the ground
• Doorbells or knocking on doors
• Mailman or package delivery person 
• Other people moving or talking
• Other dogs walking by
• A favorite person approaching
• Cars, bikes, runners, skateboards going by
• Animals moving, running or making noises
• Toys being thrown near them
• Wildlife running
• Be creative and add some every day distractions to this list

There is a never ending list of distractions, so practice really helps your dog work through different situations.

When Do I Correct My Dog?
Our philosophy is for the handler to take responsibility: train first and set your dog up for success! We advocate using few, if any, corrections. Think about it, if your untrained dog failed whose fault is that anyway?  Take responsibility and train your dog or manage them to keep them out of trouble. A correction puts the responsibility on the dog. If you have not taken the time to really train your dog under all circumstances, then it is not really fair to expect them to know what you want them to do with distractions, or when they are excited or aroused. 

This not only takes practice, it takes patience, it takes being consistent and it takes a little bit of self control and maturity on the dog's part - which comes with time. 

Fortunately, practice can be a fun game and a few minutes a day at the door, or on a walk will pay off handsomely!

What Other Behaviors Can I Train for Greetings?
Here are a few behaviors (or if you like tricks) that you can train instead of jumping. 

• Go to your crate or mat
• Hold a ball in your mouth, instead of mouthing the guests
• Go Say Hi
• Relaxation Protocol
• Doggie Zen
• Crate Games
• Tricks: Bow, Sit Up, Shake

We teach topic classes in many of these specific behaviors, so you can look up our Living with Dogs website and join us in a class or contact us if you'd like to learn more. Also, join us for more interesting articles, photos and events on our Facebook page.

Training gives you more freedom from embarrassment and freedom to relax in all kinds of social situations. Hopefully, this will give you some ideas about how to train your dog to be a well-behaved dog that you can be very proud of. We hope all your holidays are fun and relaxing! 

Seasons Greetings!

From all of us at Living with Dogs,

Sandi, Ed, Irene & Kait
Tempe, KK, Piper & Pilot

What Training Schedule Works Best for Dogs?

I enjoyed reading about this cool new research and wonder if it would help my students who are working on stay for dog sports? 

Here is our new logo, designed by long time student Marguerite Meyer. Thank you!

Proactive & Progressive Training

I am a proactive trainer. I teach my students to try to be proactive and patient too. The other day a student who had a new rescue, Sadie, came to me for help. Sadie is a very energetic and a persistent jumper when greeting new people.

I explained to the client that by jerking the leash and correcting the dog verbally with "Eh-Eh!" or "No!", that the client's attention to her dog may be actually increasing the jumping behavior and actually hurting her relationship with the dog. She had a hard time understanding how force free training would work, but she was willing to give it a try because the corrective approach wasn't working for her at all.

We started by ignoring Sadie's jumping for a bit. I walked up to her and when she jumped, I did not move, look at her, talk to her or interact with her. I was using the lack of social interaction to extinguish the behavior. Finally, after waiting 30 seconds, she sat by herself. marked her behavior with the word "Yes" and rewarded her richly, We poured on the praise, scratched her generously behind her ears and rewarded with tidbits of food her for sitting.


I wanted to use some preventative management so she could not practice jumping on me while we trained, so I stepped on her leash so that it did not restrict her but stopped her jumping up. Meanwhile, before she could start jumping, I asked for a sit and rewarded her lavishly again this time for by dropping her food rewards on the ground. A high rate of reward is very important in the beginning when a dog is replacing old behaviors with new ones. We continued with a very high rate of reward for about 2 minutes and then we gave her a break so she had time to soak that lesson in. Breaks are important too. We continued practicing with three lessons asking for a "four feet on the floor" sit and tapered off on the food rewards very slowly, while praising and patting and playing with her. By the end of about 5 minutes she was no longer jumping on me.

Sadie will go home and practice greetings for the week. We may have to warm her up again next week, and continue the lesson until she is no longer jumping, even if that means a year of training.

When a dog practices a behavior for a long time, it becomes ingrained in their brain, in a neural pathway. We want that old neural pathway to become weak through lack of practice and lack of rewarding consequences. We want to create a new neural pathway that gets stronger with each day's practice. This requires patience and persistence on the owners part. She is very motivated to stop the jumping, because Sadie could jump on her elderly mother and knock her down.

We could go a bit further with the training in the time she has and make sure that Sadie had lots of experience greeting many different people, men, women and children and proof her for different environments and set ups, like the front door with the door bell or knocking noise.

My mother always told me "Inch by inch, life's a cinch. Yard by yard, life is hard." and that holds true in dog training too. Sadie is a fun and smart dog and I expect her to learn relatively quickly with a progressive approach and lots of practice. Her owner is delighted with Sadie's progress and is now interested in Agility, which would be a really nice way to use some of Sadie's boundless energy!

Photos by Pierre Tardiff (c) 
The top photo is another Agility student, Gypsy and the bottom photo is our lovely Aptos training field.

On the Path: Changing Fear to Joy

Fear can be a tough nut to crack. Changing a dog's emotional response takes persistence, but is so well worth the time. The result is a dog who is more comfortable in the world.

I've been working with my Jack Russell Terrier Kenzie's fear of large animals including horses and very large dogs. Her fear came about in one very short moment, that I wish had never happened.

When Kenzie was a 12 week old puppy my brother in law scooped her up without asking and put her up on top of his horse, she was terrified. I asked him to get her down right away, but within a few seconds the damage was already done. As a young pup in her sensitive imprinting window, this was a very fearful experience that made a lasting impression.

Later that summer we drove to Idaho to a dog show and to visit a friend on her farm. My friend saw that Kenzie was afraid of her sheep and she said "I can fix that!" and as she said this she scooped up the young Kenzie and dropped her in the sheep pen without asking me first.  Kenzie again was terrified and the sheep were terrified as well, stampeding around the pen. I quickly climbed over the fence and rescued her, but again damage was already done. I was upset that she had been compromised. It made things much worse - she did not "just get over it".

Exposing a dog to something they fear without being able to  escape it is called "Flooding". We often see dogs becoming reactive because they have been flooded with the stimuli, usually with the bad experience of being attacked while on leash and unable to escape. I often hear people say about dogs "Just let them get over it!" or "Let them work it out" by exposing them to the things they are afraid of. The issue with this approach is that 1) it is cruel, 2) the dog may become overly sensitized, 3) the dogs may shut down and learn that being unresponsive is the way to get through it (learned helplessness), 4) and the dogs become even more fearful and reactive.

Ideally we would change the dog's emotions to happiness or even joy when they see the formerly scary thing! Through Counter Conditioning and Desensitizaiton we are able to pair scary things with good consequences like safety and food rewards and make it less scary for them.  Let me explain....

On our beach walks we have been running across a lot of large dogs, some well mannered and others not so much. Kenzie usually lowers her head, and begins to walk stiffly toward them, then will quiver her lip if they get close and then show a little bit of teeth. If the dog is big and lunges toward us, she will snap at them. I usually stop her by calling her name before her head goes down and give her an alternative job to keep her busy but wouldn't it be better if I could be more proactive and keep her from showing fear at all?

The most effective technique I have used to date has been "Look At That" (LAT). I learned about LAT from Leslie McDevitt's "Control Unleashed" book. Basically I taught her to look at inanimate things first and marked a quick glance with the word "yes!". KK knows that "Yes!" means she has done a good job and can come collect her paycheck (food reward) so she has to turn around and come to me. In her nine years she has not ever, not even once missed collecting her paycheck, imagine that!

After eight weeks of going to our local training group practice where there is a giant breed dog, and working on LAT it finally started working. Why did it take so long? Kenzie is usually very quick at catching on to things. She's been a star in Treibball, loves doing Agility, enthusiastic at Nosework, wonderful at Freestyle (what little we have done), she even tried Dock Diving and Flyball -- so what's the deal? Why didn't she learn to recover from her fears more quickly?

The Reverse Learning Curve
Two things....first, around large animals Kenzie did not feel safe and second, when dogs are uncomfortable or fearful it takes much longer for them to learn anything. Her learning curve usually goes steeply up ad then plateaus, but when she is afraid of something, it appears that the techniques that I am teaching her are not working, at least for a much longer time and then finally all of a sudden she demonstrates that she understands. The reverse learning curve for fear is the opposite of our usual training experiences. The reverse learning curve was first described by Dr Peter Borchelt, an animal behaviorist in New York City. She had created a neural pathway in her brain, which is a habitual response to a stimulus. A neural pathway is much like the erosion that creates a path for a river like the Grand Canyon is the pathway for the Rio Grande. Her response pathway was deep and well ingrained with practice. I had to "dig" a deeper pathway for a happy, relaxed response in order to change her emotions.
.

I had to work on her feeling safe - that was accomplished by creating distance between us and the very large, gregarious dog. Food rewards alone did not make her feel safe. Second, I had to give her enough time and repetitions to learn - she'd been practicing her "growly bear" habits for a long time, too long for me to be able to change the underlying emotions overnight. She needed thousands of safe and happy exposures in many new places with many new dogs to start making a change to her habits and emotions.

Is Kenzie completely fixed? Probably not. What dogs learn first, they learn best. It takes a lot of work to change those early responses and dig those new neural pathways. I will continue to work to manage her environment and keep her safe and working on the conditioning to change her responses.

On Looking Back and Going Forward
I'd give anything to have those moments back in order to not have had this problem but it is a waste of creative energy to spend time worrying about the unchangeable past. Going forward into the future, I know now to protect my dogs, manage their environment and work on getting lots of happy experiences so we can ride through the bumpy times.

I've been able to use these experiences to benefit hundreds of puppies and family dogs as well as sport dogs and reactive dogs in our classes at Living with Dogs. I am grateful for my job and all of the wonderful things we can do to help dogs live better, happier lives in their homes and in our society.

Our beach walks are now very fun and Kenzie continues with her amazing abilities to learn new behaviors -- as long as she feels safe!

I wish you and your dogs many happy, fun and safe experiences!