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.