25 JunEpisode 13 | Ask Annie: Curtailing jumping and helping scaredy dogs
For our first Q + A episode, I addressed questions from three listeners. Two of the questions in this episode are about jumping — one is about dealing with a dog who is jumping on people on the street, and the other is about jumping on people who enter the home. The third question is about a dog who is dealing with a lot of fear regarding novel things, people and dogs.
If you would like to have a question answered, I will be happy to answer it!
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Podcast Episode 13: Ask Annie: Curtailing jumping and helping scaredy dogs
Transcript:
Annie:
Hi, my name is Annie Grossman and I'm a dog trainer. This podcast is brought to you by School for the Dogs, a Manhattan based facility I own and operate along with some of the city's finest dog trainers. During this podcast, we'll be answering your questions, geeking out on animal behavior, discussing pet trends, and interviewing industry experts. Welcome to School for the Dogs podcast.
Hey everyone. So I am super excited because this is our very first School for the Dogs Podcast: Q&A episode. And I've collected some great questions here that I am going to answer. If you have a question that you would like answered on school for the dogs podcast, there are lots of ways that you can get in touch with us. If you're listening to this through anchor, which is our podcast hosting company, it's super easy through their app. To ask us a question, just click the, “send a voice message” button next to our icon. You will see it as soon as you log in. You can also send an email to podcast@schoolforthedogs.com or you can call and leave a voice message. (917) 414-2625. Alternatively, you can send a text message to that number. Our first question today comes from an anchor listener.
Corey:
Hi Annie, my name's Corey. I'm just new to your podcast and I'm also an owner of a newish Labrador puppy. She's actually 11 months old, but, um, my question is the jumping. My dog is extremely excited, very friendly, very happy. We've been through two basic trainings. No one's really been able to help me in the area of jumping. She's a jumper. She's a big girl, she's 75 pounds. And when people come in the house or we're outside a neighbor comes up to her, she just jumps in, of course I say down, of course we do the whole thing with the tree, but it just seems like we just cannot get over this hurdle of her jumping up. And of course it's not good because she could hurt somebody inadvertently. So any tips would be great. Thanks so much. Love the show.
Annie:
I'm so glad Corey asked this question because it's certainly a problem that a lot of dog owners deal with, especially people who have young dogs and large dogs. Jumping up is a totally normal puppy behavior. Really it's a normal behavior for any dog. And I think the big reason why dogs jump up is because how do they greet each other? They each other's butt and mouths. Well in order to smell our butts and mouths, they need to jump. Now I think this question as Cory has posed it offers a really good opportunity to talk about punishment, both how punishment can be used effectively and how it can be used ineffectively. But before I get into the topic of punishment, I want to talk about how you can stop this behavior from starting in the first place, right? Because one reason that I'm not a huge fan of punishment is that in order to punish a behavior, you have to have the behavior happening in the first place. And I rather not let the behaviors happen at all, right. If your dog's not doing annoying stuff, then you have nothing to punish. And to me, that's the best kind of dog training, right? Is to create a situation where your dog wants to do the stuff you want them to do, and just isn't doing the stuff you don't want them to do.
So when I deal with puppies in puppy class, we talk a lot about greetings, human greetings and dog greetings. And I suggest that when you have your dog outside on a leash and somebody wants to come up and say hi to your dog, you get down low hook your fingers into your dog's harness or a collar. Get some treats, put the treats on the ground and have the person who's approaching your dog, give your dog treats too, rght? And what you're doing here is twofold. First of all, you're making it unlikely. Your dog is going to jump because you physically are restraining them. But you're also making, being down near the ground a really fun thing because that's where treats are happening. And you know, I say treats but treats food. It's all the same thing. In fact, I think that a lot of the time simply feeding your dogs meals while you're out on walks, especially with, if you have a young dog is a really great idea because outside you are generally a lot less interesting than everything else around, right, inside your dog has to eat. And we're usually the ones providing the food, but by providing the food on the floor in the kitchen two or three times a day, like we generally do, we're kind of losing fuel that we could be using to teach new things like teaching that I am extra interesting, right? Your dog spends all their time with you. So compared to all the exciting things that they're encountering outside, you are relatively boring–unless when you're outside, you become the dispenser of the only meal that they're going to have that day.
And if you're armed on your walk with your dogs entire breakfast, for example, you're going to have a lot of opportunities to use food, to reward all the good things your dog is doing outside, like paying attention to you at all. Like not jumping. You know, you can reward every moment that your dog isn’t jumping, and do reward by your knee or toss the treats on the ground to again, encourage good things, encourage, you know, this idea that good things are happening on the ground.
Otherwise what tends to happen when someone approaches you to say hi to your dog on the street is you're walking, walking, walking, your dog is not paying much attention to you. There's lots of exciting things going on. And then, Oh my goodness, this person is all excited to see me. I'm going to get super excited to see this person. And then you, the dog owner probably have this sort of Norman Rockwell idea in your mind of your dog should be sitting nicely next to you while the person's coming to say, hello. Your dog hasn't seen that picture and is instead going bananas and you're yelling down at your dog and it's just madness, right? So I'd rather stop those behaviors from starting in the first place. Get down low, hook your fingers in your dog's collar, give the person a treat to give your dog. And then you're also creating a good association for your dog, with new people approaching. And neither of you are going to be out of control in that moment. I also find it can be a really good move to bring a toy out with you on the street with a dog, and periodically played tug with your dog or bounce a ball for your dog.
But again, you're trying to make yourself interesting and to provide appropriate outlets for them to expend their energy, rather than letting them get that energy out by jumping up on people. One other tip is to walk really fast with your dog when you're outside and switch directions all the time, right? Don't–I say to my clients, you know, you want to be a really unreliable navigator when you're outside, you want your dog to be like, I never know where we're going, right? Because if you're just going straight all the time, your dog has no real need to pay much attention to you. You want your dog to be like a backseat driver, trying to figure out what your next move is going to be and trying to keep up with you. Uh, not only is that going to keep their focus on you, but it's going to make you again more exciting. And that's a big part of our goal here is to make you interesting on walks.
Now, like I said, I wanted to use this as a chance to talk a little bit about punishment. So there are two kinds of punishment: negative punishment and positive punishment. And in this context, negative means that you're taking something away and positive means that you’re adding something and punishment, technically speaking, just means that you're discouraging a behavior. Of course, on the other side of the equation, we have reinforcement, which is encouraging a behavior. And there too, we have positive reinforcement and negative reinforcement. One is adding something to encourage a behavior, and one is taking something away in order to encourage a behavior. So it sounds like what Cory is trying to do is to punish the behavior of jumping, using positive punishment. And I know punishment can sound like big and harsh and scary. And she said, she's just yelling the word down at her dog, which you know, is not some horrible, evil thing to do at all. But if the goal of yelling down is to get your dog to stop jumping, then you're attempting to punish the behavior.
So there are a few reasons why this punishment seems to be proving ineffective. One is I'm guessing that your dog doesn't actually find you talking to him in any way punishing. And this is something you can notice. If you ever hear someone talk to their dog or try and reprimand their dog or get their dog to do something different than they're doing in a foreign language. Uh, I think we tend to give dogs a lot more credit for understanding our specific commands, as we say them, especially in moments of excitement, than they deserve credit for. So while you're saying down to your dog and you expect them to understand what you want them to do, because maybe they do know that cue and other circumstances, the reality is in the moment you might as well be there saying applesauce, jelly bean, pumpkin, bubblegum.
One way you can tell whether or not you are successfully punishing the behavior is that a punished behavior shouldn't keep happening, right? The definition of punishment is it should be discouraging a behavior. So if every day your dog is jumping on people on the street and every day, you're trying to get them to not do this by saying no or down or whatever it is you're saying, and then the next day it happens again, chances are, you are actually only reinforcing the behavior. And while I commend trying to use treats to redirect the dog to the ground, probably this is only reinforcing the behavior too, from the dog's point of view, he's like, “Oh, I jumped. And then there are treats on the ground. So the behavior of jumping must be a good thing.” So if you are going to use food to redirect your dog's attention outside, which I do think is a good idea. I would suggest delivering them down low on the ground before your dog starts jumping. Ideally, just regularly, if not on the ground, like I said, by your knee, but what you want is your dog to just think, gosh, outside, there's lots of good stuff. My human's allowing me to get on the ground. There's lots of good stuff happening by his or her knee. My human is especially interesting outside, and I don't care about all these other people because my person is where it's at.
**music**
Annie:
We have another question about jumping here. This one's from Bev in Bedford, New York.
Bev:
I have a three year old golden doodle, and my question is about jumping, and I know how to curtail jumping. Basically if I just turn my back and ignore my dog as if I'm highly insulted, that works, but it's difficult to get everyone that comes to the door to help with that training. So he gets mixed messages from people that mean well and say, “Oh, I don't mind.” So my question is, if I have a group of friends here, um, and I'm hosting a party or lunch, do you think it's a good idea to have a trainer here, and that day to completely, you know, occupy him and teach him that jumping on people is a no-no?
Annie:
That's a great question. While it would be great to have a trainer there every time you have people over to help occupy your dog and do concerted training with them in those moments, I don't think that's a sustainable solution because you probably aren't going to have a trainer there absolutely every time you have someone come over. So let's try and figure out some sustainable solutions to this very common problem. Now, what Bev describes doing is an example of negative punishment, taking something away in order to discourage a behavior, What she's taking away when she turns her back is her attention. And the behaviors she's trying to discourage is jumping. Now, again, one of the big problems with any kind of punishment is that it generally happens after the behavior has occurred. And once the behavior has occurred in the moment it's occurred, it has been most likely reinforced–because jumping is fun. Jumping feels good. So whatever happens after the jumping is fighting against the money that's been put into the bank account of jumping being a fun thing.
I kind of think of it. It's like if you had a kid who was doing a cannonball into a pool. Well, if the moment that they hit the water, the pool went into flames, that would probably be effective, positive punishment, right? Um, because it would be happening at the exact moment that they hit the water. The problem is, again, just the very act of jumping probably would have been fun and it would be excellent if the timing of the punishment could be so specific as to happen exactly when they hit the water. But even then, you're not, you can't be sure that the kid is going to associate jumping into the pool as the thing they shouldn't be doing. Right. They might think, Oh, jumping into this part of the pool was the problem. But if I jump into that part of the pool, it'll be okay. Or maybe doing the cannonball was the problem, that if I had just done a dive, it wouldn't have been an issue, or this pool is bad but that pool over there is good. And it kind of doesn't matter if someone is standing on the sidelines, shout, shouting “Don't do that,” because again, it's already been done. An example of negative punishment in that situation would be taking the kid’s allowance away for jumping into the pool. Again, they've already jumped into the pool. So you're punishing a behavior that already exists. Whereas in general, in any kind of training, my preference is to create situations where you're not going to get the behaviors you don't want.
So, I'd say Bev's dog is being reinforced for jumping a hundred percent of the time. Sometimes the reinforcement is just jumping up because jumping is fun. Although it might also then be punished after it's happened, because then Bev turns her back at an attempt to negatively punish the behavior. Sometimes the behavior of jumping up is reinforced because whoever comes over says, Oh, I don't mind. It's totally fine. And then lavishes lots of attention on the dog. You can understand that he must be confused. My suggestion is let's figure out some ways that we can keep jumping from happening at all. Now, certainly if you know, you're going to have guests over, I suggest helping the dog get out energy in lots of appropriate ways before they arrive–going for a run, throwing a ball in the yard, playing a really good game of tug or fetch.
Then the next order of business is teaching the dog that people coming through the door means lots of good stuff happens on the floor. So one way you could do this is put some treats outside by your front door and instruct your guests to grab some when they come in and then toss them on the ground at your dog when they come in the door. The challenge here might be training people to just throw the treats on the ground, because for whatever reasons we humans tend to want dogs to do some specific thing before we give them a treat. Oh, I'm only going to give a treat if he sits or whatever. And in this scenario I don't really care what the dog is doing. I just want him to make the association: people coming into the door means treats on the ground.
It's probably a good idea to set up some situations before you are actually having a party with new people coming over where your dog can practice this with decoys coming through the door. So if you have a neighbor who once a day can commit to coming over and practice this, that's going to help your dog learn this much faster than if you only try and practice it in the actual moments when you are having guests over.
You can also automate this whole process by investing in a Treat and Train. A Treat and Train is a remote controlled treat dispenser that costs about $125 I believe. We do have it StorefortheDogs.com and in our East village shop. I love this thing. I think it's well worth the investment. Basically you just fill it with treats or dry food or any, any kind of hard small treat. You could use peanuts, you could use Cheerios, and it sits on the floor and you push a tiny button that you can carry in your hand and treats come out. It also operates on a timer so you could set it to dispense every five seconds and just push the button once when people come in. If you have a dog that you have in a crate, you can also sit at on top of the crate so that it'll drop treats into the crate when you push the button. I even have clients who tape up the button by their front door along with a note that says, push this when you enter. And that way every time someone comes into the house or the apartment, the dog is learning that good things pop out of this little machine, which ideally you're keeping far away from the door. And as long as you make sure that it's always full and that your dog is psyched about whatever food is in it, it makes a little ding sound before the treats pop out. So, it's just a really great way to consistently condition your dog to understand good things happen from this machine whenever anyone enters that door.
And it's a really easy thing to practice every day. Again, it's important that it be filled with something that is more exciting to the dog than jumping up on new people. Then when your dog is paying attention to stuff that's on the ground, you can tell your guests that they can go ahead and approach your dog. I would suggest that you tell them to get down low, kneel down on the ground. Again, dogs want to smell our mouths and our butts. So if we can get down to their level, they're going to be less inclined to jump. And give the dog a lot of love at their level. And of course, if you have someone over who's not interested in hanging out with your dog, that's totally fine too.
But the trick is to have the person approach the dog and give the dog attention before the dog jumping on them.
**music**
Annie:
Our next question comes from an Instagram follower. We're on Instagram @schoolforthedogs. Her name is Roxy the Brindle. She lives in Georgia, and her human rights and says:
“Do you have any tips for an extremely fearful dog? I'm looking for a rehab place for her. And while I think your program at School for the Dogs would be a perfect fit for her because she responds well when she has other dogs to look at, I'm located in Georgia and I can't drive to New York City. Roxy is terrified of large moving objects. She's very uncertain of new things. She loves other dogs, but is uncertain around new ones–her fur stands up on her back. She also runs away when people approach her and force love on her.”
So first of all, who are the idiots out there who are approaching dogs without asking? Didn't we all learn when we were kids that you need to say, “may I please say hi to your dog?” You know, in the many years before I became a dog trainer, I was definitely someone who wanted to say hi to every dog I saw on the street. And I would ask, and you know, I used to think that dog owners were jerks. If they said no, you can't say hi to my dog, I used to think like, wow, you certainly have problems. [laugh] But now I don't think that at all. Now I think that's great if you have a dog who can't, if you have a dog and your dog can't deal with strangers approaching him or her on the street, then it's really a good thing that you as a dog owner are telling people to not say hi to your dog on the street.
So my first suggestion is do whatever you need to do to make sure people are not approaching your dog. If it's not okay with you, I often will say when someone is approaching a dog I'm working with and I don't want them to, “He has conjunctivitis!” Which is not true. [laughs] I generally am not working with a dog who has conjunctivitis, but it sounds contagious and it's enough to make people go away. You can also buy leash sleeves that say please don't approach my dog. You can get these on Etsy. If you just type into Etsy, “dog leash sleeves,” you'll see lots of different options. And there's a woman in California, Mimi Reed. She is the wonderful woman who makes the treat pouches that we sell at School for the Dogs. She makes vests that you can get that say, please give my dog some space or she can write whatever you want to say on the vest.
But that's a easy thing to, to put on a vest. They're super easy to put onto dogs. They're comfortable. You can get her vests at etsy.com/shopgiveadogahome and there's actually a whole movement trying to get people to tie yellow ribbons to leashes if you have a dog who shouldn't be approached. I'm not sure that this has taken off enough to be really well understood. I think it's probably better to have a vest that says please don't approach my dog, but you can learn more about the yellow ribbon idea at theyellowdogproject.com. And I also really liked the site dogsinneedofspace.com. You know, your dog might never be okay with strangers approaching her on the street and I think that's fine, but still as a dog owner, your job is to work at helping her be less scared of the world around her.
And that comes down to helping create good associations with all the things she's going to be encountering in her life. And this comes down to classical conditioning. If you're interested in more on classical conditioning, I did an episode a few weeks ago with our trainer, Anna Marie Johnson, where we geeked out all about classical conditioning. Classical conditioning is just another way of saying learning by association, it's also called Pavlovian conditioning. And again, it's just about changing a dog's underlying feeling about something. You might end up changing behaviors. You generally are trying to change a behavior, but you're not doing it by focusing on the behavior. You're focusing on the feeling that's causing the behavior to happen. And most aggression in dogs stems from fear.
So a lot of the time when we're working with aggressive dogs or fearful dogs–well a lot of times when we're working with aggressive dogs, we are working with fearful dogs. And a lot of times when we're working with fearful dogs, we're trying to prevent them from becoming aggressive. And how are we doing this by teaching them that all the things that they might choose to bark at or attack or whatever are actually safe and don't warrant that kind of reaction.
The tricky thing is when you're training, when you're focusing on classical conditioning during training, sometimes you're going to be feeling like you're rewarding a dog for doing behaviors that you don't like, right? Your dog is barking at that dog across the street and I as your trainer, I'm going to say, shove some Turkey in your dog's mouth and you're going to feel like, “but I'm rewarding the behavior of barking.” and I'm going to say “I don't care, do it anyway,” because we're not focusing on the behavior. We're focusing on the feeling that's causing the behavior and if we can get enough repetitions down of your dog being like” that dog across the street equals turkey from my human,” eventually you're going to have a dog who's not barking at the dog across the street to go away.
Now, the good news is your dog has to eat throughout the day at least two times, right? You can use these regular meals to help change their feelings about things. Of course, the goal should not be to absolutely terrify your dog. If at any point your dog is too scared to take some high value treat like turkey or bacon or cheese or whatever, you have definitely pushed them too far. But an easy first step might be to simply feed your dog her meals outside on the sidewalk, right? She probably doesn't need to make more good associations with eating from a bowl in the kitchen, right? She probably already feels pretty fine about being in your kitchen and feels okay about bowls on the floor, but by feeding her on the sidewalk, or on a bench in the park, you're going to help her associate that yummy food with all the stimuli she's going to encounter outside: kids on skateboards and people walking by with suitcases and people on motorcycles and new dogs, et cetera, et cetera.
So you could literally just bring her bowl of food to the park and sit on a bench with her. Or you could feed her her food piece by piece. Or we often deliver yummy things out of what we call liquid treat dispenser. We sell these storeforthedogs.com. With the liquid treat dispenser, which is basically just a little travel shampoo tube, you can give her peanut butter or you can fill it with liverwurst or you can put cream cheese in. It makes it really easy to just consistently deliver a treat. It doesn't get your hands dirty, and also licking is very soothing for a dog. If you give your dog wet food, you can even put wet food in it or you can buy like a camping squeeze tube which is a little larger than our liquid treat dispenser. Just go to Amazon and type in camping squeeze tube.
Again, it's important to consistently be gauging your dog's fear level and it sounds like you're already doing a pretty good job at reading Roxy's body language cause you mentioned that sometimes her hackles go up. Of course I mentioned that if your dog is too scared to eat, that's definitely worth noting. You also want to watch out for various displacement signals. Things that dogs tend to do when they're a little nervous. Shaking off is one thing. Lip licking is a super common displacement behavior. Unless your dog has just swallowed something or has a mouth full of peanut butter or is obviously happy or hot, usually we don't want to be seeing their tongue. So if they're licking their nose, that's usually a sign of stress, or if they're doing a lot of panting, that can also be a sign of stress. Yawning is also something dogs often do when they're uncomfortable.
So these are just some things to look for. And I actually have a template that I sometimes give to clients. I will link to it in the show notes that you can use to try and track when you're seeing these kinds of behaviors on a walk. Because ideally if you're putting in the work and really focusing on classically conditioning your dog to new stimuli, you should be seeing less and less of these kinds of displacement behaviors. And I usually suggest that just on your regular walks, again, you should be bringing treats on these walks. Ideally something in a tube cause it's really easy to deliver. I would suggest just on regular walks trying to keep to the same path so that your dog can get really used to all the things she sees on that route. And also if you have a consistent route that you're sticking to, it kind of helps, uh, give you a baseline during which you can track how many times she is displaying those kinds of stress signals I was just talking about. Ideally you should be seeing them less and less.
If you're not, you might want to consider talking to your vet about medication, whether that's pharmaceutical or non-pharmaceutical. Sometimes if a dog is super stressed, medication can be necessary to just get them to a point where learning is possible. If a dog is really over the edge all the time and you're finding that the training that you're doing is not going anywhere, that might be a step that you need to take to at least get them to a point where they can start tuning into what you're trying to train them. If an animal is just so stressed about trying to survive at every moment, they're generally not going to be able to do any kind of useful learning. They're just in total or flight mode and that's not your fault. Sometimes that can just be baked in. Sometimes it might have to do with stressors that happen in their life, before you entered the picture. And in a lot of cases, I think that medication, uh, for an extremely fearful or anxious dog can be a really integral part to a good training plan.
One last thing I wanted to mention is that you said Roxy is fearful of large objects and new objects. Just something easy that you can do in your own home is all those scary objects that come out occasionally like the vacuum cleaner or the ironing board. I suggest keeping those out, let those potentially scary objects just become part of her daily landscape rather than being scary. Things that just suddenly appear now and then if you need to, you can sprinkle treats on them to help her be less fearful. But ideally she'll start to generalize that, you know, Oh, the suitcase in the living room at home is okay.vvSo the suitcase that this guy on the street has with him must also be okay. And we hope that the generalization might go even beyond that, so that new unusual objects will become less frightening to her as well.
Thank you to everyone for the great questions. Please send in your questions and I will answer them soon.
Our Woof Shout Out today, goes to Ginger. Ginger belongs to our trainer, Anna and Ginger is very fearful. She has a history of getting very nervous on the street, very nervous around new scary objects, just like Roxy. But Anna as a trainer has done so much great work with her and I think that just a lot of the fun training that they've done together, like Ginger's learn to put her toys away and to run through obstacle courses in the apartment. And, uh, I think a lot of that kind of training that they've done together has really boosted Ginger’s confidence overall.
So a big shout out to Ginger, who I love so much and to Anna who is wonderful and to Anna's husband Allen, who chauffeurs Ginger to and from wherever she needs to go because walking on the street is often too scary for her and they actually even have a stroller for her. Uh, which is an accommodation that helps her get from place to place because you know what? The city streets for some dogs can be just too much to handle. Even with the very best training that's out there. I think we ask a lot of dogs by asking them to live in our lives, in our homes, in these crazy cities that so many of us live in. And I give a lot of credit to all the dog owners out there who go to great lengths to make city life possible for their dogs. It's not always easy.
**music**
Fun dog fact of the day: Did you know that Shakespeare mentioned dogs over 150 times in his plays and sonnets, but there is only one instance where an actual dog appears in any of his plays. That play is the Two Gentlemen of Verona and the dog belongs to the character Lance. The dog's name is Crab, and he is described as “the sourest natured dog that lives.” What's up with that Shakespeare? In all of your many plays, you only made a part for one dog and he's a crotchety dude. Come on, come on. You could have done better. Oh, well I guess we're not going to start teaching Shakespeare anytime soon at School for the Dogs.
Thanks so much for listening. You can support School for the Dogs podcast by telling your friends about it, leaving a review or shopping in our online store. You can learn more about us and sign up to get lots of free training resources when you visit us online at Schoolforthedogs.com.
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