'Down, boy!' can encourage dog to jump

McClatchy Newspapers

A frequent and frustrating behavior that dog owners face is their pet jumping for attention.

Despite lots of corrective ways to address it, the dog continues to jump. Often, the solution to an undesirable behavior is to first have a better understanding of why the dog does it, so you can then deny the dog what it wants until you get what you want.

Jumping up is attention-seeking behavior. Our attention — from the dog's perspective — comes in three forms: eye contact, voice and physical touch. With this in mind, if you address your jumping dog by scolding him and pushing him away, you are, in fact, giving him exactly what he is seeking — attention!

From the dog's perspective, you were a little grumpy, but you gave attention nonetheless, so it seems logical for the dog to continue in this manner.

Keep in mind that dogs are bright, and spend enormous amounts of time figuring out how to glean what they want from their environment. Dogs repeat behavior that "pays" them in some sort of way, and quickly discard behavior that doesn't provide a positive outcome.

So, to best address the jumping dog, you must start by ignoring the behavior you don't like. When the dog jumps up, avoid eye contact, turn away from the dog, or walk past him, as if he doesn't exist. Repeat as long as the dog is jumping. Once he determines that jumping is getting him nowhere, he will stop doing it.

Watch and wait for your dog to behave differently; usually what we choose to reward is "all four paws on the floor" behavior. When this happens, you, for the first time, calmly acknowledge your dog and give him a bit of attention.

Of course the second you begin to pet and interact with your dog, the jumping will start up again; it's a well-ingrained pattern. You must be patient, and expect to repeat this message many, many times before the dedicated jumper changes his behavior. Patterns of behaviors are not formed without a lot of practice, and the jumping dogs have usually been successfully getting attention in this manner for some time.

Honestly, the jumping dog will usually jump more often when you initially begin this modification process. This is called the extinction burst. In the dog's mind, jumping has been a successful way to get your attention for quite a while, but now suddenly it isn't working. The dog won't immediately abandon a behavior that has been working so well up to this point. Instead, he will increase the amount of jumping, as if he is testing the theory, before finally coming to the conclusion that it no longer works. In the meantime, the dog begins to see a new pattern emerge — that of getting attention when all four are on the floor.

This is a standard and usually successful method of modifying the jumping behavior. There is a way, however, to get even faster results. Dog trainers who use clickers and apply operant conditioning, positive training techniques, can help a dog get the message more quickly. By using a clicker to "mark" correct behavior the instant it happens, we can click the dog for having all four paws on the floor before he jumps. The clicker allows us to deliver the message much faster than our bodies can respond, thus creating an accelerated learning process for the dog. That's part of the beauty of clicker training; once the dog understands what the clicker means, communicating with your dog becomes easier and learning occurs at a faster rate, including but not limited to, jumping up for attention.

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Lisa Moore's pet-behavior column appears once a month on the Weekly Pet Page. Write to her in care of LifeStyles, The Modesto Bee, P.O. Box 5256, Modesto CA 95352.