Greetings and Salutations

Does your dog respond to the doorbell with a riot of barking and jumping up? Here’s how to teach him a calm greeting.

You’re most likely to encounter problems with greeting immediate family members, greeting guests in your home, and greeting people in public.

Greeting family members
You can try several different approaches with family members. First, all must agree to stop reinforcing your dog for jumping, and must all understand that any attention at all is reinforcement. Making eye contact with your dog when he jumps up is reinforcing him. By pushing him off, you’ve touched him – reinforcement!

To avoid reinforcing your dog for jumping up, he needs to get the opposite response. Rather than eliciting attention, a jump should make all attention go away. When he stops jumping (and, we hope, sits), turn back toward him and give him treats and/or attention.

Meanwhile, use a tether to teach him a more appropriate greeting. With Bounder on his tether, approach from a distance. If he’s leaping about in greeting, stand still until he’s calm, then move forward. When you are close enough to reach out and touch him (but he still can’t jump on you), stand still and wait for him to sit. When he sits, mark the polite behavior with a “Yes!” or the click! of a clicker, feed him a treat, and give him attention. Repeat this exercise until he sits promptly as soon as you head toward him. Now have the rest of the family practice, all the way down to the toddler.

Of course, your dog won’t always be on a tether, but when he has learned this exercise he’ll be much quicker to offer you (and others) that highly reinforced “sit” behavior in other scenarios as well.

Greeting guests in your home
Of course, it’s too much to expect that visitors will know enough to turn their backs on your dog when he jumps up on them, so it’s incumbent on you to make sure he doesn’t have the opportunity. Your tether will come in handy here. When the doorbell rings, calmly clip him to his tether station, feed him a yummy treat, then go greet your guests.

As your guests enter, hand them a few treats, and ask them to approach Bounder on his tether. Be sure they understand that they can feed him the treats and pet him only when he is sitting. Then supervise to be sure they follow directions.

When your dog’s initial excitement subsides, you can release him to greet your guests off leash. By then, you will have had time to instruct them on how to properly reinforce his polite greeting, and how to avoid reinforcing him if he does try to jump.

Greeting people in public
In public, your leash is the tether. Hold the leash, giving your dog only about three feet of slack. As people approach, keep your distance and the leash at a length that prevents your dog from lunging forward and jumping up on the passerby. You can, of course, reinforce your dog if he offers a sit. If the approacher appears to have dog-petting on their minds, ask (insist!) that they wait for him to sit first. If they say, “That’s okay, I don’t mind if he jumps up,” politely but firmly tell them that you mind, and that they need to wait until Bounder sits. If they ignore your instructions, turn and walk away with your dog, with a cheery “Oops! Sorry!”