dogs jumping up at guests

[AlphaSchmalpha]

I've posted the gist of this in WWYD, but thought it would be a good idea to ask dog owners about this situation - any views gratefully received, thank you!

If you had a friend (ie me) who came to your house for a weekend visit with her ds (3.5) and your two big dogs jumped up at both the friend and her ds, wouldn't leave the ds alone (licking his feet and sniffing at his face) and were obviously frightening him, what would you do?

Would you mind if the friend asked nicely if next time they visited if the dogs could be kept completely apart from her ds? Or would you be hurt / offended / think that the friend could damn well stay elsewhere?

(friend does not have dcs btw but adores ds and he loves seeing her)

"I can see how a dog can be trained to do something but "not" to do something is proving slightly more problematical. Or am I just being dense?"

You're not being dense, but it is pretty easy to train a dog out of as long as you and everyone else the dog meets is consistent.

The dog is jumping up to greet and get attention. If the attention ceases, the dog's reason for jumping up ceases, however, you also need to teach the dog an alternative behaviour.

So, the dog wants attention. If you ignore the jumping up dog effectively for long enough, it will eventually sit. When it does say 'sit' ans then lavish attention on the sitting dog. If the dog gets excited at any time, then simply ignore completely until it sits again. The dog will soon realise that jumping up = getting ignored, sitting nicely = the attention the dog wants.

Thanks Midori. Next stage is to train all visitors :)

we got our lab from a rescue place and she jumped up all the time when we first got her and it was really awful. she got horribly overexcited at visitors too.
We were given advice on how to deal with it and it really worked for us. If she jumped up, I immediately turned my back on her and folded my arms. Only when she had sat down and was quiet did I turn round and give her eye contact and then calmly give her a treat and a pat/stroke. So you reward good behaviour and ignore bad behaviour. If you interact whilst she's doing the bad behaviour, like trying to push her off you, then she can think it's part of a game and actually become worse because she wants to interact with you. The other thing that helped is to use a stern verbal warning like a loud "ah-ah!" and a stern look and then she learns that this is a "bad" thing.
Good to train the dog to be able to sit so you can always say "sit" and "wait" and then reward when they have done this - you can extend the "wait" time as well.

Good luck!!