super excitable 1yo German shep

[er1507]

We have had our beautiful white german sheppard since she was a pup. It was her birthday the other week and she is actually my brothers dog and they live in my mums house. She gets very very very excited when anyone comes to the house and goes nuts! Not in an aggressive way, in a very hyper, jumps over the baby gate (We bought a bigger dog gate this week) and jumps up at you. She is just very excitable. How do we teach her to calm down?

Reward calm behaviour. Reward it frequently - catch her lying quietly and drop her a piece of chicken or sausage as you pass. Do this again and again and she'll start to lie quietly more often.

When someone comes she needs to be on a lead and only allowed to greet them once she is calm and has all four feet on the floor. This is easy to practise if you can get a friend on board to ring the bell or knock. Some people find it helpful to

... teach their dog to go to mat, so she can be sent there when the bell rings. It takes a lot of repetition and work to get a dog able to go to the mat and stay there when they are very excited, so it isn't easy, but if you are patient and work hard you will see an improvement. If you practise a few times a day you would expect to see improvements in 6-8 weeks.

We did masses of work with dpup encouraging to keep four paws on the floor plus reward him (calmly) whenever he takes himself to his bed if there's stuff going on in the kitchen/living room. The result is he's very wriggly and excited when people come round but he doesn't jump up. He also likes going to his toy box and bring something for visitors to coo over - maybe you could encourage your dog to give themselves a 'job' like that when visitors arrive?