How to teach calm behaviours?
My training approach is to teach new behaviours instead of focusing on eliminating behaviours. When the dog is running around and jumping up on me excitedly to the point of knocking me over a fence, I am asking myself, what I would like to see instead?
I want all 4 feet on the ground. How can I get it? I need to be ready and prepared to get to him when all of his paws are on the ground before he even jumps up. No dog ever jump constantly. One solution could be to ask for touch behaviour if we previously taught it but even more important is to reinforce at the moment he approaches and keeps all 4 feet on the floor. It's about getting to him faster than he is able to jump up. With a very exuberant dog, we can also try another thing that I did with Blackie on the video below. We can teach staying on a platform.
When Blackie jumped up on the dog house I decided to take this opportunity to teach him to stay there. In the beginning, his feet were constantly moving and he was leaning towards me, like he was saying "faster, faster, faster!" I did my best to catch him staying there without leaning. To do that, I started to feed him constantly. Before he got a chance to lean towards me, I already had another piece of food close to him. You can't see that part on the video unfortunately but you can easily imagine feeding the dog from a hand. That's basically how it looked like - feeding from hand. Eventually, I slowly tried to take a little bit longer in between treats. However, I was ready to go back to "just feeding" if I saw that he is reverting back to moving towards me.
Next session we had a breakthrough! He not only stopped leaning, but his feet also stopped moving! The progress was so visible that I immediately wanted to put together this video. He learned that staying there on the platform gives him treats. There is no need for rush because the food is coming. People are sometimes surprised that feeding fast from the hand can be a training tool but Blackie showed how effective it is! The context of the platform was very important in this training as he could learn contextually - "when I'm here, I get fed. I can just relax then". That's what I conveyed to him with the use of food. To me, that's a beautiful communication between species.
Hope you enjoy the video!
PS. I’m sure you will be happy to hear that Blackie found his forever home!
Be a Superhero for your dog, he will love you for it!
