Mama is a beautiful blue Staffordshire Terrier. Her human happens to be my daughter who thinks Mama is cute, smart, and well behaved. Mama is cute, and smart. Whenever she wants something, she “talks” to you in a low, howling “Scoobie Doo” kinda way. I agree that Mama is cute and smart, but she has one small bad habit.
Whenever I visit my daughter, Mama greets me at the door, and before I put both feet in, she jumps on me to say, “Hello! I am sooo happy to see you!” That wouldn’t be so bad if she were a small dog, but Mama weighs about 65 pounds! She gets so excited that she has knocked my glasses off, flinging them across the room, she has almost knocked me off my feet, and she has scratched my arms with her nails. While she is greeting me, and practically eradicating me, my daughter looks at the melee and thinks it is amusing.
“Mom”, she says, “if you don’t want Mama to jump on you, you have to turn your back to her and shout, “NO!” I ask her, “What is wrong with you training her not to jump at all?” I tried turning my back, but it doesn’t seem to help much. She does get off, but she just waits until you turn around and back up she goes. We have to go through this ritual for about 10 minutes until she settles down.
Since my daughter is clueless as to what to do to keep Mama from jumping on people, I thought I would take matters into my own hands. The first thing I did was wonder what the “Dog Whisperer” would do. Since that drew a blank, I went to “Plan B”…..I went on the Internet and I got a few good tips.
There are two reasons that dogs jump up on you, they are excited and want to greet you, or they are competing for dominance. If they are excited and want to greet you, they jump up to get close to your face and smell your breath, which is one way they can recognize you. If a dog jumps up on you and they remain still with their paws on you, they are vying for social dominance.
If the dog’s human is unable (or unwilling) to train their dog, there are several techniques that you can try to get them to stop jumping.
- Grab their front paws and hold them firmly. You can release their paws when they try to pull them away.
- Grab their front paws and walk the dog a few steps backward to throw them off balance. Most dogs don’t like this method, and jumping rapidly seems like not such a good idea any more.
Wow, this is too simple! Why didn’t I think of that before? Now that I am armed with “doggy psychology” I can’t wait to visit Mama. Mama won’t know what hit her. Stay tuned….I will keep you posted.
4urpets 
