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Chances are these excited, anxious, or fearful behaviors have been reinforced. The truth is that it is very easy to reinforce these behaviors. You may even feel compelled to reinforce them, although that was never your intention.
Imagine a dog who whines excitedly in the car. You arrive at your destination and your dog is just-so-excited-to-be-here-and-bark-bark… There is nothing worse than sitting in a car with a dog who is whining to get out, so what do you do? You let your dog out of the car and...
...you have just reinforced whining! What's more, your dog has just reinforced you for letting him out sooner rather than later.
Another example of automatic, unintentional reinforcement is the dog who bowls over visitors. What does the visitor do?
"Oh, you're a big puppy! How about you hop down?" [push]
"HOP DOWN!" [wave hands in dog's face]
Wouldn't you love that response if you were a big, boisterous, and non-verbal Labrador retriever looking for attention?
The Calm-O-Meter solution
Let's look at a third example and a possible solution. A dog (we'll call her "Sabella" but she bears no resemblance to an actual German shepherd by that name), gets overly excited when she is about to embark on her nightly walk. Her owner, an enlightened trainer, has her sit and wait patiently at the door until she calms down. He does this because he knows that letting her out the door in her excited state will only reinforce that excited state for future walks—and will probably result in temporarily forgotten leash manners and reactive aggression towards other dogs as well.
But how does Sabella's owner know when she is calm enough to be let through the door?
He could look for certain signs: rate of breathing, ear and tail carriage, whining frequency and volume, pupil dilation or contraction. But that's a bit complicated. All he really needs to do is ask himself, "On a scale of 1-10, where 1 is very calm and 10 is very excited, how calm is Sabella right now?" He'll get a reasonably accurate answer, something good enough to work with.
Simple, huh? This is called using the "Calm-O-Meter."
Just as you can reinforce excited behaviors, you can reinforce calm behaviors.Turn the dial, but where to stop?
Next is to "turn back the dial" on that Calm-O-Meter. Just as you can reinforce excited behaviors, you can reinforce calm behaviors. But, keep in mind that it would be unreasonable to ask a dog to go from grade 10 "hyper" to grade 1 "comatose." That would set the dog up to fail and leave nothing to reinforce.
Instead, figure out what grade the dog is at when she sits, then ask for one grade less. If your Sabella is consistently at a grade 7, wait until she calms down to grade 6, then click and open the door. If Sabella is consistently at grade 6, wait until she has calmed down to grade 5, then click and open the door.
The Calm-O-Meter can be a metric for clicker training, using successive approximations toward the goal—a calm dog. Calm could be at grade 3 or 4; Sabella shouldn't have to lose her zest for life completely! If you aim too low, she might not ever make it out the door.
Historical borrowing
The Calm-O-Meter idea isn't completely new. Like so many other techniques in dog training, it is an idea borrowed from human clinical psychology, modified and repackaged. The human clinical psychology equivalent is the SUDs scale, which stands for Subjective Units of Distress/Disturbance/Discomfort Scale. Of course dogs cannot be asked their level of stress or calm directly, but most dog owners are sufficiently in tune with their dogs for this technique to give fairly reliable results.
This PDF may be helpful to you. It is called when excited becomes rude.
http://www.clickertraining.com/files/Emm…
How Dog Training Can Help You Find the Perfect Family Dog
- Him getting overexcited and jumping when you are trying to get his attention is a good thing because that means you have got his attention but i know why you might think otherwise as i thought it was a bad thing to. If you are trying to teach him new tricks which require staying still then start off somewhere with no distractions at all then when he has learned it start doing it somewhere with alot of distractions this worked for my dog and trust me it is very hard to get his attention i would be happy if my dog does what your dog does getting over excited lol, also you will find that if you make him run for a bit he will get a bit tired and he will listen more without jumping around best of luck
- Try this page, they have few video-lessons
http://en.teachme.tv/category/72/dog_tra… - Take him for a LOOOOOONNNNGGG walk before trying the harder tricks. I have a 2 year old Doberman and she has way too much energy to focus on training unless I tire her out a bit first.
So we go for a long walk, usually 2 miles, then head home, she gets some free time to drink water, rest, whatever she does. Then about 30 minutes after the walk I start the training with her.
She is able to concentrate a lot better and can usually handle about 30 minutes of training a day this way. Much more than that and she loses interest. - I recommend you visit the website I went to when my dog had behavioral issues a while back. It transformed my dog's behavior. Good Luck!
- Here's a free resource for you..
http://dogsdomain.info
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