As far as the dog is concerned greeting is something that is done face to face, or face to bottom, and since people walk on two legs rather than four, the dog has no choice but to jump up in order to reach the face of the human he is greeting.

In the case of very small dogs even a large leap is unlikely to achieve the desired result and many owners will have noticed that their dogs run up onto the backs of chairs or sofas when they are greeting in order to maximise their access to their owner's face. The desire to make facial contact stems from the food begging stage of development in puppies and resembles the submissive activity of muzzle licking. This is a behaviour that is used by puppies to stimulate their mother to regurgitate food for them and when you start to see jumping up as a signal for you to vomit it becomes much less attractive as a greeting behaviour!

In many cases jumping up is considered cute at the puppy stage and the dog is specifically rewarded for behaving in this way by receiving the attention that it desires, but as the dog grows the behaviour becomes less and less acceptable and owners decide that something has to be done.

As with any behaviour problem the best approach is one of prevention rather than cure and in order to prevent problems of inappropriate greeting behaviour puppies should be greeted at ground level and rewarded significantly for not jumping up. They should also be positively rewarded for sitting, rather than leaping, and clicker training, which is based on the principal of giving an unambiguous signal of reward during the performance of an appropriate response, can be extremely useful in this sort of case.

The major hurdle when teaching puppies to greet people appropriately is a lack of consistency and as the owner of a young puppy it is essential that you make sure that all your friends, family and visitors greet your puppy in the same way. If one person allows your dog to jump up and responds by giving it a fuss it will make your job very much harder in the long run.

If your dog has already developed an inappropriate greeting behaviour it will be necessary to make the behaviour unrewarding in order to remove it. Dogs do things that get results and the golden rule is to ignore the behaviour you don't want and reward an alternative behaviour that you do find acceptable.

That may sound simple but unfortunately any behaviour that has been previously rewarded will always get worse when you remove that reward and you need to be prepared for the so called "frustration spike" and the resulting worsening of the behaviour before it begins to get better. The longer the inappropriate behaviour has been present the more difficult it will be to remove it and the more significant the frustration effect will be when the rewarding ceases.

The aim of treatment is simply to ensure that the act of jumping up is no longer being rewarded and that the dog learns, with time, that it is not a successful greeting strategy. It is therefore possible to remove the behaviour by simply ignoring your dog but this is not advisable in terms of your relationship with your pet and it is important to combine your withdrawal of attention during inappropriate behaviour with provision of attention during an appropriate response. In other words your dog needs to learn how to greet you and your visitors in an acceptable manner.

As with any training the key to success in teaching a suitable greeting behaviour is the nature and the timing of your reward and you need to ensure that you only give your dog attention when he is sitting calmly. You also need to appreciate that attention can come in a variety of forms and it is not only a physical interaction, such as a pat, that rewards your dog. Eye contact and vocal interaction are also seen as acceptable forms of attention and your dog will see both of these as a legitimate reward!

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