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If something's intermittently rewarding, if something's intermittently rewarded. In other words, not everybody is, you know, ignoring your dog completely. And if jumping up is occurring anyway, even if they are ignoring them, then actually what you can find is that the behavior becomes even more, even more consistent. Before we dive in, a warning. The content of this podcast may not be appropriate for sneaky some young listeners. This is real life and that means that sometimes it can be a little bit graphic. So listen on at your own peril. As a veterinarian, dog behaviorist, best selling author and trainer over the past decade, I've had an obsession with transforming the behavior of dogs, understanding their brains, and creating practical strategies that you can implement easily at home. I know all too well when the dream you imagined when you first got your dog is far from your daily reality. In fact, out of the blue, a few months ago, my little dog, Gorse was bitten by a dog 20 times her size. And suddenly our life of stress free walks, a calm and cuddly household, and being teammates was replaced with reactivity, anxiety, and worrying about what's around the next corner. I'm Dr. Tom. This is the Help My Dog podcast. And this is me documenting that journey of transformation, sharing my knowledge and experience with you, and having a few laughs along the way. Hello and welcome to this episode of the Help My Dog podcast. And today we're doing a listener's question. So here it is. Hello, hello, hello. My flat coated retriever, 11 months old, gets overexcited when meeting people. I always ask people to cross their arms and not look at her or engage with her and and only stroke her if all four paws are on the ground. But it's not always working depending on the person. Ivy is a big boned pup weighing 29 kilos already. Wow, that she is already bigger than all of my dogs. Not put together. Just to clarify, I need to get her to be calmer when meeting people. Have you got a video about that? Thank you so much, Ulrike and Ivy. Well now there is a podcast about it. So, so, so, so what are we going to do for Ivy? Well, I think first things first, this is really, I'm glad that, that you've got in touch because the whole crossing your arms and ignoring when a dog's jumping up is something that is, is very commonly advised. And while it can work in situations, it often doesn't work or creates this kind of unpredictable result or sometimes escalating result. And the reason why that is is because if something's intermittently rewarding if something's intermittently rewarded. In other words, not everybody is, you know, ignoring your dog completely. And if jumping up is occurring anyway, even if they are ignoring them, then actually what you can find is that the behavior becomes even more. Even more consistent. And that's. I know that's not happening in Ivy's case, but if you think about it, it's. If you wanted to, if we were taking a very scientific approach to your recall, let's say, and we were wanting to make the recall very, very habitual, move it to the habit part of the brain. Okay, this is a tiny bit geeky. I apologise. The habit part of the brain. One way that we would do that is we will put it on an intermittent reward schedule. In other words, not every single recall would be rewarded. And that helps it transition into the habit forming part of the brain. And so sometimes what we can inadvertently do when we're using ignoring a behavior as a way of trying to stop it is if the ignoring isn't happening 1000% of the time, what we've accidentally done is put it on an intermittent reward schedule, which can actually increase the performance of the behavior and move it to the habit forming part of the brain, which is not what we want to do right now. I know that this isn't happening with Ivy because you're saying that it's getting better, but it's not always working. And it kind of depends on the person. Now, the other challenge with this, and I'm only talking about the challenges with what's currently going on, because actually that helps you to understand why I'm changing it. Not because I think you don't done anything terribly wrong. You haven't. It's just I want to get you to do something slightly different. But the other challenge is that effectively what we're doing is we're saying to Ivy that is no longer rewarding in theory, because the reality is Ivy might actually really enjoy jumping. She might really enjoy jumping up, and that might be a fun thing for her to do. Like, I like bouncing. Yeah. Just I find myself, my body is always moving. If I'm stood up, I'm probably slightly bouncing on my toes because for whatever reason, that is a happier space for me to be in than being expected to be still. And so sometimes what we have to realize is that behaviors are inherently rewarding without an external reward. And that's often the case with jumping up. It's quite fun to explode at a person. Right. Even if they don't kind of give you any kind of attention for it. So that's the other challenge and the third challenge is that, hey guys, I just want to take a moment to answer a question that has been coming in literally 10 emails today. And that is how can we help you with your dog's behavior struggle? Whether that be reactivity, separation anxiety, resource guarding, Maybe you've got multi dog household struggle right now. Maybe your dog's just so over aroused on a walk that they just can't listen to you and they're chasing everything in sight. Like can I get Tom's help? And the answer is that actually you can. And you can do that by booking a Behavet behavior consultation. That's where literally my team give you the plan on how to transform your struggle and get you to that dream that made you get a dog in the first place. Right? Your world's got smaller and smaller and smaller and actually it doesn't need to be that way. You just need to reach out for help. Now, a couple of things to say on that. First of all, if you're insured, you, if your dog's insured with pet plan, Kennel Club, Agria or many pets, we actually do direct claims with them, which means that that's covered by your insurance. So you don't pay out of your pocket. Your insurance covers that. And the second thing to say is that we have loads of options. If you're insured with another provider or if your dog's not insured at all, that's also totally fine. We have loads of options that we've developed to make this so accessible for you because we're aware that you've already invested a load of time and a load of money in getting your dog, looking after your dog, caring for your do. But the last thing we want is for you to have done all that and still not be living the life that you deserve with your dog. And we know we can get you there. So all you need to do is go to the Behave Vet website and the way to do that is go B E H A dot V E T that's beh vet and it will take you there. Or just Google Behavet, right? And you can get scheduled in and we can literally get you booked in for a consultation as soon as possible. We normally can accommodate it within a week, right, so that you can be getting to your dream asap. The third challenge is that while we're trying to make the behavior or the choice of jumping up less desirable, what we're not doing is we're not making it Clear what behavior we would like to have instead. Yeah. And with that, what that then does is allows Ivy puts the, puts the onus on Ivy to pick a different choice. Now I know flat coated retrievers and I know 11 month old flat coated retrievers and the natural right choice isn't always, it doesn't always happen. And they're quite creative and they're quite energetic and high on life. And it sounds like Ivy is like that. Right. And so yeah, she might start to think, oh, I might choose something other than jumping up. But it might still not be a choice that we want. It might move to being, okay, I'm going to mouth the person's leg. Right. And we can't, you know, remove legs at this point to try and stop that. So what are we going to do instead? Well, what I want you to think, Ulrike, is what would you like Ivy to do in that context? What would be the what do I want in that scenario? Yeah. And the nice thing about thinking about a what do I want Is that if she's doing the what do I want? She's not doing the what don't I want? Yeah. So for example, you might say, well I want her not to jump up. That's cheating. That's still a what don't I want? Right. A what do I want? Might be I do want four feet on the floor. Yeah. Maybe I do want her to stand in middle position. Maybe you don't want that. Depending on, you know, your height and her end height, that might not be a long term solution. Unless you're into flat coated retriever riding. Another one might be I do want her if I'm talking to someone on a walk, I do want her to lie down if we're on lead. Yeah. Think, think about, you know, very specifically the what do I want? And then what you're going to do is you're going to create that what do I want? Yeah. So the other person can absolutely cross their arms and not look at her. That's not a problem. They can do that. But what you're then going to do is while ever her four feet are on the floor, you are going to be rewarding her with high value food. Yeah. High value food. High value food. High value food. Yeah. Four feet for four feet on the floor. The what do I want now what are we going to do? Well, we're going to use that little strategy that I talked about at the beginning that potentially was working against us with the previous plan which we're gonna use it to our Advantage in the new plan. So once we've got her four feet on the floor and she knows that four feet on the floor means chicken, what we're gonna do is we're gonna move it to more of an intermittent reward schedule. Yeah. So it might be that we might want three seconds of four feet on the floor before we feed. And then one second and then five seconds and then two seconds and then 10 seconds and then two seconds and then 30 seconds and then three seconds, three seconds, four seconds. Yeah. And you're going to be ping ponging the times from high to low, high to low, high to low, low, low, low, low, low, high, high, low, low, low, high, medium, low, high, high, high. Right. And you're working on an average where if you average that time out, maybe you're working on a 4 second average without reward or a 10 second average about reward. Now the cool thing is, is that if the other people are ignoring her at the same time, you're not going to have to go to the drama of working out averages and whatever else because she's going to get the hang of it. And you can then start to more infrequently reward. And what that does is one, it increases performance of that. It makes it even more certain I want my four feet on the floor in that context. But also what it does is it moves it to the habit forming part of the brain so that over time you actually don't need to be rewarded in that. So that's what I would do. And the nice thing about that in the meantime is because you're going to be so on it in spotting when she's doing the what do I want and getting the rewards in, you're also going to get rid of the unpredictability. Yeah, it's not going to be person dependent because. Because you're gonna be working at a distance from that person of an appropriate distance for success. But also more importantly, getting in there with reward as quick as you can when she's doing the right thing. So that also we get her, we push the balance on her rehearsing and practicing what we do want more than what we don't want. Okay, so I wanna hear how you get on Ivy. Sounds like my kind of dog. And thank you so much for sending this question in because hopefully it will help load others. Now on the subject of helping loads of others, guys, one, we're playing around with a bit of a format of doing these fast fire episodes that are really kind of succinct and to the point and problem specific so that you can get the answer as quick as possible and then go forth and unlock amazing results for you and your dog. But secondly, if you have not already, or even if you haven't, it's been a little while, please, please, please leave a review on Apple Podcasts for this podcast, the Help My Dog podcast. Because that means that other people that don't know anything about what we do are more likely to find it. Which means that more dogs get helped, more relationships get saved, more dogs stay out of rehoming environments or just rehoming situations, and ultimately dogs are thriving rather than surviving. So please, please, please, for the love of dogs, leave a review on Apple podc. Sam.