You are listening to your new puppies podcast. Starting you and your dog off on the right paw. Here's your

host Debbie Salento. Hello and welcome to episode 80 of your new puppies podcast. I'm Debbie and today I'm just

going to talk about why I don't teach the cue off. So usually we want to use the Q off when our dog is jumping up on something. So when they're

jumping on people, maybe it's the couch, maybe it's your kitchen counters because they're looking for food.

Now I have nothing against teaching the cue off to your dog. I just approach it in a different way where teaching the cue isn't

even necessary. I like to streamline the process and take out that step and here's why because when one of my clients

asked me how do I teach the word off to tell them to get down from jumping up on

something what I'm really being asked is how do I stop my dog from jumping on people? How do I stop

them from counter surfing? How do I stop them from going up on the couch? So really what we want to teach our dog is to keep

four paws on the ground. And when we think about it this way, you know, dogs learn through

repetition. So if we need to use the word off, they've already performed the behavior

that we didn't want them to do in the first place. So I would rather back up a step and teach them four paws on the ground is a good thing.

That's where you get rewarded. There's no need to lift up your paws and in fact we want to teach them it doesn't work for them.

So this is one of those places that I'd rather teach them the habit of keeping four paws on the

ground so they don't even think about jumping up so eventually we don't even need the

cue at all. Now again some trainers might disagree with me because they might approach it a different

way. This is just the way I approach it. Here's a couple

examples of what I mean. So if we're trying to teach them off because they keep jumping

on our guests, what we really want them to do is to be calm and have four paws on the ground when they greet our guests and how I want to do this and I talk about this all the way back in episode 8, but we want to teach them that they only

get attention, whether it's from you or from your guests, when they are calm.

If they do jump up, they lose access to that attention,

whether it's you bringing them away from the guests or you turn your back or even

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