Wild 6 month old puppy
Hi guys,
We just got back from an almost month long vacation. And well we left our puppy with the grandparents.
My pup is now 6 months old and oh my god he loves people and dogs, however, he is now jumping and nipping to get attention.
I am trying to find a good way to correct. Treats work, but not really honestly. So 2 main problems:
1.) greeting at the door: when guest come in he is overly excited and he is starting to nip at their hands and ankles for attention. Does he eventually calm down? Yes but it takes a while. Sometimes we have to crate him. The more people come over the worse it gets.
My proposed solution: we leash him and put him in a place, then teach the “go say hi” command.
My issue with this proposed solution: do I just like keep closing the door in guest if the initial reaction is excitement? Or do I let them come in and ignore until he can go back to place or down?
2.) nipping/frustration: general nipping with us and them. So before we left I taught him “get a toy” and well my parents didn’t follow up, so now he can’t self sooth with a chew toy. So now I have to reteach that. Now, we stopped letting him say hi to people/dogs on walks and I want to make sure I don’t get him frustrated from not being able to do that. How do I balance that with play time? Bc right now the only play time he gets is if we see a dog we know, other than that we used to go to the dog park really late in the day and only bc we saw the same 4 dogs, but lately there have been too many unknown dogs and one which is very dominant so we decided to stop that all together. I am like concerned about frustration reactivity and want to balance it.
He enters doggy first grade in a month, and I’ll be hiring a trainer to come to the house for a 1:1 but we can’t for another 2 weeks 😭
Please note, this dog will be getting service trained to be my service animal. But we haven’t started service training (we already found a trainer for that) as I want to make sure that he has the basics down to a T before I even add that on. So him learning to calm down is a HUGE deal bc if he can’t, then I can’t make him a service animal. Which him being a pet would bc okay too! But I would be sad about it.
Thank you for your help and tips!