Excited jumping and biting

So... I am failing at the most basic of things...

Leo is jumping and biting. Simultaneously.

If I go out somewhere whether it be 5 days, or 5 minutes, when I get back Leo jumps on me excitedly and he also becomes mouthy. He bites my hands, he bites my thighs, he bites anything he can bite.

Now if he was doing it to just me... I might have still tried long drawn out methods to fix it. But he is now doing it to my mom, my brother, my dad, my boyfriend, and my guests as well. He doesn't bite the guests, but he jumps on them.

Now here's the situation, I cannot always put him on the leash and leash correct. He gets IGNORED when he jumps/bites so I don't know why he is still doing it, and quite frankly it is sometimes incredibly hard to be indifferent when you get bitten on your inner thigh. It's freaking sensitive there! IT HURTS!

He has NEVER bitten hard enough to break through skin, but he has bitten hard enough to cause minor bruising.

I have in the past taught our rescue dog to not to jump, I did it by completely ignoring her until she sat down and then I would give her CRAZY amounts of attention. It worked, she is jump proof. This method does not work with Leo, because if you wait for him to sit, he will sit, the problem is if you jack pot with attention he gets so excited the biting just doesn't stop. [ETA] He bites as soon as he sits down, not only when I attention reward him. He bites while he is jumping as well, the biting is continuous. I think its some sort of comfort mechanism for him or something some people call "love-biting" but to me is is unacceptable

Please help me.

ETA: Also another issue we are having is, when we get guests, there are a select few he will get excited with, maybe 1 out of 10 guests, with the rest of them he just barks unreasonably, just bark bark bark all the way through. I've been told it's a confidence issue but I don't know how to work with it...

I would train him to grab a toy. Tucker is like this, he jumps and grabs with his mouth. He now knows he should get a toy but still needs reminders a lot of the time, he'll give a few leaps which you ignore, then he remembers he needs to go get a toy to "turn you on". As soon as the toy is in his mouth I go from standing completely still to smiling at him and then when he gets back to me I pet him. If he drops the toy or jumps again I turn back off, stand up, cross arms, and wait. It's working well.


How you go about getting him to give the toy is up to you. With Tucker we can just point to a toy or give it a kick and he will usually grab it. Then he just learns that picking up the toy gets him attention and you go from there.

If the problem is mainly when you are coming home or into your house use the door as a blockade. Meaning, come in, when he jumps/bites walk right back out the door and shut it. Wait a little bit and go back in, any biting or jumping, walk right back out again. Wait for polite behavior before giving attention, but don't jackpot it, a simple ear scratch or "Good boy" is all he needs so he doesn't get over excited again. Have everyone in your family do this.

All this method is doing is taking your "ignore the problem behavior" to the extreme, making it very black and white. You jump or bite, I go away.

I was going to say what Sarah said about leaving the room if he does it. For some dogs, being ignored is not enough, and you need to actually walk away, using your physical presence as negative punishment.

Leo doesn't stay inside the house when nobody is inside the house so we open the gate and there he is crowding us, jumping and biting. The gate itself is an electronic gate so I can't use that as a barrier mechanism. Is there a similar idea? I have started walking away if he jumps/bites but he just follows on biting/jumping while attempting to walk. I even fold my arms to get those away from him, that's how he resorted to biting my thighs. I have noticed if I walk away and fold my arms he will partially switch off, I reward it by saying good boy, but then he switches on again, if I reward it with a ear scratch or a pat on the head, he switches on again.

Maxy, I am not sure how the toy method would work, because Bella is the fun police and instead of going for the toy being a reward as soon as he goes for the toy Bella is going to start going for it too and then tug war and then "mom she took my toy" faces and then jumping up and down all over again...Vicious cycle O_O

Can you carry treats with you? When he is showing polite behaviors, mark it with a "Yes" and toss a treat onto the ground away from you. This will keep him from getting over excited when you go to reward him.

Right now the jumping and mouthing are highly rewarding behaviours for him. I would train an incompatible behaviour (like sitting, going to a dog bed). Then, the tricky part, is making the new behaviour more appealing and rewarding than the one previous. It's all about building the value for the new behaviour through a heavy history of strong reinforcement.

I've not been a fan of the negative punishment method of leaving since you're not telling the dog what to do instead, and the learning process is more protracted and takes longer.

I have tried telling him to sit and then rewarding, he sits but still continues being mouthy, I will attempt to teach him to down rather when he is in that state (?), but do you have any ideas on how to redirect his attention so he listens to the down? At the moment he is so focused on jumping and biting he really shuts out commands. I am afraid he might associate the sequence of events with rewards. Example: If I jump and bite and then go down I will get rewarded. He is that smart... and then even if I do get that right how do I stop him from getting over excited again after the down is over? I am really confused as to how to handle these situations...

SaraB: Can you carry treats with you? When he is showing polite behaviors, mark it with a "Yes" and toss a treat onto the ground away from you. This will keep him from getting over excited when you go to reward him.

I can carry treats with me... However, the training method I am currently teaching Leo requires that he does not pick treats off the floor. It has done a lot for his focus and he started doing exceptionally well at training when I stopped letting him get things off the floor. Previously at training instead of focusing on me in a heel he used to have his nose to the ground trying to pick up the food the other handlers had dropped along the way, I was advised to stop letting him pick food off the floor and only allow him to take treats from my hand. If I drop a treat on the floor he isn't allowed to take it. I think it might be counter productive..

Understandable, but you can add a cue to tell him to check the floor for treats. For my dogs it's "Find it". Only when I say find it will there be a treat on the floor for them, when I don't say it, I have their focus 100%.

The trick here is to make laying down somewhere valuable before people come over. Spend huge amounts of time making holding a stay on a bed into a huge game where lots of fun things happen. Trying to train an incompatible behaviour when there's already the huge excitement of having guests over won't get you very far when he loves jumping up so much.