[JJLamb]

Does anyone have any advice for my Jenna to stop her from jumping on the kitchen and bathroom counters?? She is just going on 6 months and has never been interested in the counters before, but about 2-3 weeks ago she became very intrigued with them. She jumps up especially when she knows that we have been in the kitchen or bathroom.

I have tried to use our "Off" command, but she just ignores me. I even tried stepping lightly on her back foot, which usually causes her to get down, but then she jumps right back up. I really want to get this under control. We usually don't have alot of food on our counters, accept during dinner time. Which is what I am really scared of, the other day she ended up with shells from a hard boiled egg.

Does anyone have any suggestions????

 

[Dani]

Well, I guess the obvious one would be to supervise her...but then next you can try a couple of things...put her leash on and thether her to you so you can correct her when she does it. What do you do besides tell her off? If you are just telling her off, you are not telling her that it is NOT OKAY to do that. A leash pop and a firm NO should be followed up with the Off command. YOu could also try shaking a can of pennies to startle her...again, you need to reinforce with a verbal no-no!

 

[MarlansMum]

This is an ongoing problem for me, since Marlan is a very food motivated dog and knows that is what i am usually preparing on the kitchen counters. The pennies in a can thing doesn't work for me - he is not scared of loud noises. I have also tried baiting food with Frank's Red Hot so that he would learn a negative association. Instead, he just learned to sniff out the Red Hot.

Basically now I just make sure that there is never anything on the counters that he can steal, and whenever I catch him jumping up I say 'off' and he listens. This is a very difficult problem to remedy - there is another person on here who has a pic of her dog counter surfing wearing an apron. I am pretty sure this is a common thing for dogs.

 

[Dakkerdog]

The best defense is making sure there is nothing and I mean nothing that would entice her to jump up. As soon as she gets any reward of finding something it will really be hard to break.

Moose has a really honed talent for counter surfing - as you can see we weren't ever able to stop him. When he was little we literally lived 6ft above ground because he would take everything - magazines, paper, books - you name it.

He is much calmer now and pretty much only steals food and likes to bring me the kitchen towels when he gets excited :laugh:

 

[Bob Pr.]

The best defense is making sure there is nothing and I mean nothing that would entice her to jump up. As soon as she gets any reward of finding something it will really be hard to break.

Agree 100%.

That's the ONLY thing that worked with Bess. Everything else we tried failed and we tried many things. Even food items as far back as possible from the front edge were no match for her accordion neck which extended out as far as needed and grabbed and consumed anything within milliseconds, far faster than we could yell "NO!"

One possibility I've learned of since then from a dog trainer (who also rescues Border Collies) is to put in a series of screw eyes into the kitchen counter toe boards; then she uses a carabiner type snap hook to attach a leash to the screw eye with the other end attached to a BC.

Puff was never a surfer but when she was a pup I did put in several screw eyes and occasionally attached her to them with a leash when I was in the kitchen and wanted to be sure of where she was.

 

[shortcake]

We had this problem twice. The first time it was mostly our kitchen sink which is next to an outside wall with a window. We knew she went to the sink pretty quickly after we left the house so I ran around to the kitchen window and as soon as I saw the dog jump up to the sink, to scan what might be in there, I pounded on the wall and she got scared. Did this a couple of times and that was the end of it.

You can also buy those plastic strips that cover carpeting to protect it, similar to the plastic under a desk chair for the same purpose. The reverse side has small points to grip the carpet. Anyway lay strips of this with the pointy side up and when the dogs paws hit the pointy side they don't like it. Once they think it is going to be there everytime they jump up they should lose interest. This works on couches you may not want them on either. Good Luck

Just a side note, I first realized our dog was getting in the sink when I came home and a very large carving knife was in the middle of the kitchen floor - it scared me to death to think what could have happened so I never took the chance of leaving a sharp object in the sink again.