Your dog does not jump on everyone.
They jump on your sister. Not your husband. They jump on the neighbours who come through the side gate but hold it together when your mother-in-law visits. They launch at strangers on the Walter Bean Trail who make that high-pitched sound, and walk calmly past the ones who ignore them.
You have probably noticed this. You may have even felt briefly hopeful about it, like the training is working on some people at least.
It is not working. Your dog is reading the room.
What your dog is actually doing
Dogs are extraordinarily good at identifying the conditions under which a behaviour gets rewarded. Not consciously. Not strategically. Through repetition, they build a precise picture of who produces results and who does not.
Your sister lights up when she sees the dog. Voice goes up, arms go wide, she is already leaning forward before she is through the door. Your dog has jumped on her eleven times and eleven times the outcome was contact, laughter, and attention. That is an airtight sample size. Jumping on your sister works.
Your husband does not react. Never has. The dog tried jumping on him four times in the first week and got nothing. They stopped.
This is not proof that your dog knows better. It is proof that your dog has learned to sort people into categories. Worth trying and not worth trying. And at Mill Race Park on a busy Saturday afternoon in downtown Galt, they are making that assessment in about two seconds based on body language, voice pitch, and how fast someone is moving toward them.
The category system is the problem. A dog who jumps on some people has a jumping habit. It is just a selective one. And selective habits are in some ways harder to break than consistent ones, because the dog has learned the behaviour well enough to filter it.
The people in your house are not running the same program
This is the conversation most training advice skips entirely.
You have been consistent. You turn away. You wait for four paws on the floor. You reward the sit. And it is working, sort of, with you.
Then your teenager comes home from school and your dog launches at them and they grab the dog's face with both hands and say "hi buddy hi buddy" in the voice that makes the whole dog wiggle, and six weeks of your training evaporates in about four seconds.
That is not your teenager being careless. That is a genuinely difficult thing to ask of a person who loves their dog and just got home. But it is also exactly why your dog still jumps.
Every person in your household is either making a deposit into the training account or making a withdrawal. There is no neutral. A greeting that lets jumping happen, even once, even softly, is a withdrawal. Your dog does not average your consistency across family members. They respond to the most permissive rule available.
One person holding firm means nothing if three others are not.
The stranger problem on the Cambridge trails
On the Walter Bean Trail or along the riverbank path through Mill Race Park, your dog is meeting people who have never heard of your training plan and have no particular interest in following it.
The person who crouches down from ten feet away and makes the sound. The child who runs straight at your dog with both arms open. The older gentleman near the Grand River who says "oh come here sweetheart" before you have had a second to set anything up.
These are not bad people. They are dog lovers who are about to run an unsupervised training session on your dog. And the curriculum is not yours.
You cannot control what strangers do after the fact. You can control what happens before they reach you. Speak first. Every time. Before the chaos starts.
"Just one second. I am actually working on training my dog not to jump. Would you mind helping me?"
Most people say yes immediately. Then you tell them what you need. Stand upright. Neutral voice. Wait for the dog to settle before any contact happens. You are not being rude. You are being your dog's trainer in a situation where nobody else is going to do that job.
And when someone says "oh it's fine I love dogs" while your dog is already in the air, be kind but be clear. You are not apologising for having a training plan. You are enforcing one.
The fix is not about your dog. It is about the rules.
Your dog is not confused about jumping. They are clear on exactly when it works and exactly when it does not. The problem is that "when it works" includes enough people and enough situations that the habit stays alive.
The goal is to close those gaps. Not perfectly overnight. Consistently enough that the category of "people who reward jumping" starts to shrink until it disappears.
That means a house line so you can intervene before the jump completes regardless of who is at the door. It means a conversation with everyone in your household about what the rule is and why it matters that everyone runs the same one. It means speaking to strangers at Mill Race Park before they reach you rather than managing the fallout after.
None of this requires a different technique. You probably already know what works. The gap is not knowledge. It is coverage. Every person your dog interacts with is either part of the solution or part of the problem, and right now not everyone is on the same page.
Get everyone on the same page. The jumping stops having anywhere to go.
We are 30 minutes from Cambridge
McCann Professional Dog Trainers is in Flamborough, just 30 minutes from Cambridge. Our Life Skills program works through exactly this kind of real-world challenge with you and your dog together.
Happy Training!