Border collies are fantastic dogs, and can make great companions, but there are often very difficult behaviours to navigate from puppyhood through adolescence and on to early adulthood, often as late as 3 years old. They can become aroused by different things to other breeds, mostly focused around movement. Border collie jumping and biting behaviour is one common and particularly problematic behaviour, usually starting in young adolescent dogs. This mostly starts to occur when the owner is moving, and when the dog is frustrated, frightened or over-excited. It is quite common when collies first start doing agility, or when owners are walking, particularly around triggers such as other people, dogs or traffic.
My own collie Ozzy is prone to this behaviour but by careful management it’s kept to a minimum and is very easy to interrupt/pre-empt.
What causes border collie jumping and biting?
Jumping and biting at owners will mostly only occur when the dog is over-aroused and overwhelmed by emotion, such as in the following contexts:
Excitement
When dogs are over-excited – such as when they are let first let off lead on walks, or when owners get home from being out, the excitement can tip over into jumping/biting. It can also occur when owners start running, or moving strangely or quickly. The movement over-stimulates the dog and they are not sure how to cope with the situation, so the biting/jumping is a kind of displacement behaviour. When you see young collies with older adults, the young dogs often bite at the older dogs when they are all running, usually around the neck area, so it’s a natural behaviour to some extent. It could also be related to frustration that they can’t keep up!
Frustration
This is probably the most frequent cause of this sort of behaviour. The frustration is caused by the dog being prevented from doing something that it wants to do. For example, it can occur on walks where collies encounter other dogs or people who they want to greet, but are on lead and can’t get to them. It can also happen when dogs are asked to do something they don’t want to do, such as get off the couch, or have their lead put on. For example, I had a client whose dog would jump and bite at her on walks every time she turned round to start walking home, and my own collie would start to jump and bite at me whenever I left her at the gate to go into the sheep field, because she wanted to come with me.
It can also have a predatory element, such as when collies see a cat or a squirrel, and want to chase but can’t because they are on a lead.
Fear
Dogs that experience closer proximity to something scary than they feel comfortable with, may start jumping and biting at owners and pulling on the lead. I most often see this with collies who are fearful of traffic, people or other dogs, and it is also highly related to frustration. These collies may be used to performing certain behaviours in relation to the scary objects, such as barking and lunging, in an attempt to make the scary thing go away, but if for some reason they can’t perform these behaviours, then they may redirect onto their owner. However, the underlying emotion is fear of the trigger.
What can help?
Avoid the contexts that cause the behaviour
Avoiding the situations in which the biting/jumping behaviour occurs is the best first step, if it is possible to do so. This is important because the more a dog practises a behaviour, the more that behaviour becomes their go-to way of acting in that context – it essentially becomes a habit that is difficult to break.
So if your collie always jumps and bites at the same place on walks, walk somewhere different for a few weeks – this alone may be enough to break the behaviour, especially if it’s a very young dog, helping them to forget that it’s even an option.
Or if your collie jumps and bites when the family or visitors are trying to leave the house, put them in the garden, or in a different room, with something to do, such as a snuffle mat, lickimat, filled kong or a chew BEFORE people get up to leave the house whenever possible. This is a management strategy that will prevent the behaviour from getting worse, and with young dogs, that have just started to practise the behaviour, it may be sufficient to completely eliminate it.
Reduce arousal
If you’d like to understand more about arousal, and what causes it, have a read through of this article: “Why is it important to manage arousal in border collies?” and follow the tips about how to keep arousal low and prevent trigger stacking. Keeping dogs’ arousal generally low throughout the day, by ensuring that they can’t get triggered by people walking past, visitors or delivery drivers, barking at next door’s dog in the garden or playing boisterous, excitable games will all help to keep them calmer and prevent the biting/jumping behaviour occuring at any other times.
Using sniffing, licking and eating to lower arousal
Because the border collie jumping and biting behaviour almost always occurs at times of high arousal, then, if possible, we need to reduce the collie’s arousal. Sniffing, licking and eating are all behaviours that lower arousal, so scatter feeding, where the dog has to sniff around to find the food, is a great way to lower arousal when out and about. Lickimats and snuffle mats are ideal when at home or in locations where you can’t scatter food about.
However, because we don’t want to reward the jumping and biting by scatter feeding or using the other enrichment techniques after they have already started jumping/biting, then we need to PRE-EMPT the biting and jumping, so that we calm the dog down BEFORE they start the behaviour. We can then praise them for being right!
So, for instance, the way to stop my dog jumping and biting when I walked into the sheep field was to toss some treats to her as I entered the field. After a couple of weeks of this, she had forgotten that she ever carried out the behaviour, as her mind was more focused on when or if the treats were coming. Similarly, a client had problems with her dog always jumping and biting when she turned round for the return journey on a walk. So she started to toss her dog treats just before and just after she turned round, so that her dog was focusing more on finding treats than being frustrated that the walk was ending, and within two walks the jumping and biting had gone.
Using gradual exposure to movement – related excitement
When you have a collie that is very quickly aroused by movement, such as when you run, or when you are trying to train agility or if you are pulling something along the ground, the first rule, as outlined above, is to limit exposure to these triggers. This may be enough to eliminate the behaviour for some dogs, in that a break for a few weeks then a re-introduction of the behaviour later on when the collie is older and more mature, may reveal that the collie no longer feels the same urge to practise the behaviour.
However, for a more pro-active approach, or for older dogs who have been practising the behaviour for longer, we can carefully start to desensitise the collie to the movement, in very small, relatively boring increments, so that the dog learns that actually this trigger isn’t all that exciting. They are able to experience the trigger, but make the decision not to fixate or pay it any attention. We can then praise any good decisions using either food, or affection, or a game with a toy. Ideally, any toys that we use in these sorts of situations shouldn’t cause excessive arousal, so tug toys are not ideal. Food is generally the best option because it has a natural calming effect on the dog.
So, for instance, Ozzy would get very over-excited when I did any running games with the dogs, and would jump up and leap at me, and nip my clothes. We completely stopped playing the running games when Ozzy was with us because it was just making him worse – he was becoming even more excited each time. When we next played, after a few weeks, he was much better, with only minimal jumping, but it was still too exciting/frustrating for him to cope with easily. So we now keep things calmer by including food into the games. Every time he comes to me, I roll a treat in one direction for him to find, then the other direction, and repeat a few times. So we can run a little, then roll food. And this helps him to cope with short bursts of running, by interspersing it with food chasing/eating. Over time, we will lessen the food, with longer periods of running in between, so that he doesn’t need it any more. Sometimes giving the dog a toy to carry in these sorts of situations will also help. When Flo was younger, she had a very short lead that I tied a tug toy to, and whenever she became over-aroused by running, she would grab hold of the tug toy instead. However, use this option with care as the result may be a dog that grabs and pulls on leads later on. Flo didn’t but it could happen.
Ozzy would also nip and bite me (or the object) when I was using anything that dragged or moved along the ground. So builder’s bags full of sheep hay, or rakes for raking up hay, were big triggers. The great news is that this is REALLY easy to pre-empt. So at present I wouldn’t do these activities when Ozzy is about when I need to get these things done to ensure that he isn’t practising the behaviour when I don’t have time to work with him. At a separate time, I set up training sessions in which whenever I move the item, I throw Ozzy a treat. I keep movement of the item slow and only move it a few inches to start with a praise him for staying calm. Then over days, weeks and sometimes months, depending on the dog and how long they have been practising the behaviour, we start to increase the distance moved and the speed at which the object is moving. If these things are build up very gradually then the dog’s focus is completely on staying calm and looking for treats than jumping and biting at me or the object. And it is setting the dog up for success, meaning that we are not putting him in a situation in which he will be wrong, and we then have to struggle to stop him. And the issue with this sort of border collie jumping and biting behaviour is that the more angry we get and the more we try to stop the dog jumping and biting, the more frustrated they become, potentially making the behaviour even more intense and dangerous.
If the border collie jumping and biting behaviour is occurring with no obvious trigger, for instance if you are just walking across the garden, and there is nothing obvious that has frustrated or scared them, then remember that it is often triggered by movement. Stand still. Tell them “no” or “ah ah” and stay standing still. Say nothing else, keep still. Wait for them to relax a bit and wander off, then start walking, using small, slow steps to start with. If the dog stays calm, then ask him or her to do another behaviour that they enjoy doing, such as a sit, and only then scatter feed to lower arousal. This brings a clear interruption between the dog jumping/biting and scatter feeding and prevents them from performing the behaviour to get a treat.
This video demonstrates me practising this training with Ozzy, who would get very over-excited by anything to do with builders bags – I am carrying one in this video.
Borer collie jumping and biting behaviour related to fear
Again, absolute key to resolving the border collie jumping and biting behaviour is to not put the collie in the situation in which they will practise the behaviour. So, if your collie always starts to jump and bite as you get to a busy crossroads on a walk, and you know that they can be worried by traffic, walk in a different location. If they are fearful of other dogs, and will jump and bite when they see another dog, don’t walk near other dogs. Because this behaviour is so dangerous to owners, particularly as puppies grow into adolescents, and very difficult to stop once it starts, it is really important to prevent them from practising it while you work on training in controlled environments. It is even preferable NOT to walk them at all in the short term if you can’t avoid such triggers.
Then ideally find a good behaviourist or trainer that understands collies who can help you work to change your dog’s emotional reaction to these triggers. Once they start to relax and not worry so much about the things that previously frightened them, when they are reintroduced to the previous triggers on your usual everyday walks or outings, the border collie jumping and biting behaviour should not be present.
Jumping and biting as attention seeking
This can happen when collies, who learn very quickly, start to realise that if they perform the behaviour, they get attention, and sometimes treats if the owners are giving them treats to distract them and aren’t pre-empting the behaviour.
Ignoring the jumping and biting seems like the obvious thing to do, but is not a good idea. Ignoring a behaviour, or trying to “extinguish” the behaviour, is highly likely to cause an extinction burst, in which the dog can’t get what it wants, so it tries harder – the jumping becomes more intense and they bite harder, and so on. If we then give them attention because it hurts, and we can’t ignore it any more, then we have reinforced worse behaviour, and in this way, we are causing a deterioration rather than improvement.
So, the best way to resolve this is to keep a note of whenever the behaviour happens and try to PRE-EMPT it, following the advice above. The good thing about biting and jumping is that it is usually quite predictable: we know that there are certain things that cause it, so we can prepare in advance.
If your collie is biting and jumping and the above advice isn’t helping, please get in touch – there are always other things we can try and the sooner you get help, the easier it will be to resolve.