Are people reluctant to come inside your home because it looks like they'll get slobbered, pounced, or sat on by your dog? Do your dogs love to greet a visitor with all the joy of meeting a new playmate?

Does your dog defy gravity to get a good lick at a visitor's face? Even if you don't mind this behavior, the odds are very good that your visitors do.

Curbing your dog's natural exuberance for greeting people enthusiastically is a fairly tough job, and you can not really do it alone. Sure, you can train your dog to greet your own return with sedate happiness, by simply refusing to acknowledge anything but a sitting dog.

Walk in the door after an absence and ignore your dog until he or she has calmed down enough to sit properly and lavish praise upon her for doing so. Continue this for the rest of your dog's life and your dog will catch on very quickly that to sit nicely means a warm greeting from his favorite human.

But what about everyone else?

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Your dog will learn to greet visitors properly as soon as visitors become a more common occurrence and use the same technique that you did. Get your friends to visit often, as often as three times a day, and with as many different people as possible.

Have them enter, and ignore your dog until he settles down. As soon as your dog settles, your visitor should proceed to greet the dog with praise and petting.

Your dog needs to learn that sitting politely will garner praise and pets, and that jumping around and demanding attention will get nowhere.

This is a mix of positive (praise for the right thing) and negative (something your dog doesn't want - no attention - for the wrong thing) reinforcement.

However please be a patient human, for most dogs these exuberant greetings have long been successful, and a modification of this behavior will take an enormous amount of time and dedication, especially with older dogs.

This is something that is best done as a "begin as you mean to go on" thing, when your dog first enters your home as part of the family.