The last few weeks staff (and volunteers) have all been working with him by giving him balls, bones, etc and verbally praising him for playing with those. It's been more though, NOT setting the dog up for failure, which we seem to have done well considering the situation. Everyone was told do not pet him or move to pet him unless he's sitting, else to keep your hands in your pockets/away and to not raise their energy level even a little. It took a long time to convince people DON'T get excited and energetically pet him and keep hands in pockets around him unless he was calmly sitting, but somehow it worked out (one woman on staff is really good at convincing people to listen lol).
Anyway, I went in today took him out for two hours in the pen and he didn't jump for my hands or go to mouth them even once! He also sat nicely and thus got petted - and again he did not even go for the hands. Sadly you could tell that he probably would have gone for them, if I would have waved them or gotten my energy up so it's not out of his system completely yet, but hey it's a big step in the right direction.
I've been extremely happy all day because of this! Course there's a ways to go, but considering this is a shelter I'm still pretty happy.
