How to teach a dog to greet other dogs calmly?

It starts with developing their ability to listen to you and accept your guidance even when they’re excited and want to do something else, which gives you the ability to teach them right from wrong in any situation. Your dog’s self-control, or their ability to hold themselves back from doing something exciting, even when they REALLY want to do it, is one of the most important things to teach. Your dog’s ability to listen to you, even when they don’t want to, is also crucial to teach. Once you have a good training foundation, and your dog has learnt self-control and how to listen even when they’d rather do something else, you can start teaching them to greet dogs calmly close at hand. This means you can closely monitor their behaviour and step in if they make a bad choice, to teach them what is and isn’t appropriate. As they get more practice, they develop the habit of greeting nicely and eventually, you can trust them to greet new dogs politely, even without you right there. If you try and jump to the off-lead greeting stage too early though, you’ll just teach your dog that they don’t have to listen to you, because they have too much freedom to rush up to other dogs and greet them rudely, without you being able to quickly step in and help them make better choices.