Stop Your Puppy from Biting
If you have a new puppy in your home you must have already noticed his passion for chewing and biting everything he can get his little mouth close to. Obvious targets are your hands and feet, any shoes laying around, and basically everything else, too.Here are a few practical tips to help stop your puppy from biting and to make his chewing less of a problem.
- First of all, get your puppy some chew toys to play with. He’s teething, so he’s going to have to bite something, and these chew toys are the perfect substitutes for your hands and feet. As you start playing with your puppy and he gets too rough, stop him by placing your hand over his mouth to hold it shut. Hold his mouth closed with your hand until he stops resisting your grip. Your puppy won’t exactly enjoy his mouth being held shut, so soothe him with your voice while you hold him. Using a firm but calm voice, tell your puppy “no biting”. Be sure to keep your voice calm so he doesn’t become nervous and resist even longer. The sooner he relaxes, the sooner he will submit. Once he has become submissive and stopped struggling, it is time to remove your hand from his mouth, and offer him his chew toy as a wonderful substitute to human flesh. Get him to take the chew toy in his mouth, and then give him lots of praise and affection.Because you are positively reinforcing chewing on the toy instead of you-consistently-the puppy will learn that the toy is the better alternative.Be patient with the training (it won’t change overnight. This type of negative reinforcement will hurt you progress with training your puppy by undermining his trust and confidence in you.For the best results, make sure the whole family knows to only use the positive reinforcement techniques. Try to make sure no one else who is around the puppy slows down the training by not following the positive training method.
- A good way to prevent household damage when you can’t supervise your puppy’s activities directly, is to keep him in his crate. If the puppy is allowed to wander the house without anyone watching he will surely attack his favorite targets. Put some chew toys inside his crate with him, so he can chew to his heart’s content safely.
- Common sense alone tells you some easy ways to stop the pup from chewing easy to get at goodies. A simple example is to put all your shoes and slippers (historically favorite targets) into a closed room or closet.
- Borrow a trick form Mama dog to let the puppy know he is biting too hard. You can imitate her, by yelping with a very high pitched voice to let the puppy know he is biting too hard. You might feel sort of silly, but this is one way Mama Dog gets a puppy’s attention and stops the puppy from biting her.
- I have found that a very good way to stop my puppy from biting me is that while holding my hand over his mouth, I also stare him in the eyes and bare my teeth in a snarl and perhaps even make a low growl to show a threat to him. You may have seen a Mama dog do this sometime or other.
- You probably won’t want to grab the puppy by the scruff of the neck with your teeth the way a Mama dog does, but there is no reason not to use your hand to hold him still and show him who is boss until he submits. Don’t stop the correction until he has really shown you he understands that you are the boss, by becoming submissive.
- Playing rough games with him, such as wrestling and tug of war only encourage him to bite, so avoid the rough play. I always used to do both those rough games with my puppies, and consequently always used to have bloody hands and wrists and forearms. I didn’t realize at the time the rough playing was not a good idea because it could increase his aggression level.
I hope these tips are useful to get a grip on your puppy’s biting problem. Click here for more dog training tips www.BehaveDoggy.com.
To read my review of the best of the Internet’s dog obedience training programs, please click here.