puppy bites

stop puppy biting


Puppies are small cuddly and playful they learn by play fighting and just like children they love to play rough and are often spiteful.

Puppies teeth are very sharp just like needles and can be very painful if they nip you and can even pierce your skin, which can be unpleasant especially for your family and in particular children.

So what causes puppies to bite :-

Unfortunately it is a natural part of puppies instinctive learning, the puppy’s siblings and mother  encourage such behavior because as pack dogs its part of their instincts to learn how to nip and bite, this  is to do with their  hunting instinct and is part of their pack dominance training, it determines their pecking order in their pack.

You cant change a puppy’s instinctive behavior but you do need to train your puppy to know the sort of behavior that will be tolerated, the responsibility lies with the puppy’s owner to train the  puppy in the correct  behavior suitable to his new environment.

Common mistakes :-

One of the biggest mistakes puppy owners make is to play games with the puppy that encourages nipping and biting, games such as tug o war, play fighting or chase, when you play these sort of games it teaches your puppy that biting and scratching is acceptable, especially if you let the puppy win.

So what can you do to stop a puppy biting, the first thing is to redirect the biting from you or pieces of furniture to a few well chosen chew toys, if you stop the puppy when ever he bites you and put his chew toy in his mouth then he will start to learn to use the toy for chewing and not your fingers or your prized possessions.

You can use treat and reward training to teach your puppy when to stop biting

  1. Hold a small treat in one hand show it to your puppy
  2. hold a bigger treat in the other
  3. show the puppy the small treat
  4. choose a command that must be consistent, such as stop or leave, when he goes for the small treat say in a firm voice leave, if he leaves the small treat reward him with the big treat.

Once he learns that stop or leave means leave and that he will be rewarded for it, you can change the technique  to work for biting , your puppy will soon learn that when you use that command and he leaves it or stops biting he will be rewarded with a treat and petted, puppies love to be rewarded and petted and they love to please their owners.

Their are other techniques that are easily taught, that use the puppies  psychological and instinctive behavior to train the puppy to be obedient, for instance a puppy will stop biting a sibling from his litter if his sibling yelps out a cry of pain, replicating this will make him stop if he thinks he is hurting you. click here to learn the secrets to dog trainingsecrets to dog training