How to Stop Puppy Biting/Mouthing
- Apr 24, 2018
- 5 min read
When you want to stop an unwanted behavior, you first have to understand why that behavior is occurring in the first place. There are many reasons why puppies and dogs chew, bite, or mouth. Puppies use their mouths to explore the world around them. They learn what objects taste like, feel like, how soft or hard the surface is. They may also bite to engage with you. They tug on your shirt to encourage you to play with them. Mouthing can also soothe pain and irritation during teething which is the most common reason for severe biting and chewing in puppies around the age of 4-6 months.
So then the next question becomes “what can I do to stop biting, chewing, or mouthing?” Now we don't want to stop all biting, chewing, and mouthing, but we do want to stop the inappropriate occurrences. We will still want the dog to chew on appropriate objects like a bone or a toy, or to learn a command to hold or pick up objects. There are two times that you can change the behavior - during the bite, or before the bite. Preventing the bite will be a better choice because you will be teaching the puppy a habit to replace mouthing that they will choose to do on their own.
Stopping the unwanted behavior:
Substitute biting on you, your clothing, or another object with chewing on a toy or treat. You want to redirect their attention away from the object you don't want them to chew on, to something that they can chew on, such as a toy or treat. Get them excited in whatever the good item is my having it make noise, shake it, throw it, or have a smelly chew!
Keep a variety of textures - rope, plastic, soft, rubber.
Variety of flavors - beef stick, pig ear, cow hoof, Kong with peanut butter
Use a treat to redirect attention away from chewing and ask them do a simple command, then give a treat.
This will initiate a training session. When they are given the treat after doing a command, they associate getting the treat with the command. You don’t want to give them the treat right after they stop biting your hand because they will associate the treat with your hand. When they know they get a treat for not biting, they will sometimes bite to get you to ask them not to bite. Don’t underestimate the intelligence of a young pup!
When your pup or dog begins mouthing, immediately stop play.
You can stop play by standing up, send them to their kennel, walk away, and/or leave the room. Dogs want to engage and play with you, so when they bite and you stop their playtime. They begin to question what they did to make playtime stop. The more consistent you are with this, the quicker they will associate the mouthing to play stopping.
If you decided to send them to their kennel, if standing up and walking away isn’t working, the time spent in the kennel should only last a minute or two. Just enough time until they become mellow before they can come back out. Some dogs get too amped up during play, so some time alone to settle down can help greatly.
With some dogs, you can make a loud and high pitched yelp sound.
This will replicate what their siblings would do if play becomes too rough and they were hurt. The puppy will understand not to bite so hard next time. You will yelp anytime you feel teeth put pressure on your skin.
This is also a great way to teach bite inhibition which will teach the dog how to gauge how hard they are biting and adjust it to different surfaces.
This option may not always work because it can get some dogs more aroused, leading to more biting.
Preventing the unwanted behaviors:
When giving a young puppy or dog a treat, give it to them with an open palm to limit accidental biting. This will help to prevent the behavior from occurring in the first place and you can also teach your pup how to take treats gently.
Don’t play with your hands! We all want to use our hands to roughly pet them, maybe run our hands long the ground for them to chase, etc. This causes our dogs to see our hands as toys and that is one of the biggest problems. They are able to bite on their toys, so they think that they can bite our hands.
Desensitize your dog to petting or touching.
This is a great way to teach your dog that being touched, doesn’t cause excitement or initiate playtime.
Use high value treats to reward no attention to your hand moving. (Say tuned for a video.)
Slowly move your hand in the air towards them with a treat right in front of their nose. Don't touch them yet, just act like you are going to. If they ignore your hand, reward. If they pay attention, no reward and try again, but farther away from them. Repeat and gradually increase the difficulty until you can run your hand along them without them paying attention to it, and only to the treat. You can increase the difficulty further by starting to pet faster, multiple people petting, etc.
Do this in a variety of settings such as touching them when they are on the ground, being held, while playing with toys, while eating, in different parts of their body, etc.
You can then do this with more objects such as slippers, hands, feet shuffling, shoe laces, paper towels, etc.
Stay mellow.
If you have a relaxed energy while around your pup, they will be more likely to copy your energy. When they are relaxed, they are less likely to be trying to bite you to get your attention.
Teach a “leave it” command and use it to teach them to leave your hands.
Use this command before they even touch your hand to prevent the behavior to even begin.
It will also teach them that this behavior is not wanted, and if they don't bite, then they get something better in return (a reward). This will teach them to choose the better option on their own.
Teach them how to play Tug-Of-War.
You can use this fun game to teach them a command for when to bite such as “get it”, and a commands for when not to bite such as “out” or “leave it”. This will teach them to bite only when give a command which you can then use to wait for their food or a treat.
Exercise!
Many dogs will bite because they want to engage in play. If they have been on a long walk and got a lot of energy out, they will most likely be too tired to want to play, preventing the want to bite for attention.
Proof
Shake your hands and feet, long pant legs, wait for toy, shuffling feet, slippers, shoe laces, paper towels, whatever your dog likes to chew!
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