How to Train Puppies : Train Your Puppy Not to Bite

Biting and mouthing are normal behaviors for puppies. Dogs don’t have hands so they investigate objects and their environment with their mouths. To a curious puppy, everything about this big world is brand new and exciting. He learns as he goes along. You can almost hear his thought processes as he discovers something he’s never seen before: “Hmmm…what’s this? [chomping on it] Something to eat? No? [tossing it around] Can I play with it? Maybe. Can I make it squeak?”

If you watch a litter of puppies playing, you will notice that they spend much of their time biting and grabbing each other with their mouths. This is normal puppy behavior. When you take a puppy from the litter and into your home, the puppy will play bite and mouth you. This is normal behavior, but needs to be modified so you and the puppy will be happy. The first thing to teach your new puppy is that human flesh is much more
sensitive than other puppies and that it really hurts us when they bite. This is called bite inhibition. A puppy has very sharp teeth and a weak jaw. This means that the puppy can cause you to be uncomfortable when mouthing or puppy biting you, but can not cause severe damage. An adult dog has duller teeth and a powerful jaw. This means that an adult dog can cause significant damage when biting.

There are the five ways a puppy will use his teeth on others:

• Mouthing—which is done to bond emotionally.
• Nipping—which is done to initiate, or perpetuate play.
• Grabbing or Gripping—can be part of play, or may be used by the pup to move your hands away from a part of her body she doesn’t want you to touch.
• Snapping—which is a precursor to actual biting, and
• Biting—which is only done in self-defense when a pup is frightened.

To inform the puppy that biting hurts, it is not necessary to hurt, frighten, punish or even reprimand the pup; a simple high pitch “ouch” is sufficient and you can also try giving them an appropriate toy that they CAN chew on.. sending them the message that chewing on you is no fun but chewing on this toy or bone is GREAT FUN. If the pup acknowledges the ‘Ouch” and stops the mouthing play, then you can praise them and then resume playing but in a calmer manner. If the puppy ignores your yelp, emphasize “OOOUUUCHHH” in a louder voice and stop playing all together.

Learning Through Play

As when playing with their littermates or Mom’s teats and tail, puppies quickly learn hard bites lose playmates. Return after one or two minutes time out and make up by having the puppy come, sit and calm down before resuming play.

Never play wrestle games, chase games or tug of war games with a puppy who is in their mouthing stage and not until you trust your dog understand the concept of bite inhibition. All children who come into contact with your puppy must be taught these very important play rules.

Once the pup’s mouthing no longer hurts, you should still pretend that it does. Continue to greet harder munches with a yelp of pseudo-pain. The puppy will begin to get the idea, thinking, “Whooahh! These humans are super-sensitive. I’ll have to be much more gentle.” The force of the puppy’s biting will progressively decrease until biting becomes mouthing and eventually, mouthing succumbs to gumming, licking or just plain slobbering.

Puppy Teething Alternatives to your skin and your shoes…

Natural Dog Training (the best book ever written about dogs) by Kevin Behan

Also another great article is TEACHING BITE INHIBITION – Relief from puppy mouthing by Melissa Alexander