How to wean a puppy from biting

Almost all puppies bite when playing with their owners. Are puppy bites quite painful? How to wean a puppy from biting in the game? And does it need to be done?

For a very long time in cynology, especially domestic, there was an opinion that we should not play with our dog with the help of hands, because this allegedly teaches the dog to bite. The latest global trends are such that now behaviorists (behavior specialists) and trainers, on the contrary, are emphasizing that it is necessary to play with our puppy with the help of hands, it is necessary that the puppy learns to bite our hands.

How so, you ask? Sounds very stupid!

But there is one important point.

Why does the puppy bite in the game?

And why do we need the puppy to continue playing with his hands?

The thing is, when a puppy comes to our house, he tries to play with us the same way he played with his littermates. How can a puppy play? He can play with his front paws and with his teeth. And usually puppies play among themselves with the help of biting, catching up, fighting.

Puppies bite quite strongly, but dogs simply do not have the same pain threshold as humans. And what the other puppy perceives as a game, we humans, with our skin and with our pain threshold, perceive it as pain. But the puppy doesn’t know! That is, he does not bite us in order to hurt us, he plays this way.

If we stop playing, forbid the pet to play with our hands, then the baby eventually does not receive feedback. He does not understand with what force he can clench his jaws in order to play with us and indicate a bite, but at the same time not bite, do not tear the skin, do not inflict wounds.

There is an opinion that if a puppy does not have this experience, there is no understanding that a person is a different species and that a person can be bitten, but this needs to be done differently, with a different jaw clenching force, then we ourselves form the probability that if our dog if you don’t like something, then most likely it will bite very painfully. And we will talk about the fact that the dog has a problem of aggression, and we will need to solve this problem.

If we play with our puppy with the help of hands from puppyhood and teach to do it carefully, there is no such risk.

How to teach a puppy to play with his hands carefully?

If the puppy plays carefully, that is, even when he bites, we feel scratching, but it doesn’t hurt very much, the puppy doesn’t pierce our skin, we buy such games, we continue to play. If the puppy grabbed us too hard, we mark it, for example, we start saying the marker “It hurts” and stop the game.

If we have a puppy on the word “It hurts” stops biting us, listens to us and continues to play more gently, we continue the game. We say: “Well done, good” and continue to play with our hands. If, on the command “It hurts”, he ignores us and tries to continue to gnaw, we stop the game, take a time out, remove the puppy to the next room, close the door for literally 5-7 seconds. That is, we deprive the puppy of that pleasant thing that he had in his life until the moment he bit us too painfully.

Of course, for 1 – 2 repetitions the puppy will not learn this science, but if we regularly play games with hands, and the puppy understands that after he grabs our hands too painfully, the game stops, he will learn how to control yourself and control the force of compression of the jaws. In the future, we will simply get a dog that, if something is uncomfortable for her, is scared, she shows this by calmly taking our hand in her teeth, signaling that at the moment she was uncomfortable. For us, this is a sign that we need to work out this situation so that our dog is not afraid, for example, of veterinary manipulations, but at least we do not risk that the dog has bitten us.

Moreover, if the dog shows problematic behavior in the future, such as fears, or noise phobias, or zoo-aggression, often methods of correction include playing with a toy, with food and always with hands, special games with their owner. For example, our dog has noise phobias, fireworks shoot, and it so happened that now we went out without food and without a toy. We need to form the social motivation of our puppy so that he can play with our hands. And in this case, if we find ourselves in a difficult situation, but we suddenly don’t have any food or toys with us in order to reinforce the correct behavior of our pet, we can reinforce it with the help of hand games, and our puppy already knows this. And hands – we always have them with us.

You can learn more about how to raise and train a puppy in a humane way in our video course “An obedient puppy without the hassle.”