Stop Puppy from Biting
If your puppy biting is an annoyance to you, then you need to stop your puppy from biting. Puppies are cute as they can be but owners sometimes don’t realize that their puppies biting habit can be dangerous later on in life. Most puppies learn to quit biting very early in life but some don’t. The little brothers and sisters of the puppy teach him that if he bites, he gets bitten right back. After the age of eight weeks old, the puppy should stop biting. But sometimes the owner does instigate the return of the habit with tugs of war playing. Then you have to teach your puppy to stop biting all over again.
Stop the Biting in the Early Years
When you first bring your eight week old puppy home and it continues to bite and nip at your fingers, the you have to start training to stop this habit immediately. Never hit your puppy though when it bites you. You don’t want to make your puppy afraid of you and will develop many phobias and anxiety attacks which will lead to more aggressive actions later on in life. In order to successfully stop your puppy from biting, you have to find out the cause. The way to do this is to discourage any negative behavior and reinforce positive behaviors with rewards. Don’t confuse your puppy with aggressive games such as chase and tug of war.
You have to be consistent with training your puppy and not let it become spoiled. It’s comparable to teaching a child; you can’t let them get away with anything. In many ways, the puppy does have the same intelligence level of a child. The puppy can also be just as stubborn as a child is. So you have to have a lot of patience when training him.
The Actual Training
When you have decided to start training your puppy, enrolling it in an obedience class is sometime the best way. This way they have professional training. There are even actual bite inhibition classes which imitate the puppy’s mother who teaches that bites are not acceptable behavior. The puppy must learn to interact with other dogs acceptably as well. There are socialization classes for that too.
When your puppy bites or nips at you tell it “NO” in a firm voice or whimper like another puppy would if nipped. That way your puppy will know that it has hurt you and that you don’t like it. Buying your puppy a chew toy is also a positive way to make sure that it doesn’t bite people. If nothing else works, then the obedience classes are the only solution.
Training your puppy not to bite is very important. If it bites someone as an older dog, it can lead to many legal worries that might result in the dog being destroyed. There can also be lawsuits in some cases of dog biting. So stopping your puppy from biting can avoid many heartaches and worries.